Web Accessibility of the Presidential Candidate Sites, December 9, 1999

Technical Note

Programmers, webmasters, and markup experts visiting this site may wish for a detailed, line-by-line analysis of the candidates' pages. Advocates for the disabled may wish for more advocacy from us. Others may wonder why we chose Netscape Navigator or ProxiWeb for our analysis.

Our purpose at OrbitAccess is to look for a range of pitfalls using typical situations. We are interested in keeping the Web accessible to all, including to people who have slow connections in locations without the latest graphical browser. Our only advocacy is access for people through their devices and browsers of choice.

For example, there is no point in hunting for invalid HTML where browsers handle common errors or deprecated markup. Nor do we expect accessibility perfection. On this site, we chose to keep our graphical buttons at the top of the page -- meaning speech readers will repeat the ALT text every time. We didn't implement an HTML shortcut key for these because it might conflict with the speech reader's shortcut keys. On the other hand, our small script deprecates nicely, and our single line of CSS replaces dangerous table layout, incorrect <blockquote> or <ul>, or deadly transparent spacer bar GIFs.

Everything is changing and 100% accessibility is impossible -- one has to have a computer, after all, and some sort of Internet connection and software to start with!

But the point is awareness of the issues. To that end, we used the following typical setups:

• Windows 95 (B, build 1212), Celeron 300a processor, 128MB memory, 56K dialup connection, 19-inch monitor at 1280x1024, with accompanying speakers, keyboard, mouse, and trackball. This was the primary unit, with three other test machines sharing the Internet connection. All are Win95B/1212: K6-200 on 14-inch 640x400, Pentium 90 on 15-inch 800x600, Pentium 100 laptop 640x400. Windows 95 is found at http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/
• Netscape Navigator 4.08. This is the first main build of the generation 4 graphical browsers. This is our browser of choice for day-to-day work; it also works with IBM Home Page Reader, which Microsoft Internet Explorer does not. Nevertheless, we did check for anomalies with Internet Explorer 3.0 and Opera 3.5. Note that Netscape screen captures were done at 1280x1024 to emphasize the "fixed paper" nature of most of these sites. Netscape browsers are found at http://home.netscape.com/download/index.html
• Lynx 2.8. Lynx was the assumed choice for screen-scrapers. This version of Lynx runs in the Windows 32-bit environment, and emulates the typical Unix presentation. Our version was configured to use code page 850 because 8859-1 did not correctly present character entities. Lynx binaries are found at http://www.crl.com/%7Esubir/lynx/binaries.html
• IBM Home Page Reader 2.5. This is the latest version of Home Page Reader (HPR), using the Lernout & Hauspie speech engine. The product is still flawed (no distinction between image and link voice, non-customizable pronunciation, links not spoken with surrounding context, etc.) but it is superior to Monolog and similar screen-scraper programs in that it uses Netscape as a companion to determing what should be spoken aloud and what should be ignored. It can be found at http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/hpr.htm
• Palm V, Palm OS 3.3, 2MB memory. The best-selling palmtop may soon be superseded by the wireless Palm VII, but for now it is typical, with wired-only Internet access. It has a 160x160 display. It was connected to our LAN using Mochasoft W32 PPP. We did not test sites for access using pagers or Internet telephones; if the technology becomes popular, we will revisit those techniques before the 2000 election. Palm information is found at http://www.palm.com/ and Mochasoft at http://www.mochasoft.dk/
• ProxiWeb 3.5. Web access on palmtops is largely limited to services which reconfigure web pages for small screens, low memory, and slow connections. We originally selected AvantGo, but it requires that sites be registered ahead of time, and downloaded during HotSync sessions. We wanted to browse live, and settled on ProxiWeb, which calls on the server to reformat images and strip text alignment markup. It can be found at http://www.proxinet.com/
• Bobby 3.1.1. This validator does a good job in presenting all possible problems, with suggestions for manual checks. Because Bobby validates against the W3C checklist, we accepted the Bobby results and turned to the W3C list for manual items. Bobby is found at http://www.cast.org/bobby/, and the W3C checklist is found at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html

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