Posts by AlternativeFact

The Register's 2018 homepage redesign: What's going on now?

Why does mobile keep getting worse?

Originally there was an El Reg app for the iPhone. Nice and compact, could scan the titles of the articles each day and read what interested me. Then you dropped the app (presumably for economic reasons) and really made it difficult to find the mobile version. Eventually I found it and managed to store a link to it on my phone, and that was a reasonable substitute for the app, even though it reset itself to the desktop page from time to time. Having struggled to find the new mobile homepage (at least I assume that Top Stories is where it is), I find that the title and description of each article means that my phone (an iPhone 5) can accomodate no more than three articles, and because the titles are longer it takes me longer to find out what they are about. Why can't you understand mobile usage?

Apple web design violates law, claims blind person

Image problem

Having produced websites and studied the accessibility question I would make the following general points.

1. Accessibility guidelines are framed in terms of standards compliance, not support for particular hardware or software.

2. Most of Apple's pages I have looked at use background images, where it is not technically possible to give alt tags.

3. The standards advice is not to give meaningless alt tags like "apple logo" or even "picture of iPad". Blind users don't like them (they slow them down) and gain nothing from them. If the specs of a Mac are described in the text, there is no need to describe the pic.

4. To conform with accessibility when one is marking up images that don't need a verbal description, alt= "" is what is recommended as it is ignored by screen readers but passes standards test.

Of course, whether Apple's site is good or bad, and whether the case has any merit in US law is another matter. But it isn't quite as simple as some would suppose.