Kate Bush is inaccessible
Last night, seven top websites were presented with at a prestigious awards dinner held by the . The winners in the seven categories won their prizes for outstanding efforts in ensuring their content is accessible to visually impaired people. Bravo.
But I have to confess that my interest was caught rather more by the recipient of the booby prize for the most inaccessible site - why, it's only the official website for , the 80s songstress who has recently returned to the pop world with her album Aerial. How shocking!
Crippled Monkey says: less Wuthering Heights than withering lows for Kate then. Groan.
Comments
Well having just visited Kate's official website, I found it fairly plain and simple, I didn't really expect much more, I certainly would make her feel obliged to make her sight universally user friendly and pick on her for not having acieved that status. Her work is about audio fascination and as a sensory experience for people with poor or no vision I can only imagine that her album Aerial is a journey through a world of sensual fantasy. As a sighted person her work has given me an exploded sense of vision... So don't criticise the website, it makes you sound bitter and it isn't that important, celebrate her amazing talent as an artist and realise that there are a million worse websites than this to pick on... Whoever nominated it as most inaccessible site needs to take a more rational stance on life.
Ever since the site appeared, we've been trying to get the site designers to make the site accessible. It started out as the typical Flash-only site with no text equivilant at all. Then, with prodding, they eventually added a text version. But proving that they were COMPLETELY unclear on the concept, the only access to the text version was only available by clicking on a Flash-only link!
Finally, after many e-mails to the site designers, the Flash barracade was removed. One still has to go through a pointless ImageMap to get there, and the Lyrics don't work.
But no worries...I'm sure they'll learn how to write correct HTML before Kate's next album!
Luckily, the leading Kate Bush sity, Gaffa.org, while not being Flashy, prides it's self on being accessible.