Monday, March 17, 2008

London 2012 Olympics Website Accessiblity

In contrast to the Commonwealth Games Delhi 2010, the organizers of the London 2012 Olympics seem to have put some thought into the accessibility of their web site. The site passes a basic automated test. It has some interesting features, such as three versions of the color scheme and layout:
  1. Normal
  2. Dyslexia: Limited graphics and only one column of text.
  3. Highvis: The high visibility version has yellow text on a black background.
Unfortunately these are accessed via three icons of increasingly large images of the letter "A". These are usually used to access versions of a web site with larger text. The reader is going to get confused when instead they get a different layout.

The London team made some unfortunate choices with their visual materials, with some animated footage reported to trigger photosensitive epilepsy seizures. This is covered by W3C web accessibility checkpoint "Verify that there is no blinking content in the page".

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