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

This is the sixth 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.

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


The volunteers' views on Thesun.co.uk:

John:

Trying to get past the rolling betting advert at the top of The Sun's website was an immediate accessibility obstacle. As heard in the audio clip below, JAWS kept reading this item as it failed to reach the bottom of the text.



John was impressed by how quickly he could access the news section of The Sun site, aided largely by the inclusion of a left-hand navigation bar only, with no section headings running across the top of the site.

Furthermore a heading stating 'Today's Top Stories' provided John and sighted users with and instant idea of what the main news items on the site were and where they can be found.

"To it's credit when you first go in it lists their main articles and you could find what you were looking for. I feel I've had more success on finding content on this website than on the others."

In contrast, John was disappointed to find that after clicking through to access one of the main stories a pop-up adverted appeared hindering JAWS and the reader. In addition, once again, JAWS was not immediately taken to the content of the article that was clicked on.

"Once again we're trying to get into the guts of an article, but each new page that we go to JAWS is reading the furniture."

A blogs section or area in which John could leave his own comments was easy to locate on The Sun site, because of the presence of four tabs inviting reader interaction positioned at the top of each page. One criticism of this set-up, however, was that the 'Take Me To...' link is out of context providing a barrier to accessibility for both sighted and blind users.

John found these tabs to be 'straightforward' to find and 'direct', but was let down by the out of context links, which read 'click here' in the Contact Us section.

Using the website's search facility raised some new issues for accessibility not found on the Telegraph or Independent's websites.

Firstly, when searching for cycling, John found the facility searched the web by default without informing the user, as the site uses a drop down menu rather than radio buttons to change this feature.

In addition, the search results opened up another browser page without informing the user, making it increasingly difficult for them to identify where they are in the site and how they can navigate back to the homepage.

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

Finding the headline story: "The position and heading on the top stories helps reader's identify that it's important." [5/5]

Finding an article of interest: "The size of the text is good and the way The Sun is written gives a clear impression of what story is about.

"This is useful for people using ZoomText and screen magnifiers because it takes a long time to scroll through an article." [5/5]

Site search: "It's confusing having different options like 'the web' or 'this site' for The Sun, because they could be easily missed by visually impaired users." [3/5]

Overall design and layout: "The images mixed with text help me to navigate through sections. This site's easy to move around, because every page is laid out the same - nothing really moves around too much." [4/5]

Video/audio content: "All I have to do is click on a button and it takes you straight through to Sun TV." [5/5]


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

The Sun website has no dedicated accessibility section.


Response from The Sun:

The Sun did not respond to requests for comment


The expert's view:

Richard

"A common problem found by your reviewer was the need to listen to an extensive list of links (navigation menus) and other page furniture before getting to the main content of the page.

"This is because Jaws (and other assistive software) reads the page in the order in which it is written. The sighted user has his or her attention drawn to the main story in the middle of the page by the colour and size of the headline font and associated images.

"The blind user has to listen whilst Jaws works it way through all the menus, advertisements and other clutter on the page.

"To a lesser extent sighted people who cannot use a mouse accurately share this problem. If they want to use a link in the main story they have to use the keyboard tab key to jump through all the preceding navigation links (site furniture) before they get to the main story."

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