Inaccessible websites?

[denise]

I'm doing a talk on web accessibility at LinuxConf Australia and would like to give specific examples!

So, gimme your best examples of websites with specific accessibility problems that drive you nuts. Use of tabular data where it doesn't make any sense, sites with horrible contrast or that won't let you change font sizes, restaurant websites that are entirely flash-based, etc, etc.

Also, if anybody knows of good illustrative videos of a) people listening to a screenreader and b) people dictating to their computer, point me at 'em?

Comments

[carene_waterman]

cbc.ca is a good example of something that I see on a lot of sites, often on new, cutting edge redesigns.

Horizontal menus that don't wrap and therefore don't scale. On the CBC site, with my font minimum set to 13px, the listen link is half under the search box. If I up the font size a little more, the watch link goes bye-bye too.

I gave them feedback on this, I do it all the time on sites that introduce menus that only work if you leave the tiny 10px font alone. I have a little boilerplate bit of text about aging populations and accessibility for everyone of all ability levels. Don't know if it's doing any good, but I keep doing it.

The other main problem area for me is shopping sites that display a grid of items. They often use fixed height elements for the image and the text, so the text just overflows out of visibility range at anything big enough to read.

[carene_waterman]

This post just came up on my reading list: http://css-tricks.com/zooming-squishes/

It's an interesting case of a complaint about a responsive design that doesn't work well at large font and the designers choice of repair which is not what the person wanted, but might be the best fix.

Raises a question about who is responsible to make the effort for a site to be fully usable that isn't answered, but certainly bears thinking about.

[cellio]

Yeah, CNN does that "fixed space, truncate or overlap the text as needed" thing, so with larger fonts I can't read many of the headlines.

Google+ does not allow you to change the font size for entries, and if you use your browser to do it it zooms the whole page (which already has horizontal scrolling). If you have to zoom a page it should *always* re-lay itself out to fit within the browser window, but few actually do. :-(