How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 2 - Daily Mail
Yesterday I started a series of posts looking at the accessibility of British newspaper websites with an overview of the accessibility performance of the Daily Express website. Today I'm continuing the series by looking at the Daily Mail. I'm testing each newspaper homepage, and a subsequent story page, against a range of accessibility criteria.
The Daily Mail is one of the newspaper sites that uses fixed font sizes in its homepage and story page display. This means that the Mail over-rides any user settings in the Internet Explorer 6 browser, and so users are unable to switch to a larger font.
The Firefox browser behaves slightly differently in this regard, and usually gives the user more control. However, because of the way the Mail's site is coded, increasing the font size in the Firefox browser breaks the layout of the page in places, rendering some of it unreadable.
Alternative image text
The Daily Mail performs better with alternative image text. The images on the homepage have descriptive text included in their <img> tag, making the information meaningful to anyone who is unable to see the pictures, and when the page is being rendered by a text-only browser.
However, as I have previously noted, sometimes the content of that text isn't particularly descriptive - killer Monica McCanch was once described as 'thingy' in the alternative image text on the Daily Mail's homepage.
However, there is one severe issue caused on the Daily Mail site if you are unable to see or read the text in images. The Daily Mail has invested significantly in adding user-generated comment to the majority of their stories - but only if their would-be contributor has 20/20 vision. Before a comment can be submitted to the Daily Mail, the user has to pass a CAPTCHA test.
Whilst I can appreciate the Daily Mail's desire to prevent the comment form being spammed by bots, it is a pity they have chosen a way of doing it that creates accessibility problems. Unless you can read the text contained in that image, you cannot contribute to the Daily Mail site. There are ways to provide alternate routes to verify the human nature of the user, either by making available an alternative audio CAPTCHA, or using one of several other ways of making the test available to all users.
(This site, for example, requires a code word to be typed into a box before it will accept a comment - an instruction easily understood whichever software is used to access the page, but not one easily followed by a machine)
Browsing using FANGS
The Daily Mail's code is quite friendly to screen-reading software users, since it includes an accessibility link to skip to the main content, and also features coded accesskeys.
However, if users don't take advantage of these features, there are quite a lot of words to listen to before reaching the main content of the page. On the homepage the main headline is 429 words into the rendering of the page, and when the user follows a link to that main story, there are a further 672 words to be read out before reaching the story itself, aking over a 1,000 in total to get from rendering the homepage to reading the main story of the day.