July 25, 2002, 9:31 PM ET
Inaccessible multimedia at nytimes.com
According to an item on ResearchBuzz, nytimes.com has launched a new multimedia section.
It's convenient having all this multimedia content in one place. But the convenience is overshadowed by the page's inaccessibility to browsers with JavaScript turned off. After disabling JavaScript in my browser, I discovered 24 of the 27 links in the content area of the page (not counting "Related Article" links) didn't take me anywhere. Nothing happened when I clicked them, because their a hrefs were set to load a JavaScript popup window and provided no alternate means of accessing the content.
The least they could have done is provide an error message for non-JavaScript browsers. Instead, the significant group of Internet users who disable JavaScript will be left clicking -- and getting increasingly frustrated.
(I've mentioned how to make JavaScript popups accessible in a previous post.)
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