Accessibility of disability related Web sites

I am active in the “Accessible Community” project in Petah Tikva.
This project is part of an effort made in several Israeli cities to improve the quality of life experienced by people with disabilities.

Today there was a meeting of representatives of the “Accessible Community” project from several cities. Among other things, two Web sites were announced:

  1. http://www.kn1.org.il/
  2. http://www.matnachim.org.il/

Of course, I asked about accessibility of those Web sites to non-IE browsers. Both announcers of the Web sites claimed that their Web sites are accessible to everyone.

After returning home, I surfed into those Web sites using Mozilla. I found that the first Web site has a problem of text layout, which causes some frames to overlap. The links, which I checked, did work. With the second Web site I saw no problems in my limited testing. I cannot finish this journal entry without an amusing anecdote. I schlepped a woman, who walks on crutches, to the meeting and back to her home. The woman is very active in the campaign against non-disabled people parking at spaces reserved to people with disabilities. Near her home there is a parking reserved for the car of another disabled person, and it was empty when I arrived there. I stopped my car in the reserved parking place to let the woman go out and then exclaimed “Oh, I am occupying a disabled parking!”. She LOL and almost ROTFLed.

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.