Sydney 2000 Olympics - Sports Menu - Website accessibility

Demonstration showing two options for implementing Website accessibility guidelines in the menu of sports

By Tom Worthington

http://www.tomw.net.au/2000/sports.html

The purpose of this document is to demonstrate methods for implementing Website accessibility guidelines for the Olympic games web site. Specifically methods to provide a text alternative for the menu of sports is shown.

Option 1: ALT Text on the existing image map

In this implementation, a ALT tag with the name of the sport is added to each rectangular region of the existing image map. As an example, alt="Archery" is added to the first area:

< AREA shape="rect" coords="1,1,80,12" href=http://www.olympics.com/eng/sports/AR/home.html" alt="Archery">

There is no change in the appearance of the menu for most users. However, the effect of including the ALT tags is that a browser can display the text labels in place of the graphics, if required:

Option 2: Simple text menu supplementing or replacing the existing image map

Simple hypertext links are used for the name of each sport:

<A HREF="http://www.olympics.com/eng/about/programs/index.html?/eng/sports/AR/home.html"> Archery </A>

These instructions could be used in a simple list of sports, or in a table as show below. The list has been changed to run alphabetically across the columns, rather than down, to aid braille readers (which read one line of horizontal text at a time). The colour of the table background and text can be changed to match that of the current graphic. However, those colours may be difficult for some people to read:

Archery	Athletics	Badminton
Baseball	Basketball	Boxing
Canoe/Kayak Slalom	Canoe/Kayak Sprint	Cycling: Mountain Bike
Cycling: Road	Cycling: Track	Diving
Equestrian	Fencing	Football
Gymnastics: Artistic	Gymnastics: Rhythmic	Gymnastics: Trampoline
Handball	Hockey	Judo
Modern Pentathlon	Rowing	Sailing
Shooting	Softball	Swimming
Synchronized Swimming	Table Tennis	Taekwondo
Tennis	Triathlon	Beach Volleyball
Volleyball Indoor	Water Polo	Weightlifting
Wrestling

PS: This document was created 9 August 2000. The SOCOG Sydney 2000 Olympic Web site appears to have been removed some time after the games and replaced with a redirection to the official sites of the International Olympic Committee at http://www.olympics.com/. Fortunately the National Library of Australia has copies of the site in its PANDORA Archive, as at 18 May 2000 and and 11 Jan. 2000. Those copies are linked to references to the web site in this document.

For background see: Olympic Failure: A Case for Making the Web Accessible, prepared for INET 2001: Internet Society Conference, 8 June 2001, Stockholm.

Tom Worthington
14 May 2001