Accessibility 2.0: How user-friendly is the Times to the blind and visually impaired?

This is the seventh 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)


Our volunteers' views on Times Online:

John

As the clip below illustrates, JAWS was not happy about entering the Times' homepage as it reeled off site parameters and ads rather than content.



After finishing this process John was taken straight into a host of adverts for holidays, though there was no heading for JAWS to read to tell the user that these were ads. Eventually at the bottom of the listings a reference to Google ads was made, but, as John pointed out, while the sighted user would realise this association instantly, a blind website user has to wait to be told this.

Browsing the site with JAWS brought up some out of context links, such as 'Where am I?', which are a barrier to accessibility for screen reader users.

Similarly a pull quote towards the top of the site - and therefore one of the first things JAWS comes to on the page - was very confusing to our user as it was out of context and attributed to a specific author, only familiar to Times' readers.

The graphic of the columnist in question accompanying this quote was also not labelled correctly and so was not read out by JAWS.

However, when searching the site for the main news stories of the day John found the inclusion of the section heading 'Headlines:' extremely useful.

His search for news was again aided by the use of only one navigation bar on the site - across the top - rather than an additional menu of section headings present on the left-hand side of sites, as found on Telegraph.co.uk.

"It's a useful indicator of where I am - hopefully at the top of the page - and where the main content is. There's a series of very topical items and we got to it very quickly, plus all the graphics associated with the top stories were correctly labelled as images that are also links."

Having clicked through to a news story about Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable, John found it frustrating that he had to use a JAWS search for 'Cable' to locate the body of the article of the page.

"It's confusing because if go to the top it reads out the headline, which includes Vince Cable's name, which is very encouraging. But the next line down takes me to something about film and starts reading an advert."

A further frustration was the presence of unlabelled images on this page, which are communicated to users like John by JAWS saying 'undefined graphic'.

Problems trying to access a blogs area of the site were encountered because of a lack of a 'blog' link on the homepage. As such John's JAWS search for 'blog' returned no results from the homepage - though links to the section do appear on other pages of the site - and so a blind user would be lead to the conclusion that no such section exists on Times Online

Access to an audio and video section of the site - a potentially popular feature for visually impaired or blind users - was good, because, John said, a tab linking to the section was conveniently located towards the top of the page and so read out early on by JAWS when first entering the site.

Unfortunately, when played the sound on the video clips was louder than that of the screen reader, obscuring JAWS.

In addition the clip began with an advert, but this was only made clear visually and not aurally, which is of no use to visually impaired or blind users.

John conceded that learning the shortcut keys to use this site's video playing technology would give him greater accessibility and that these were announced by JAWS at the start of the clip.

When trying to use the site's search function, John said he had difficulty discovering where it was he was supposed to enter text and had to guess.

Luckily, he was taken through to a results page for 'cycling', which he found to be very accessible as it was particularly uncluttered and included summaries for each result, as well as the author and date.

The option to refine search results is included on the page, but not above the results themselves, allowing screen reader users to come to this feature after browsing the initial results first.

Charlotte's view (Dorton College students graded site function 1 (poor) to 5 (good))

Finding the headline news: "The headline article was very clear on the home page and stood out" [5/5]

User interaction: "Comments were easy to fin and easy to fill in." [5/5]

Site search: "The search box was in an obvious and easy to find place. Results made it easy to find story I wanted." [5\5]

Overall design and layout: The pictures are colourful and appealing, although the different text fonts and links all over the place was very confusing. The headlines all being the same colour was helpful" [4/5]

Video/audio content: "This is very confusing, I'm not sure I really know how to use it." [2/5]


Accessibility features for visually impaired users on Timesonline:

There is no dedicated accessibility section on Times Online, though a digital e-edition of the print publication is available through the website and features a zoom tool.


Response from Times Online:

Julian Desborough, publishing operations director

"The recent redesign of Times Online was undertaken to significantly improve the user experience of our website. As tools for browsing are being constantly revised and developed, it is a significant challenge to keep pace - and we welcome any feedback about our site.

"It is important to us for users to be able to navigate the site quickly and easily and we take the concerns of our blind and visually impaired users very seriously. We are committed to working through any usability issues with the relevant organisations."

The expert's view:

Richard

"There is an easy solution to the problem for site furniture, which is to introduce a new link at the top of the page that takes the user directly to the main page content thus avoiding all the navigation links.

'This is called a 'skip links' option and is very easy to implement. The Mirror, Daily Mail and Guardian each provide this 'skip links' option with varying degrees of success."

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