- Disable images in the browser. Can you understand the page?
This one's hardly gonna be a challenge at all. Or at least that's what I thought to myself. Except it was harder than it first appeared. The first thing that I decided to was look at the above link without the images on and see how that appeared. Actually did pretty well.
The next thing I decided to do was look at Gmail without images. This was not so ideal. So it turns out that apparently Gmail uses images for all it's labels. Naughty Gmail. Although just navigating around my inbox was not as bad as if I tried to access Drive or my account or go back to the Google homepage because apparently all of those links are, you guessed it, images which don't seem to really have alternative text so you get a little bit lost if you turn the images off period. You pretty much don’t get warned what you’ve lost.
OK let’s test Google a little bit more, how does Blogger cope? Actually the answer to this seems to be that it does ok. Then just to make things more exciting I decided to type this up as I went along. Of course I'm yet again trying to do one of these one-handed though so I decided to go all out accessibility and try and use speech to text. Blogger doesn't seem to support speech to text and to be honest I'm not that surprised or really that disappointed. I decided to go a bit hacky and type in Google Docs and copy and paste. Google Docs does have speech to text, but saying his perfect would maybe be over stating it. I have ended up going through and editing this some typing these are acting it as I go along so you might find that there's a couple of things that don't make perfect sense that all adds to the accessibility experience and hopefully you'll be able to identify which things are poor accessibility tools which things are we just not being able to use computers properly. Whilst using the speech to text there were a couple of I wasn't sure how to do so I used the question mark button brought up to help. That was great until I tried to get rid of it . Turns out the X button is an image so I couldn't find it .A little bit of clicking about the area I guessed it would be in solved the problem but it was an interesting unexpected issue which really made things harder.
So let's do a couple of other popular websites with the images turned off and see how they fare.
First stop the BBC homepage. Actually not too bad. With the exception of the BBC blocks not being visible or having alternative text, at a rough glance it feels as if you could probably navigate this page quite happily.
Ok next up was to go look at Facebook and see how that survived without images. I didn't really imagine it was going to be particularly well. So there's no profile pictures and any posts that are simply images leave a bit to be desired. But the main problem really was that without the images I didn't really see the point. It did’t fall over in a heap though.
One last stop at social media to post to Twitter. Actually coped quite well without images. I didn't do an awful lot of with it but it did seem to cook quite well. I suppose this is because it is largely text. I would imagine it would have been even better in the old days before the extended support for anything other than a micro blog post.
So to summarise it's been an interesting little exercise. It's definitely something that's worth doing on websites I’m working on as it really highlights areas where we may have dropped the ball. I found it worthwhile and I suppose that's the most important thing.
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