Text on website included as images

Victor

I'm wondering what peoples opinions are of public notices like this that are presented as images instead of just text: http://www.rpa.ie/en/projects/metro_orbital/line_and_stop_design/Pages/BelgardPublicMeetingNoticeMarch2010.aspx

Its style over substance. I imagine its hard for people with screen readers like Browse Aloud or some people with reading difficulties.

Now, yes there is a PDF with the text available, but the RPA have a habit of even making the text in the PDF be an image instead of text: http://www.rpa.ie/Documents/Corporate%20RPA/Corporate%20Press/RPA%20Press%20Releases/November%2010th%202006%20-%20RPA%20Press%20Release.pdf

SerialComplaint

This very poor practice by the RPA, particularly as a public body. This will stop anyone using a screen reader from seeing this content. It will also stop Google and other search engines from picking up the content, making it harder for everyone to find this.

This is probably a breach of Section 28(2) of the DIsability Act 2005. Do you fancy making a complaint under the Act (as outlined in Sections 38/39 of the Act? There are more details on this complaint procedure on the Ombudsman's website.

billy the squid

The website doesn't appear to be working for me, however I have come accross some horrific websites that do this.

The Limerick Festivals one is notorious for putting large chunks of text in the form of a GIF file on their website, or they might put a scan of a leaflet rather than PDF file.

tricky D

That text is indeed unuseable for text readers and so is the RPA PDF. The same is true of PDFs in general unless they are specifically designed to be 'tagged'. Most government ones are not tagged or structured last time I checked (use Shift+Ctrl+6 to check in Adobe Reader). There's also the issue of producing html versions of PDFs which isn't too hard to achieve yet I haven't ever seen this implemented. It is certainly 'practicable' in terms of Section 28(2) imo, it's just the lack of accessibility knowledge and laziness.

Overall, gov sites and docs have very poor compliance. Many sites are touted as accessible but the methods used and compliance levels achieved fall far short of being properly accessible. The text only alternatives are poor too and are in danger of not being updated. They're also fundamentally unnecessary and not really good practise imo.

There's also a certain irony of the Disability Act being primarily available as a PDF. There may be reader friendly versions somewhere, but I haven't come across them and Google search doesn't offer a html alternative presumably because it can't parse the PDF into that format - a sure sign that the PDF isn't accessible. Even more ironic and disappointing is the notion in the Act that accessibility for the blind is all that is required and no mention appears to made of accessibility for wand users in particular or deaf users when using aural content often in videos (no transcript). (A wand user example is a quadraplegic who taps the keyboards using a 'stick' strapped to the head.)

More:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/

This whole area is a particular pet hate of mine as firstly, though I wouldn't describe colourblindness as a disability, more a mild impairment, my common colourblindness means I have difficulty reading poorly contrasted, usually light grey, text. Luckily I've been developing websites for 15 years now and can easily mitigate accordingly. Secondly, I've done quite a few accessible websites including for semi-state and know what's entailed and that it's not that difficult to get it right. Most of the knowhow is readily available from the W3C site linked above and adapting really isn't too hard.

Victor

I'm a user of the site, I've no particular sight problem (other than shortsighted), my real problem is hte lack of transparency it results in.

tricky D wrote: »

There's also a certain irony of the Disability Act being primarily available as a PDF.

PDF http://www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?DocID=4338

HTML (not sure about reading quality, but it does have some factual errors on the site) http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/2005/en/act/pub/0014/index.html

This whole area is a particular pet hate of mine as firstly, though I wouldn't describe colourblindness as a disability, more a mild impairment, my common colourblindness means I have difficulty reading poorly contrasted, usually light grey, text.

Many people, of all sight abilities, have this problem.

Victor

Email from RPA

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Hi,

Thanks for bringing the Boards.ie discussion to our attention in RPA. The PDF version of the Metro West Newsletter is made available on our website for the public to print and/or save the file. All the content on all documents (not maps) are produced in PDF that appear on www.rpa.ie are replicated at least once in plain text on the site. It appears the contributors to the boards forum failed to see this.

