19 February 2007
A visually impaired software expert has highlighted the three main barriers to an accessible site.
Ray Campbell, formerly an employee of global telecommunications group Lucent Technologies, cited graphics which lack descriptive text tags, necessary plug-in downloads and visual registration tests as the major stumbling blocks.
The latter can take the form of a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) and can exclude many visually impaired web users, he told Medill News Service.
"All I want to do is buy tickets and I can't do that because there's this verification and they have not provided an audio link to it," Mr Campbell, who has been blind throughout his life, said of these systems.
The publication notes that this difficulty has the potential to exclude a large number of web users from e-commerce sites.
In 2005, the World Wide Web Consortium published a report into the accessibility of CAPTCHAs, finding that they pose a "major problem" to some web users, although it also outlined a number of potential solutions to these issues.
© Adfero LtdKeep up to date with industry and Nomensa news by signing up to Nomensa newsletters.
