I first used the net at university, and back then there was no such thing as Internet Explorer. You still had to pay for Netscape Navigator, but that really didn’t matter as connections were so slow that they made graphical pages practically useless. Instead we used Lynx, the text-based browser, often running on Vax terminals rather than stand-alone PCs.

Lynx is still popular - especially among those with a visual impairment who use it with screen readers. So, coming across a copy at lunchtime I thought I’d browse the front pages of a few sites to see how they faired. The principles of good site design disctate that whatever works in Explorer or Navigator should work equally well in a text-based browser, and European regulations could soon see companies that do not make their sites accessible to the visually impaired fined.

So, kicking off with the BBC News site, we get this:

The whole of the first page is taken up by menus, forcing users to cycle through them all until they get to the one that they want, and that’s before they even get to read any news.

It does far better than the Odeon Cinemas site for online bookings and film information:

I have trouble using this in anything other than Internet Explorer so was not in the least surprised to see that in Lynx you got just six lines of text. They aren’t even links, so all you can do on the site is read these words and then leave. Very poor.

My old university did a better job:

Its front page renders as a series of common sense options leading to the most commonly used parts of a university site and would be a good starting point for prospective students who are forced to run text-based browsers.

The offering from Channel 4 was rather disappointing, though:

Some of the images were just labelled up as ‘ADVERTISEMENT’ and the meaty content of the page was split up by a lot of [spacer] tags. Clearly Channel 4’s designers are friends of the 1px Gif.

The Eurostar site was a dead loss:

That screen shot shows the completed page. It appears blank, having completely foxed the browser. Time for the visually impaired to get on the phone.

After all that I was a bit worried what my site would look like. It uses a fair amount of images and there is some javascript going on in the background making things happen. So, with a sense of trepidation I typed it in and was pleasantly surprised by the results. It renders well, with the content right up there at the top and all of the links and menu options in place below.

Today I am smiling.

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