Lack of accessibility of web presence for conference on technology & persons with disabilities – #CSUN10

Updated: 2010-03-08: A call to action met:

Proving their willingness to address issues brought forward, CSUN has shocked many (including this reader) by their responsiveness in addressing the accessibility issues identified on the page below.  

Having fixed up the link issues on the page itself, fixed heading issues, cleaned up some of the code, provided some information about the strange table construct intended to visually provide the layout of the exhibit hall, the page is vastly more usable than it was just a week ago when the issues were identified.   The only outstanding issue relates to the information itself, see article: http://blog.blackspheretech.com/?p=45  Lack of equitable access to wayfinding information

However, my hat goes off to the organisers in even achieving what they have in just a week.

Original Article:

You would think that a conference on technology & persons with disabilities that includes tons of sessions on accessible web design, technology & accommodation’s would consider accessibility as a priority in their web presence; however this does not seem to be the case.

Accessibility isn’t rocket science. We have had well defined web accessibility standards (W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/wai) in place for almost 20 years. Free courses exist by the droves to explain web accessibility from a whole host of directions for a whole host of audiences. There are also free and for pay accessibility validation software & sites that can pick up the most common problems. So today, there is no excuse for having a site that isn’t accessible (especially for a conference that is guaranteed to have a ton of persons with disabilities attending).

I ran a single page from the CSUN conference site through an html & accessibility validator and got the following results: (It should be noted that this is in no way exhaustive nor a full accessibility evaluation but simply less than 5 minutes worth of work looking at one page of the site and some of it’s html standard compliance & accessibility compliance issues.. .

On the following conference page: CSUN Conference Page That was evaluated http://bit.ly/duzw50 the following errors were identified by the validator:

• Avoid specifying a new window as the target of a link with target=”_blank”.
• Create pages that validate to W3C recommendations. This document contains markup errors.
• Headings must be nested correctly. For example, H2 must appear after H1, H3 after H2 etc.
• Identify row and column headers in data tables using TH elements.
• Provide SUMMARY attributes for data tables (but not for layout tables.)
• This page has markup errors which cause problems in screen readers.
• Omitting IMG WIDTH or HEIGHT attributes means page text jumps about as images load.
• To enhance readability, sentences should be 20 words or less, and paragraphs 6 sentences or less.
• Use headings in the appropriate HTML order (don’t put H1 inside an H2, or H2 inside H3 etc.)
• Keep URLs shorter than 78 characters so they don’t wrap when emailed.
• The A NAME attribute is deprecated in XHTML 1.0, and is illegal in XHTML 1.1 Strict.
• The IMG BORDER attribute is deprecated in HTML 4.01.
• Character “&” is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data.
• Character “<” is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data.
• End tag for “a” omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified.
• End tag for element “A” which is not open.
• Title is longer than 64 characters. W3C recommends titles are no longer than 64 characters.

If one is looking at the accessibility of the site, it should also be noted that it’s full of meaningless links that in no way implicitly identify their destination, pages that are full of data that should really be marked up as a data table and a strange graphical map like construct that they have built with a table.

These are just the easy to find issues. Someone should step up and do the right thing.