Australia Day Website Inaccessible

 – posted January 26th, 2007 by Laurence Veale     Comments (2)

Screenshot of Australia Day website

Back in 2000, Sydney hosted the Olympic Games. At the time, Sydney also hosted what is probably the most often cited legal case involving web accessibility. After visiting the Australia Day website, it appears that history is repeating itself.

Around the time of the Sydney Olympics I was working as a web developer in the New South Wales Office of State Revenue, in Parramatta, Sydney.

I worked with really great people there but what struck me most of all was their commitment to web accessibility. They, and other government agencies in Australia took these commitments seriously and were certainly streets ahead of UK and Irish government sites at the time.

Australian Web Accessibility Legislation

This commitment to accessibility may have been due, in no small part, to the strong Australian accessibility legislation in place, so it’s very surprising to see the Australia Day website fail on so many basic accessibility issues. But I’m going to focus on the most fundamental of them, failing to give images a description using the ALT attribute.

No ALT text on images

Firefox image properties dialog showing ALT text is missing on the Australia Day website

On the homepage, there is no ALT text description on any of the images used in the navigation. Ideally, images should never be used where text will do, but failing that, ALT text should be used.

It was developed by a company who focus on usability and accessibility. According to their website,

Our proven applications are developed with a focus on usability, W3C accessibility and are thoroughly tested.

JAWS screen shots

Let’s look at the links dialog from JAWS. This is the list of links that JAWS would read out to a blind user.

First screen shot of links dialog from JAWS

Second screen shot of links dialog from JAWS

Third screen shot of links dialog from JAWS

Meaningless is useless

Here’s an example of some the offending links from the JAWS links dialog :

  • page123
  • #
  • more
  • images/tab_aoty-off

As you can see, they are meaningless and completely useless. Another word for “meaning” is “semantics” and HTML should be coded semantically, which is what web standards is all about.

Australian Accessibility Visionaries

What’s really tragic is that there are fantastic skills in Australia. Take Vision Australia, for example, developers of the web accessibility toolbar, a browser plugin used to check the accessibility of websites and a vital addition to the toolkit of many accessibility professionals.

Another example is Australian-based Russ Weakley, one of the world’s best recognised accessibility experts.

So the legislation and the skills are in place, yet the mess that is australiaday.gov.au still happens.

And that’s a “bladdy shame, mate”.

Categories Accessibility, Design, Site reviews, Spotted, Usability

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