ryan behrman

Today I stumbled upon the Government’s Accessibility page for the British Citizenship Test. I’m fortunate enough to be an EU citizen and not in need of British citizenship in order to live and work in Britain. But if I did need to prepare for the test then it seems:

• I’d probably need to use Windows operating system and Internet Explorer:
  

  You may experience difficulty viewing the ‘Prepare for the test’ section of this website if you use other browsers or operating systems.

• Ironically I would have difficulty reading the Accessibility page if I had a visual disability and needed to use a screen reader. The page is sorely in need of h2 and h3 tags, and even visually there is no distinction between level 2 and level 3 headings.
• Instructions are provided for Netscape Navigator(!) and ‘Macintosh users’, but the significantly large group of Firefox users on a PC are unaccounted for. Not to mention a host of other browsers..

So there you have it. An inaccessible accessibilty page. Now isn’t that ironic.

Another ironic website is accessability.org which gets lost in its myriad of nested tables, an image-infested splash page, and unquoted attribute values…

I look forward to the day when the battle for accessible websites and web standards is truly won. Until then I’ll breathe a sigh of relief that I already know (and don’t need to be tested on anyway) where Geordie, Cockney and Scouse dialects are spoken.