I’m just trying to acquire drivers for someone’s 5570z notebook.
Strike one: the site is in flash. There’s no need for flash for that. God help anyone with disabilities such as blindness.
Strike two: it’s incredibly slow and unresponsive.
Strike three: since it’s in flash I can’t copy the links to the drivers and put them in getright. This means I can’t schedule them so they don’t all happen at once unless I babysit the computer for the next 6 hours. (on a slow 10 KB down cell connection so this is a big deal)
Strike four: it don’t have ANY drivers listed for the 5570z, has a big mess of them for the 5570 though so hoping the parts match up to the z. Which brings us to:
Strike five: the drivers are all unsorted. The XP and vista drivers are all mixed togather. Some of them aren’t even labeled for which os they go too or exactly what part they belong to. For example for wireless there’s a braodcom driver, an atheros driver, and a mysteriously vague “wireless” wireless driver.
strike six: no contact page. My guess is I’m not the first to find the site frustrating and want to complain, as well as offer some services for html coding and website design since they’re obviously in need of competent help.
strike seven: just to reiterate… Why flash??? The list box it’s doing could easily be done with javascript, and html. Then instead of dumping them all out unsorted and unlabeled in the last edit box it could spit out a page with them listed on it. Just like how decent uncraptacular companies do it.
Because in the final instance, a Javascript/HTML page will still be outputting bog standard HTML, which can be read by whatever accessibility software a user has. On the other hand, because Flash pages are just one big embedded software object, with all the data tied up in that in various arcane ways, it’s exceedingly rare for page readers to be able to get access to the basic page elements in order to describe them. Javascript can cause problems, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle.
For example, for users with less severe visual impairment, some accessibility technologies just strip off all the HTML style information from pages, and apply high-contrast stylesheets (looking something like this) in its place. This is impossible with flash pages, which for all intents and purposes when they get to the browser are no more manipulable than a fixed image. So either the original website designer makes an accessible version (which you can pretty much guarantee someone who writes a whole site in Flash won’t), or you’re screwed.
Reading the screen’s only half the problem. You also have to be able to interact with it without using a mouse, and I don’t think that embedded flash offers that capability.
Because doing that puts the burden of accesibility onto the user, not the site. Furthermore, OCR would be costly, and a total pain in the ass, and much of Flash-based design isn’t OCR-ready, and Flash doesn’t readily give up its URLs. Who’s going to pay for developing it?
There are perfectly good WC3 accessibility guidelines; currently Flash sites ignore them. Supposedly, versions 8 and 9 of Flash have W3C-compatible accessibility components, though I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s worked with them.
