Olympic Website fails to get Gold for Disabled Users

The World Wide Web has revolutionised the availability of information. People are one click away from literally world-wide information. The Olympic Games website is a case in point - www.athens2004.com has up-to-date information on all the events as they happen.

But making that information easy to find and interact with is still not easy, as the Olympic site also illustrates. At the Centre for HCI Design at City University we investigate what makes web information easy and engaging to use. For example, the homepage of the Olympics site is somewhat cluttered, making it difficult to scan the page to find the information being sought. This is a classic case of trying to push too much information at the user with little consideration for the perceptual and cognitive processing load that it imposes on them. There are lots of different navigation mechanisms on the site, making it difficult to know which one to choose to find the information you want. A mixture of different text styles and colours also adds to the overall "cognitive load.

And what if one is visually impaired or dyslexic? The Web has the potential to allow users to control their own presentation of material, converting it to synthetic speech, enlarging it, and changing the font and background colour. These capabilities make the Web even more revolutionary for disabled people, providing accessible information as never before.

The Olympic site is in a particularly sensitive position when it comes to accessibility for disabled people. During the last Olympics, Bruce Macguire, a blind Australian, found that the official website was inaccessible, even though he had been directed to the site since no information was available in Braille. He later successfully sued the Sydney Olympics Organising Committee for discrimination under the Australian Disability Discrimination Act. The UK also has a Disability Discrimination Act, and a Code of Practice published in 2002 states that websites come in the scope of the Act and therefore web ite owners need to make "reasonable adjustments" to ensure that their sites are accessible to disabled users.

Perhaps because of the Macguire case, it seems that the official Olympic site has made efforts to be accessible to disabled people. Images have been described quite well - using ALT tags for instance - enabling blind people to know what these images represent. (One of the main problems that blind people have in using the internet is not knowing what images are representing, especially when the images link to more information.)

Another positive aspect of the Olympic website is that it refrains from using moving text or flashing images. Movement in webpages certainly has its place, but too often movement is used to distract towards secondary content such as advertisements rather than alert users to the main business- and user-critical content.

However, it’s not all good news for disabled people who might visit the Olympic site. The contrast on some pages is poor, with text often appearing on a grey background. Partially sighted people may find this a real problem. Coupled with a small font size and pages with dense information, finding the information you want can be quite a challenge.

A particularly problematic aspect of the site is the presentation of the schedules of events with two rows of headers. One row refers to the particular day of the games Games, with Day 0 being the opening ceremony, and the other to the date in August. This may not be comprehensible to sighted users, though the physical alignment of the two sets of numbers gives you some clues (the simple addition of a label "Day/Date" at the beginning of the header would help enormously) but for a blind user listening to the information sequentially in synthetic speech, it makes no sense at all.

We asked a blind person to search the site for the date and time of the Women's Marathon; when she came to the table with the double headers, her comment was 'This doesn't make sense to me. Does –1 take me to yesterday’s schedule?' A logical possibility, but in fact –1 takes you to events that took place the day before the Games opened. This example shows that something that is perhaps difficult for mainstream users becomes impossible for disabled users – so accessibility issues may magnify usability issues.

These problems are all reminiscent of the recurring barriers that we found earlier this year when our team of accessibility experts conducted the largest ever accessibility evaluation of the Web. We evaluated 1000 home pages and then tested 100 websites with a User Panel of 50 disabled users as part of the Disability Rights Commission's investigation into website accessibility. We were amazed to find that 81% of websites failed even the most basic accessibility checks – so you don't need to do much to get ahead of your competitors.

So what can you do to make your site accessible? For medium or large businesses, accessibility needs to be more than just following guidelines or testing your site with software downloaded from the internet. The technical coding of the site is just one part. Businesses that take social responsibility and their brand image seriously need to initiate cross-departmental accessibility strategies. Accessibility needs to be part of a company's culture and processes. Senior management need to buy-into and promote an accessibility strategy. Developers may need training. Maintenance and editorial processes may need to be established or changed. Accessibility is an organisational and methodological issue.

Critically, real disabled people – like those in our User Panel – need to be involved in testing websites to uncover barriers to your key products and services. Interestingly, earlier this year I established that websites that are more accessible to disabled people are also more usable for everyone: Making your website accessible to disabled people can improve non-disabled people's efficiency – and thus satisfaction and enjoyment - by 35%. So there's not only a legal case, there's a strong business case: users who can use sites more efficiently, more successfully, and with more satisfaction are indeed happy customers. Surprisingly few organisations appreciate the impact that improved accessibility can make to their bottom line.

The Olympic site should have given its disabled website visitors a ‘Gold medal’ experience, a sense of achievement. Instead of being an easy jog, it seems that there are a few too many hurdles before the finishing line. Let's hope for Gold next time.

City University's Helen Petrie and team

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