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

[marahmarie]

For privacy reasons not giving the specific example I have in mind but it's a Silverlight based website that is a nightmare now that it's no longer coded in plain old HTML. This website was bad anyway because before Silverlight it was coded in tables so it was clunky and hard to navigate, but now the Silverlight seems to have disabled a lot of the keyboard-based navigation of the site altogether.

Also on my list of Websites That Should Not Exist In Their Current Form: any site done in Flash, any site with a splash or landing page of any sort (outside of purely navigational index pages, which I think can actually be useful as primary landing pages if done right), any website that makes you log in on a secondary page (one or more clicks away) from the home page, any site that autoloads previous and newly arriving comments FB and/or Disqus style (for me the scripts never load right or at all no matter how good my computer, browser, or connection is), any site behind frames, any site that doesn't function or look right without gobs of JS, any site that starts you off with teeny-tiny or too-large text even if the font is adjustable, any site that disables view source, any site that remotely loads the content you're viewing and/or uses a script to deliver it so that the content cannot be viewed in source at all, and uh, I'm running out of stuff on my short list, but I'll add on later if I think of more.

Anything that's bad for accessibility is bad for the public (and therefore bad for websites' bottom lines and popularity) overall. If you think about just my basic examples above, all of them annoy and inconvenience not just users with accessibility issues but many others as well.