Harry Potter author's site goes accessible
Childrens' author JK Rowling receives an access makeover of her website with help from vision and hearing impaired testers and others.
Harry Potter is one of the big talking points of the moment and, um, would it be taking it too far to suggest that web accessibility is too? Incidentally - it's OK, you can read on and we won't tell you who dies in the Half Blood Prince. Um, if anyone does die that is.
Explain mode on -- The whizzy animated sites that you see tend to be powered by this thing called Flash, made by Macromedia. Though the take-up hasn't been what you would call marvellous, recent editions of the product allow developers to make sites both whizzy and accessible -- Explain mode off.
Enter the author of Harry Potter and the company who makes her website - Lightmaker. And what we now have, thanks to a bit of help from the RNIB, the RNIDand stuff, is a stable readable Flash website.
Visit now.
The animated page-turning is cool for deaf and partially sighted kids. It's a good thing to have done. But for blind screenreader users it arguably makes the experience a little more difficult and less like normal web-surfing, with no great new whizzy benefits except the occasional sound of an owl hooting.
We call for more imaginative Flash and more toolkits to create it. But, c'mon, access should be the norm - so why I'm sitting here writing a weblog entry about a good bunch of people who've made an effort to attract more customers, I really don't know.
Comments
I'm blind and haven't found one single Flash website worth going to. Macromedia say their product is accessible now but really it isn't. Screenreader manufacturers have a part to play here in the fact that cool multimedia rich web content is just that little bit out of the reach of visually impaired people using this kind of access technology. Sort it out.
The Rowling website doesn't really have any new content on it, they've just made what was there look a bit flashier. WE're not fooled.
Did you know that if you piled all of the Potter volumes up in the sahara desert you would be very tired. Not only that but also the pile would be visible from the great wall of china and if you set the pile alight, I would be very grateful and the flames would be viewable from the moon if you were there. Give me J R R Tolkien the original, (with 3 christian names, JK!) and best fantasy writer long before the evil Potter empire shadow took hold, Hogwartz and all.