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My experience with CDAC website

September 23, 2011
by Bhavesh Patel No Comments
Filed under: Accessibility

Before writing my experience with the website, let me briefly tell you what the website is about.

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) External Website is the premier R&D organization of the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT) for carrying out R&D in IT, Electronics and associated areas.

The website offers various open source software’s. This is a multi lingual site. It also offers careers, educational training etc.

As I went thru the website, they have provided the website to be viewed in different colors, with different font size for low vision users. However, no luck for screen reader users at this time, as this site seems to be difficult to get all the information.

The home page is the simplest page to give the title, and I was shocked to not hear the title when I opened it. I could hear the page address instead of title.

No headings were defined at least for the pages I visited. So many layout tables were used, causing me to hear table with X columns and Y rows, which was problematic. No method was provided for the screen reader users to quickly jump to main content. Many informative images had the absence of alternative text. Alternate text provides the information conveyed through images to the users in the form of text. Alternate text is helpful for users with visual disabilities, learning disabilities, users browsing with text browsers etc to understand the information conveyed using images.

I did not find any labeled form field. Labeling form field helps a screen reader user to know what information should be input in the field. For e.g., first name. Some non-descriptive links and identical links such as “more” were used. Link text should be unique and descriptive of its target. Screen reader users often access links in a list format. While doing so, only the text of the link (“link text”) is read out by a screen reader and not the surrounding text. As a result, it is important that link text is descriptive of its target when read out of context.

Screen reader users get confused with the links within the page that are not descriptive when read out of context, since they access links in the form of a list. When the users with visual impairment go thru the various tabs, the content is automatically updated, and they have no clue of what content is changing.

They even went to the extent of using the dropdown menus, which again were not being accessed by the screen reader users. The audio/video buttons such as pause, stop etc. were not labeled, and therefore I couldn’t make use of them. I landed on a block of text on the home page, which was written in a different language. Since it was not programmatically coded, the screen readers couldn’t identify it. Some images were given inappropriate alternative text, such as “partition 1”, which was not relevant.

No luck with the people with hearing impairment, since captions were missing for the audio and videos.

At this point in time, I would give 1 point out of 5 to this website, since many things have to be worked on.