TV online falls short on accessibility
Thursday, 03 December 2009 14:29
In recent judging for the eircom Golden Spider web awards, entries from RTÉ and TV3 failed to meet the shortlist due to their lack of accessibility. In the standards and accessibility assessment carried out by NCBI CFIT, the TV3 website was seen to be missing important structural markup, the RTÉ Player was found to be incompatible with assistive technologies (as previously reported here) and the navigation menus on RTÉ's Young Peoples website did not appear in response to keyboard activation, therefore excluding kids and teens with motor and visual impairments.
This is shame for these broadcasters because their entries were all tremendous online resources which in many other ways would be worthy winners of such an award. It is an even bigger shame for those disabled viewers who would love to be able to access these sites just like everyone else, but are prevented due to unnecessary restrictions caused by bad design practices that fail to take their needs into account.
Making these online resources accessible would not be difficult or costly. Heading markup could be added to the TV3 website in just a few hours. RTÉ's menus and Player buttons could be made keyboard and screen reader accessible with a bit of work. There are many examples of similar resources that do meet accessibility criteria and are just as dynamic, functional and visually appealing. For example, the BBC iPlayer shows the way RTÉ should have gone in the design of their catch-up player.
It's time for broadcasters to embrace accessibility. To realise that their audience is the general public in all its diversity and that nobody should be excluded unnecessarily due to lack of attention to achievable universal design.
Full marks to eircom and the Golden Spiders team for recognising basic accessibility standards as an essential element of good online design.