Following on from the previous post, looking at responsibility of providers, the twittering at Sitecore was a little frantic - we weren't trying to offer their client services people 'free' re-tweets, but we acknowledge their thanks for the assistance via this tweet from SitecoreUK to Sitemorse: "thx. agency has bn notified". Shame the Chairman was so aggressive and threatening - something to protect or worse, to hide?... a reminder of the email exchange.
We also noticed there were a number of questions around the capability of the CMS to support accessibility - based on their own marketing (http://www.sitecore.net/en/Products/Sitecore-CMS/Sitecore-feature-comparison.aspx) which states (under the "Site Control Tools" section) that they have an accessibility checker, the most basic of needs we would have thought would have been covered - missing "Alt" text for an image - especially on the home page of their international award winner... come on Sitecore, time to be a little more accurate in your products capability - advise clients of the limitations....
Here's the site, www.stokke.com/en-us/, that won Sitecore's International Site of the Year award for 2009. That's quite an accolade !
So I did a quick Sitemorse Snapshot of the site's Home Page and found that the 3 main product images were missing AltTxt (that's a basic Priority 1 (A) Accessibility failure) and there were 3 associated links to separate product info pages which all said "Read more" (so those are all Priority 2 (AA) Accessibility failures (linktarget). Both these errors are basic and should be identified by any Accessibility checking, which most CMS vendors claim that they do.
Oh, and from a usability point of view the page also has lots of Flash, so that won't look good on the new Apple iPad ! (or in the Opera browser that's used by the Wii and is probably problematic on several other platforms)
Here's the bottom of the page where the errors are
Back to my point on other blogs on this topic. Are the people responsible for the site aware of these errors ? Would they be happy if they knew they existed ? I wouldn't think so. So perhaps they are under the misapprehension that these types of problems can't exist on their site.
More about Sitemorse at www.sitemorse.com
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