A case study of inaccessibility
While innocently researching the IMS Learning Design Information Model specification - (an open standard, of the sort that the IEEE for instance now forces one to pay for, but until recently were mostly freely available on the internet as per standing practise) - one of the most egregious examples of poor content design seen for some time thrust itself into my attention.
One may go to said IMS site, select the spec as an HTML link, and freely read it online, even locally save the document (492 KB html only). But to print that document is a most absurd and inaccessible process.
Forget printing from the HTML - it won't let you, even though one can save the document. One has to return to the home page. Select a link to a download page. Navigate and submit two drop-down form controls to select the general and then specific area required. Then fill in a form with one's details (the usual address, email, phone, shoe size, etc) and again submit. One is then automatically granted permission to download, which arrives as a ZIP file, in this case automatically blocked by the latest version of Internet Explorer. One then overrides the IE security setting, and recieves an 8.14 MB zip file, containing not only the document required, but all the examples and specs that are related (though not in this case required.) The required document is now 2.5 mb of PDF, which, after extracting from the ZIP file, one can then open and print.
To achieve the printing of an open standard document, which one can freely browse in HTML, one needs to navigate 3 forms and several pages and files to recieve a bloated package that is several times larger than the HTML one began with. A massive waste of bandwidth and user's time for the sake of printing the document one began browsing with.
Note to the IMS Consortium: forcing users into a highly inaccessible and complex process for the sake of monitoring the printing of an open standard is very unlikely to assist with the adoption of this standard anytime soon. In fact, based on experience, it is more likely to send users elsewhere. This has been an experience that is very illustrative of the degeneration of the web into proprietary, frequently inaccessible behaviour - and that this has been demonstrated by an organisation that supposedly is furthering the use of the web for e-learning is not reassuring.
Item posted by AutoEditor at 3:09 pm ::
