Sunday lottery not so friendly after all

Today we had an interesting exercise to see how accessible some web pages where to everyone, the main reason for this was to test if it was user friendly for people with disabilities (for instance - some one who was blind) Yeah... I didn't know that until now but it is possible for someone who is blind to surf the internet, but as I found out it can prove quite difficult with most web pages because of all the 'bell's and whistles' that come with todays web pages (for instance flash applications and button) lets take a look at this page quickly



At first glance this web page looks pretty normal... well it is really. A pretty normal layout, normal colours, easy navigation. But what happens if you have a disability that prevents you from using a mouse and you can only use a keyboard effectively, well you are pretty much screwed with this page as they definitely didn't think of this one beforehand.

For example: I tried to navigate this with the keyboard and found I had to press the tab key 16 times just to get to this page. I then couldn't even see what I was highlighting most of the time, I finally managed to get on the flash window to start choosing my number. then more hell started, it was more difficult than I thought to choose a number - when I pressed up on the keyboard the selection square would either 'decide' to go upper left or upper right - I had no control over this. it was exactly the same if I pressed any of the other arrows, all in all it was bloody frustrating.

We then had a look at trying to make the text bigger on the page for people who had problems reading small text and also tried to change the background colour for people who had difficulty seeing black text on white, as you can see the text started overlapping and there was no change to the background colour whatsoever, also there where so many flash applications in this page that the majority of it didn't even change at all. Not very good at all. We also took a look at a program called Lnxy that changed pages into brail for people who couldn't see but it had so many links and other crap it would be almost impossible to access, even when you selected an option on the page it would redisplay the whole thing again... madness! Afterwards we had a look at what this page would have looked like to a colour blind person or to people who couldnt see very well. For the colour blind people it would have been damn near impossible to read the numbers on the balls, for the people who needed more contrast I believe they could have seen it easier if they just turned the contrast up on their monitor and got a decent pair of glasses, also there is a magnifying tool that comes with windows so there is another solution.

Heres are the answers for the sections (anyone reading this blog probably wont understand them so just ignore it, it's for the lecturers)


2.1 Monday, charities lottery
2.2 yes
2.3 yes, text that embeds flash features

Step 3

1. no it is not obvious you have changed the page
2.1 no its difficult
2.2 Pi553s me off, it's difficult.

Step 4

1. I could not see the selection box very easily and it took me 7 clicks to get to the 'play lottery feature'

2.1 no, its random
2.2 no, the flash controls are not very use-able
2.3 again pi55es me off!

Step 5

1 Not really, you could always up the contrast on-screen.

Step 6

1.1 some text changed but not by much... all the flash text did not change.
1.2 Flash text is fixed an seen as a picture not as text. also there is not much space left for text to expand.

1.3 Yes I expected the flash sections to remain the same. it is however not the desired result the user would want.
1.4 Flash sections
1.5 yes definitely for colour blind and hard of seeing people.

Step 7

1.1 poor - some sections could not be accessed
1.2 unusable - you could not use this page without plug ins
1.3 poor - extremely difficult to navigate using just the keyboard
1.4 poor - usable but not very nice for the user who has colour blindness
1.5 Ok - Most things could be seen by changing the contrast on screen or using a simple magnifying tool (however it is difficult to navigate when the screen is magnified)
1.6 it did not change much at all because of all the flash related features, trying to change the text colours did not work very well either.