Dorothea Salo: Open An EBook. The site [OpenAnEBook.org] touts the accessibility of ebooks… Some of its images do not even have alt attributes. Section 508? It is to laugh.
Curious, I started poking around. To be sure, it’s not Section 508-compliant, and it doesn’t validate as HTML, even with DOCTYPE override and character set override. But is it usable in the real world? I open it with Lynx. The main images do have ALT tags, and good ones at that; the ones that don’t are spacer GIFs. Annoying but not fatal. I have to sit through the navigation bar before getting to the main content; a “skip to main content” link wouldn’t hurt, but this too is not fatal.
However, the further I dig, the worse it gets. The entire site uses absolute font sizes, specifically 11px Verdana, thus ensuring that the 80% of the browsing population that uses Internet Explorer on Windows will be unable to resize the text. What’s that? You say they could set their browser to ignore font sizes? (Tools, Internet Options, General tab, Accessibility, Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages) Bzzt! That impressive-looking 9-item list in the “What’s the big deal about eBooks?” section is… an image! So the words are just one big bitmap, and can not be resized. (Even more accessible browsers, like Opera, that can zoom both text and images, are no help here. Upon zooming, the list-that-is-really-an-image gets grainy, just like any other image, making the text even more difficult to read.)
But the final insult is on the page entitled “Tips for Users with Disabilities”, which presents a drop-down menu with four options (FAQ, Devices & Software, Links & Resources, Glossary), and a “Go” image to view the selection. The image has no ALT tag, but they’ll squeak by because the name of the image displays as “go.gif”. No, the real nightmare here is that the form has no action method, and the image is not a submit button. Clicking the image calls “javascript: formHandler()”, which redirects to the appropriate page and displays the selection. No alternative navigation methods are available.
You heard me right: the page entitled “Tips for Users with Disabilities” does not work without Javascript. Whoever designed this site should be sued.
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