Dating sites not such a hot date
- 12 Feb 07, 2:18 PM
Valentine's Day is just around the corner (more's the pity), and here on Ouch we've not only got our own Disability Bitch (she's scary!) giving us her Anti-Valentine Quiz, but also Tom Shakespeare writing about looking for love on the personal ads pages. Thing is, if the latest report from the technology folks over at is anything to go by, disabled people will be lucky to find love online, because the .
Worse still, if dating websites that are aimed specifically at disabled people are the kind of thing that, er, float your boat, you're not in for much luck either. Shockingly, of the four they tested, only one - - gained a minimum three star accessibility rating.
It all makes for interesting, if disappointing, reading. Check out the on AbilityNet's site. As for Monkey - well, if dating sites are really that inaccessible, I guess I'll have to go back to putting my "looking for lurve" ads in the newsagent's window. Sigh.
Comments
What's up with them implying that the only way for disabled people to *make friends* (or more) online is through a dating service? I agree that they should be accessible, but it's not like we're incapable of gaining friends (nearby or otherwise) and possibly letting that grow into a romantic partnership. I've certainly made plenty of friends (and one long-term partner) that way, as have many of my friends. None of us ever had much success with dating services, online or otherwise.
Second, a tiny rant... The definition of inaccessibility is one that irks me quite a bit. As commented in the article, it is generally used to mean that it's not compatible with speech recognition and/or a screen reader -- but is never seems to encompass people with neurological difficulty dealing with certain colors, color combinations, or visual recognition difficulties.
For example, I am guessing that Ouch! is considered "accessible" from the typical definition... But as an Autistic with the kind of visual disability common to my kind, I find it awful -- bright red hurts my eyes and kind of makes the whole screen flash/vibrate, blue-on-red looks like it's either floating or recessed or both, yellow-on-maroon does similar, and the whole mess causes the white text to be overrun with internal "halo" effects to the point that it's extremely hard for my brain to translate into anything of meaning! (Based on how the text is wrapping bizarrely, I am guessing you also have it set so the font is quite tiny, which would have made the text issues even worse.)
Normally I just read all of the Ouch! articles from my RSS extension in Firefox, since it allows me to change colors to suit my needs... But I wanted to comment on the "accessible" concept, so I'm stuck here squinting as if I were trying to stare at the sun, and starting to feel the inevitable migraine that this kind of design causes me. :-p
Yes, I could tell Firefox to force my chosen colors on every site -- but I don't want to completely lose all of the designs, background images, or other features, either. I grabbed an extension for Firefox that lets me "clean" the page of color elements...but oops, it is set to black text on a bright white background, which is only slightly better. (I can handle most colors, really. It's just that ones that have high contrast, like red/blue or black/white, often cause me problems.)
I can-and-will rewrite the extension, but thing is, I shouldn't *have* to do that in order to comfortably read an "accessible" website. The needs of people with my disability should be included, too. :-/
I'm actually writing my dissertation at the moment and it's about technology for people with autism and asperger syndrome... I'd be really interested to hear anyone elses thoughts on the issue of web accessibility, what are the main problems that you have with this as a person with autism or asperger? Do you feel left out of the issue of web accessibility (as so often it's focussed on the visually impaired)? What improvements would you like to see on 'accessible' websites that would help someone with autism in particular? Any thoughts, because other than Moggy I haven't seen any other posts on technology issues from people with autism.