Writing
Experiences: Test Evaluation
So I thought I would run http://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/weather/ontario/toronto through the test, as weather should be accessible to all? But it clearly isn't.
1) I used the HTML Code Sniffer as my automated tool and it found 101 errors, 85 warnings, and 389 notices.
It would be too cumbersome to list all of these, but some of them are as follows:
- no ability to bypass the repeated blocks of content (2.4.1)
- no alt-attributes for images, graphics, videos, etc. (absolutely crucial, since quite literally *all* the weather info is actually displayed as some sort of media, so if someone is using a screenreader it is entirely inaccessible to them!) (1.1.1)
- a lot of the links are non-descriptive/non-contextualized (i.e. they just say "read more" or "find out more") (2.4.4)
2) Using NVDA was a disaster. Every single word was punctuated/interrupted by "link." The entire speech went something like "link, link, list of nine of nine links, Toronto, Ontario, link, link, clickable link, overcast, link, etc." While I can see it is necessary for screen-reader users to have these options for links, perhaps there should be a simple-text version of the website, so that it isn't just so damn frustrating and overwhelming. As a vision-privileged person, it takes me seconds to see the current weather; with the screen-reader I was waiting and waiting for many minutes, and honestly I didn't even care what the weather was any more I just wanted the barrage of LINKLINKLINK to stop pummeling my ears. Extremely discouraging.
3) Keyboard only test was also very frustrating. When I was Tab-ing over, for the vast majority of the time, I had no idea where I was in the page (failing 2.4.7 immediately). Some sections were unreachable by keyboard. And once I started up one of the news video segments (by pressing the "Enter" key), I was in a keyboard trap, unable to pause, stop it, or move the page at all (failing 2.1.2).
