This is the fourth in a series of articles looking at the accessibility of national newspaper websites in the UK to blind and partially sighted users.

Journalism.co.uk asked blind volunteer John Allnutt to give us his take on several leading UK newspaper websites. John uses JAWS screen reading technology to navigate web pages and find his news online. He was aided and abetted in his assessment by pupils from Dorton College.

(Our introduction piece links to our assessment of other newspaper sites. Read the profile of our volunteers and expert)


The volunteer's views on Mirror.co.uk:

John

Our blind JAWS user John was welcomed to Mirror.co.uk by a barrage of adverts, which you can hear by clicking on the audio link below.



However, JAWS told us that the page had only 126 links - relatively few compared to the other homepages of newspaper websites featured in this study and something that John said would be encouraging to visually impaired users when coming to the site.

Navigating past these adverts John was immediately taken to a 'skip to main content' link, which sounded promising, but unfortunately took John to long list of showbiz news stories (located on the left-hand side of the page) rather than the main news section of the site.

After tabbing through this column John discovered a latest news label - a helpful method for news sites to flag up their main news content to all users - but he found the process of getting to this section 'convoluted' and 'misleading' given the misdirection of the 'skip to main content' link.

Hoping to find an area of the site that he could interact with, John used a JAWS search and successfully located a blogs section. Unfortunately this heading was not a link and so to access blogs, John had to select a link from a list of names. It was not made clear to a JAWS user that these names would take you to a specific blogger's page.

Having selected Kevin Maguire's blog, JAWS started going through the long list of links that feature in Maguire's tags section (left).

These tags provide out of context links and while for a sighted reader the more popular tags - those subjects that Maguire has written about most - will appear larger, this visual representation is useless to a blind reader.

These tag links, said John, were not only out of context for the screen reader user, but would suggest to someone who is blind that the blog post they are on covers all these different topic areas. 

On a positive note, John approved of the Mirror's approach of not displaying each blog post in its entirety on the blogger's main page, as this allowed quicker access to a comment link.

Using the site search from the Mirror's homepage, John was pleased to find that the results pages for a search on cycling were not inundated with adverts, as was the case on other newspaper sites, and so JAWS could access the search results more quickly. The screen reader was forced to read a lot of site parameters first however.

The inclusion of page number links was initially confusing: "At first when it was saying link two I didn't understand that it was taking me to a page link,but after you've worked it out I'm glad it gives you access to get to those extra pages. I think the search gets a plus."

Despite the prominence for sighted users of the Mirror's online video content, for blind visitors to the site the lack of section heading in the site's navigation bars made this area more inaccessible.

Without already knowing that there was video present on the site, John said tabbing through the homepage's links offered no indication to him that he could access videos on Mirror.co.uk.

Rosie's views: (Dorton College students graded site function 1 (poor) to 5 (good))

Finding the headline news: "It doesn't actually say that I've reached the top stories of the day, so a label or section heading would be helpful." [1/5]

Finding an article of interest: "It's easy to navigate into different sections, but the headings of these sections weren't always descriptive enough to tell you where you are going to." [3/5]

Site search: "JAWS has to go through a lot of links before it finds a search box and only with prior knowledge would I know to keep tabbing through the navigation bar." [1/5]

Overall layout and design: "JAWS will only read text, so I imagine there are quite a lot of pictures on this site, which is less helpful to me as a screen reader user." [2/5]

Video/audio content: "It would be better to have a separate heading for the video section in the main navigation - otherwise I can't find it." [1/5]


Accessibility features for visually impaired users on Mirror.co.uk:

There is no dedicated accessiblity section on this website.


Response from Trinity Mirror:

"Accessibility is a primary issue for Mirror Group and is at the forefront of all the redesign work we are currently carrying out. We welcome all feedback to ensure continued improvements in this area," a spokesman for the Mirror Group told Journalism.co.uk.


The expert's view:

Richard

"The videos and blogs that your reviewers tested are newer technologies than standard websites, so the accessibility functions might not be as well known. However, this is still not an excuse for not trying.

"Videos should have an alternative transcript of the associated audio available for deaf people to read and an alternative text description of the scene/s to enable blind people to put the audio into context.

"Blogs come in many flavours so even sighted users need to take time familiarising themselves with a particular blog's peculiarities. A good role model for blogs is the BBC, probably because it is not cluttered up with adverts, but it is still worth using as a benchmark."