[MLUG - DISCUSSION] firefox, web accessability, and the program to make it all better

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

OK, so with a few exceptions, I've got type-ahead-to-find working like
a champ, my emacs editing keys work pretty well (still no cntrl-Y,
though) and life is basically a blast since I don't have to take my
hands away from the keyboard.

And, my word, Firefox is significantly faster than Safari at rendering
most sites (which did not used to be true) and especially fast at
rendering/downloading gmail.  So I should be incredibly happy.

Except when I'm not.  Grumble, grumble.

It turns out that several sites have text navbars that don't actually
have text in them, using the oh-so-90s technique of a navbar gif and
an image map.  This defeats type-ahead find in Firefox, pretty
obviously, and is just a gratuitous accessability problem.  (You can't
as easily navigate via the keyboard, and increasing the text size via
cmd-+ doesn't make the navbar any more readable if you like or need
big text.)

A classic example of the problem is:

http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/refservices/ellis/ellis.htm

...which is a top 10 site for me and many others on campus I'm sure. 
If you look at the source, you see a completely gratuitous use of
frames wrapping the gratuitous use of the navbar imagemap.

The more I think about this (30 seconds did the trick), the lamer it
seems.  A quick google search for:

navbar site: missouri.edu

turned up 154 hits.  Looking at a few of them, I see the same old,
same old pattern.  (And this is just the tip of the iceberg, in all
likelihood; googling for navbar world-wide gives you more than 1
million hits.)  So the question is: what should be done about this?

I have sent email to the person responsible at Ellis, and I'll find
out what she says.  I'm guessing some good could even come of things
in this case.  But, in general, does anybody know a nice and effective
way to get people to change a less accessible site?

I think that the best way might be just to give them the code to
change things.  Once you've gotten some tweaks made, you can generate
even a semi-custom nav bars using CSS and html pretty much
programatically.  You could then tell people, "Hear, just paste these
lines in place of what  you have" (or do the surgery for them) and
they could see that it worked, looked good, degraded more nicely, and
was just the Right thing to do.

So does anybody know whether anybody has already started a campaign
like this?  It really did just hit me this could have real legs these
days.  The stupid gif navbar is just one of many related lamenesses
that follows a consistent and predictable pattern.  And, indeed, once
you have detected any of these "lameness patterns" you can use google
to find 10,000 others just like it, so if you can fix one, you can
probably fix most of the others...and notify the people in charge.

Well, enough of this safe the world talk; I gotta eat lunch. :-)

jking
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