Bloom in Park and perish online
In a recent post about a Peters Pink Boat I came across a Web site which has to be the most inaccessible Web site I have ever seen.
“Bloom in the Park is the largest and most spectacular gardening event in Ireland, hosted by Bord Bia. Its a competition of sorts where gardeners can get creative as they like.”
The Bloom in the Park Web site should get a Golden Razzie. The site is one big image thats probably been run through a Dreamweaver chopping shop. Everything is an image right down to the text.
The competition is all about “getting creative” and obviously the organisers like things that look nice. (Note to organisers not everyone who uses the Web can see.)
I’ve seen a lot of bad sites and most could be put down to lack of knowledge and experience. In such cases the developers usually demonstrate that they did their home work and with a little research they did their best to make their Web site as accessible as they new best.
Chances are the developer marked up headings incorrectly, hard coded a few spacer gifs and forgot to provide alt text for images, but they gave it their best shot. With a little encouragement these developers can only get better and they do.
Part of the problem with accessibility is understanding, some people just cant think outside the box while others are not paid to think outside of the box. I’d love to know what their excuse is. It was the same last year.
This Web site clearly demonstrates the wool being pulled over the clients eyes, but is that good enough excuse, surely in this day and age they could manage to pull of a Single A compliant Web site?
16 Responses to “Bloom in Park and perish online”
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i think you’re being a tiny bit harsh here. i mean it looks good and it works, far as I can see.
but on the other hand i can’t understand why ppl would actually sit down and build some minor .asp monstrosity these days when they could just go get Joomla!(in this case) or Drupal or soomething. (i mean, it looks to me like someone actually sat down with Dreamweaver, as you say, and –shock– built this thing from scratch.)
we really are still cavemen in Ireland when it comes to web development. with one obvious exception being Segala, of course. Go Heinz beans!!
@John I wasn’t to harsh at all the site works 50% if you’re an abler person with a good mouse and perfect eyesight. It does not support key board navigation or simple thing like resize text, there is no proper structure to the site. It wouldn’t support the needs of senior folks the typical visitors to such events. You can’t even select/copy text. The only information a user of assistive technologies would get out of it is th
Forget about users for a minute. The site is completely hidden from search engines. This site will never be found and indexed by Google or any other search engine. The same best practice guidelines applied for users, are applied by search spiders/crawlers.
Aido, looking forward to seeing your posts move from draft to published
to help people understand the benefits of best practice design…
oh wait.. I get it now. so the text is in images? wow. that’s pretty bad all right. note to self : read the full blog post b4 commenting…
talking of accessibility Paul, you expect these ‘bankers’ to do better…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/moneybox/7332216.stm
Thats a perfect example of why we have to re-educate the industry, not just the techies but the product owners and decision makers.
Converting online bank statements from HTML to PDF probably seemed like a “nice have” from a visual perspective. My own CC company provides you with the ability to download a CSV and text version.
[...] other reason was to travel with a very good friend/ neighbour[ish]/ colleague of mine/ Adrian McMahon and his two sons where we would meet with Gene another colleague of ours and David [Milner] for a [...]
why have I got an american flag?!!
Peter,
That’s not your flag mate, that’s flag of your hosting server.
WordPress server is located in USA, thus the IP of the server belongs to US. All trackback, pingback contain IP of the server, not your IP.
Hi Aido,
Many thanks for taking the time to review the Bloom website.
We were working on a redesign at the time that your review happened, and I was wondering now that this redesign is up would you be able to review it again?
I have included your recommendations as well and I look forward to hear how you feel we have implemented these changes across the site and any further changes you feel need to be made to make this site as accessible as possible.
Ah Kamrul,
as my twitter thing says your garden is my computer – unlike aido and myself where I did his garden and he did my computer.
…. IP??! and [without sounding like I'm taking the mick...] if you want to know anything about ‘allium sativum’ I’m your man!!
have a great day mate – you are all of the gentleman that aido tells me you are. Great to see you.
peter
@Grace Sutton Many thanks for your comment. I would gladly review the new site and shall channel feedback via email.
I have had a quick look at the site and there is room for improvement, but please take this a positive note. I look forward to working with you
@Grace Sutton
well done Grace. It brilliant to see comments, based on reason, taken with the correct pinch of salt rather than refuted and expelled as perceived as possible insult. Bulaidh bós. I too received the same [although verbal] compliments once!
I might add that you are in good hands, those of Adrian [and the segala team - see their accessibility cert at the bottom of my web page].
Looking forward to Aido’s review.
slán agus beannacht
peter
what is funny is that any website developer that starts with a large image is supposed to later come back before publishing and change out images for text. this is required not only for functionality but for search engine recognition, and the ability to copy text from the page.
@brian True but there is also so many other benefits for having an accessible site. I’ve been in contact with the company off line. They have improved the site and I’ll be working with them to ensure their Web site is fully complaint moving forward.
[...] other reason was to travel with a very good friend/ neighbour[ish]/ colleague of mine/ Adrian McMahon and his two sons where we would meet with Gene another colleague of ours and David [Milner] for a [...]