tmiles.co.uk » Accessibility

WAVE

Tommy — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:24:43 +0000

Not Google wave, but a free web accessibility evaluation tool from Webaim. Particularly useful for those of us working on Intranets as it can be installed as a Firefox add-on.

http://wave.webaim.org/

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Content owner apathy

Tommy — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:00:43 +0000

[Rant alert.]

My focus is mostly Intranets, however I sit next to our Web Team so often hear their grumblings of discontent, therefore I fairly confident what I am about to write translate to the world wide web as well.

We rely on subject experts to create and write content, often these subjects experts are policy officials with little understanding of what makes valuable web content. Most of the time, publishing content on the Intranet (or web) is a box ticking exercise and something done at the last minute. Very rarely do they think about the web when they are formulating and beginning to write their new policy. Often when you tell them about how people want web content and read the web you are treated to a sigh and a roll of the eyes and told to just ‘publish the content’.

Content owners often give the excuse that they’re too busy and hard pressed to worry about accessibility, well structured content and the user goals of people looking at their content. They’re apathetic to the concerns of us webmasters!

The result: a sprawling website of inconsistent, unstructured content which is too long to read and a nightmare to search and navigate. And who gets the blame for said poor website? That’s right, us webmasters.

[End of rant.]

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CAPTCHA if you can

Tommy — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:00:51 +0000

Internet security is always top of the agenda and new security technology is continually being released. Although first coined in 2000 CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) technology has only really become more prominent over the last couple of years. CAPTCHA attempts to distinguish between a computer and human by asking you to type in some hard to decipher random characters represented by an image, the idea being that any automatic spamming bots can’t figure out what the characters are (through image recognition) so therefore can’t register/log in to spam the website in question. It’s more of a reverse turin test because the Computer is testing the human rather than vice versa.

An example of a CAPTCHA image, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Certainly this is a clever solution to the problem of spamming and mass automated marketing but does it work? Well, no solution can be 100% secure and as some research at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) suggests CAPTCHA is certainly not.

There are of course both usability and accessibility issues with CAPTCHA. Audio versions of CAPTCHA try to allow users who are visually impaired to pass the “test”. Though there is some debate as to how effective these are due to the background noise required to prevent audio recognition.

My personal experiences of CAPTCHA aren’t all that great; sometimes I have found the characters completely undecipherable and have had to refresh the image (where this is available) until something I can understand is displayed.

I sympathize with the websites as I can see why they are using CAPTCHA, after all who would visit a forum which had been completely overrun with marketing spam? However, is it worth potentially alienating or frustrating users of your site? After all, it is the website (a potential business) which should be convincing the user (a potential customer) to register and potentially spend their money there. Not the user which should be convincing the website that they are suitable to use the website. If a website annoys someone and isn’t usable then they’ll simply go somewhere else. With more and more advanced spam detection available websites should be employing a system which combines automatic detection with pre-post moderation to prevent mass-marketing/spamming.

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