Beijing Olympics - special State of the eNation report

In this special report AbilityNet asked disabled users to try out the Beijing Olympics website in our interaction lab. Poor information architecture and a lack of adherence to web standards result in an uneven playing field for disabled sports fans across the world.

This special issue of the e-Nation report concentrates solely on the Beijing Olympics website. The owners of the last Olympics website were prosecuted under the Australian Disability Discrimination Act by a blind sports fan. We take a look at both the usability and accessibility of the Beijing Olympics site and ask if disabled sports fans can easily access the games website.

In a departure from our standard State of the eNation review procedure we brought a range of disabled users into our lab to perform some basic tasks on the website. Users uncovered a variety of accessibility and usability issues that only real-life user testing would have uncovered.

The Beijing website has clearly been developed with some accessibility principles in mind, however these have been poorly implemented - showing how a purely technical approach to accessibility won’t result in a good user experience.

Associated Link: Read more comments, access the full report, and watch clips of our testers

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