Buy.com Does Good
When I visited Buy.com the other day to do some Christmas shopping, their website was having some problems serving up the images correctly. So I was happy to see that they took the time to add alt text for most of the meaningful graphics on their site. They still have a way to go before they can claim to have a fully accessible website, but as we learned from the recent Joe Clark interview, having alt text is the single biggest step a site can take to becoming accessible.
Meanwhile Amazon.com, in a sad profit-driven move, only provides alt text for their “Add to Shopping Cart” button and their checkout pages. Their access site, while more accessible than the rest of their site, snubs current accessibility recommendations by being a text-only site and not providing equivalent content. (It doesn’t return the same search results as the regular site.)
Cheers to Buy.com for understanding that accessibility doesn’t mean creating a separate text-only site, but instead using methods that have existed since HTML 2.0.
- 16 Dec 02
- accessibility, ecommerce, html, standards, web design