PDF http://www.rpa.ie/en/projects/metro_west/line_and_stop_design/Pages/BelgardPublicMeetingNoticeMarch2010.aspx

Text Versions:

Home Page: http://www.rpa.ie/en/Pages/default.aspx See under network map
News Page: http://www.rpa.ie/en/news/Pages/MetroWestBelgardPublicMeetingNotice.aspx
Project Page: http://www.rpa.ie/en/projects/metro_west/line_and_stop_design/Pages/default.aspx

Just to let you know we have had in-depth discussions with Text Help the company who developed Browse Aloud about applying the software to our websites. Our PDF’s without being tagged are readable with Browse Aloud.

Thanks again for the information.

Dave Murphy
Web Content Manager
RPA

SerialComplaint

Victor wrote: »

Thanks for bringing the Boards.ie discussion to our attention in RPA. The PDF version of the Metro West Newsletter is made available on our website for the public to print and/or save the file. All the content on all documents (not maps) are produced in PDF that appear on www.rpa.ie are replicated at least once in plain text on the site. It appears the contributors to the boards forum failed to see this.

PDF http://www.rpa.ie/en/projects/metro_west/line_and_stop_design/Pages/BelgardPublicMeetingNoticeMarch2010.aspx

Text Versions:

Home Page: http://www.rpa.ie/en/Pages/default.aspx See under network map
News Page: http://www.rpa.ie/en/news/Pages/MetroWestBelgardPublicMeetingNotice.aspx
Project Page: http://www.rpa.ie/en/projects/metro_west/line_and_stop_design/Pages/default.aspx

Just to let you know we have had in-depth discussions with Text Help the company who developed Browse Aloud about applying the software to our websites. Our PDF’s without being tagged are readable with Browse Aloud.

Thanks again for the information.

Dave Murphy
Web Content Manager
RPA

That's a strange response from Dave, complete with an attempt at oneupmanship ("it appears that the contibutors....") that is quite inappropriate in this kind of situation.

First of all, the response doesn't address the main issue of text within images at all. It only addresses the pdf issue. So what is the RPA doing about the images issue? I note that they seem to have moved or removed the page originally linked by Victor above, so maybe that means they are working on a solution to this.

In relation to the PDFs, it seems that Dave doesn't really understand accessibility. He points out that the information within the PDFs is also available elsewhere in text form. This is nice for us to know, but the people who really need to know this are the screen reader users who attempt to open the PDF and find they can't read it. How are they supposed to know that the information is available elsewhere? How do they know what they are missing? How are they supposed to find the other information? This is really not an answer.

Then Dave tells us that the PDFs can be read by Browse Aloud. Yet again, this is really not an answer. Somebody who uses JAWS or other screen reader shouldn't have to download another piece of software to use the RPA website. They are already used to JAWS, skilled in navigating web pages, and familiar with the synthesised voice. They really don't want to use different software. It's a bit like expecting a visitor to your office to completely change their clothes before entering, or taking somebody from a right-hand drive manual car to a left-hand drive automatic car. It is not a comfortable experience, and not what RPA should be requiring of their customers.

But then I looked further, to find there is no mention of BrowseAloud on the rpa site, and no mention of the RPA on the Text Help/BrowseALoud list of enabled sites. So I really don't see the relevance of this comment at all.

2/10 marks for effort Dave, but RPA have a lot more work to do here.

tricky D

Quite right. The response does show a poor understanding of accessibility.

Browse Aloud isn't even aimed at the blind. It's aimed at users with: 'Low literacy and reading skills, English as a second language, Learning Disabilities such as Dyslexia, Mild visual impairments' according to their own site, though it may help to certain level. Nevermind the other 2/3+ dozen assistive technologies.

The RPA site also falls short in other areas: the skip links are not implemented quite in the way W3C has in mind, no accesskeys, no search facility, a poor accessibility statement, no accessible acronyms and abbreviations, no longdesc's etc. In relation to the original point, there's still 2 versions of the one page, one accessible and one not - that would be plain confusing.

It appears that it is Dave's understanding of what's involved which has failed.

Victor

As a modest comfort, they are looking at revising at least parts of the site. One of the problems is that the amount of data contained on it (mostly technical data) is vastly larger than I imagine 95% of sites.