New York Times touts accessibility upgrades

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Wednesday, 25 June 2014 17:02pm

The New York Times has announced that it has made accessibility improvements to its new site following the introduction of inaccessible features in a major updating of NYTimes.com earlier this year.

In a blog post on the update, the Times stated that the January overhaul of the site had inadvertently removed an accessibility workaround on the site.

“Before the article redesign, most of our assistive technology users went to our print preview version, which contained only the article text, to avoid having their screen readers interrupted by content outside of the flow of the article,” the post reads.

“By removing the print preview feature (the redesign allowed us to leverage the print capabilities of modern browsers to improve the print experience without a separate view), we inadvertently removed this common workaround.”

The Times subsequently introduced new accessibility features including:

  • Creating ‘skip’ links to bring users directly to content, text and navigation
  • Adding a site index to our article pages
  • Adding focus to modal windows
  • Introducing a series of labels for elements

According to the post, the Times will continue to improve the experience on the site for its assistive technology users.

You can find out current information on the state of the accessibility of major news organisations In Australia by visiting Fairfax’s accessibility page, News Limited’s accessibility page and the ABC’s accessibility page.


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