[Gllug] Barbican website - accessibility issues

Ian Norton bredroll at atari.org
Thu Nov 14 09:20:54 UTC 2002


Hi there,

I appear to have caught the thread about this a bit late, but accessibility is
something i consider in every web development i have undertaken for the last
few years, I am a contributer of the gnome accessibility project and a
professional web developer, My girfriend is partially sighted and a keen
computer user, she is also a big fan of the arts and enjoys theatre alot,

making a site viewable to all isnt a question of following the W3C HTML spec to
the letter, internet explorer for example is not a W3C compliant browser,
though the standard will ensure things work in 99.99% of cases you just have to
be careful that with some small things that it all still works, for example a
very powerful system called cascading style sheets allows you to uniform the
look of pages quickly and easily, IE doesnt support this well and lacks a few
important features, 

that said, i've not found it difficult to produce something visually pleasing and
accessible aswell as incorperate the odd peice of flash or multimedia.

can i help :-) ?

Ian Norton 
m: 07748766853

On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 02:49:52PM -0000, CEvers at barbican.org.uk wrote:
> Dear Greater London Linux Users Group
> 
> Some of you contacted me recently about the Barbican Centre website and
> commented on problems related to its accessibility, both for people with
> disabilities and users of non-Microsoft/Netscape browsers.  I promised to
> respond via your group email address as the issues are clearly of concern to
> all of you - and to me too.
> 
> To take disabled access first, I guess we would all agree that the key group
> here is people with visual impairments. Visual impairment is not an all or
> nothing condition, and not all visually-impaired people want to use
> text-only browsers and/or text-to-speech converters, simply because they
> enjoy using sites that have interesting visual content.  
> However, I think you are absolutely right that we should be aiming to meet
> the needs of all our audiences (within reason), and it is something that has
> been discussed inside the organization.  I would like to assure you all that
> this is something we want to work towards.  One question the Barbican has to
> come to a view on, given its inevitably limited resources, is, where should
> we start?  I'll come back to this point shortly.
> 
> On the second point of browser compatibility, as I mentioned in my original
> email, at the time the site was designed, Opera and the others were off the
> radar.  And much as I agree with the point made by Gary Heaton and Will
> Jessop that making the site compliant with W3C standards will make the site
> compatible with future developments in the browser industry, I do believe
> that an arts site has a duty to be visually interesting/aesthetically
> pleasing - would this be possible if we followed W3C standards to the
> letter?  I'm not convinced.  However, I agree that the environment has
> changed now - the open source community has made a real impact and browsers
> like Opera are becoming more widespread.  Again, the Barbican needs to take
> this into account.  Again, the question I come back to is, where should we
> start?
> 
> I also wanted to quickly deal with the comment from Linuxlover that I am
> "bowing to corporate giants such as Microsoft".  I think that Microsoft have
> been a force for good and for bad in the development of IT over the last 20
> years.  On the negative side are the issues we all know about from the
> anti-trust case in the US.  On the positive side I would argue that their
> products have made IT affordable to many more individuals and organizations
> than would have been possible otherwise - I suspect you disagree with me on
> this!
> 
> So getting down to details, what concrete steps should the Barbican be
> taking to evolve its website in the broad direction you and I agree we
> should be taking?  I would like to invite 3 or 4 of you down to the Barbican
> for a chat about this (tea and biscuits on me) - how about Gary, Will and
> Linuxlover - I promise not to wear a 'Gates is God' t-shirt.  If you have
> members who act as representatives for this kind of exercise, even better -
> but please, no businesses.  (Naturally, you are all welcome to email me back
> as well.)  So, over to you.
> 
> Best wishes, Chris Evers
> 
> 
> 
> Chris Evers
> Head of IT, Barbican Centre
> e: cevers at barbican.org.uk
> t:  020 7382 7111
> f:  020 7382 7254
> www.barbican.org.uk
> 
> 
> 
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