Roberto Scano has an excellant article looking back at web developement and accessibility: A Journey Through Accessibility by Roberto Scano.
Mar
26
This has come up often lately and I tire of re-writing it every time so for those who may wish to ask about this in the future, here is why they are useless.
You can make the image a background, makes it a [b]little[/b] harder to get, even add a same sized clear gif over it that would get grabbed by newbies… but for Pros, it will not stop them.
- All images on a site are downloaded to the temp folder on the HD by default. Just have to pull the images from there.
- I can make a screen capture of your page and trim the image out
- I can download the page to my HD and grap the image
- I can download the whole site to my HD and grab the image
- I can use IE6 which offers a image tool bar that bypasses such scripts
- I can use Firefox with an extension that gives me a toolbar that bypasses such scripts
- I can turn off JavaScript so that your script does not work
- I can look at your source code to see the path and image name and place that tin the address bar to access the image directly without loading your script.
- I can use one of the programs out there to download your site and images for off line browsing and get the images that way.
- Disabling right clicks can make the browser unusable for some people with disabilities. Some people like me have very useful tools tied into our right click and you have no right to mess with it.
- Those with Dial-up may wish to / need to use right click to show a image itself due to slow loading times. (thanks Billy)
- Users can block right-click scripts from within Firefox (see below, thanks Tim)
Using such scripts only calls me a thief. You interfere with the workings of my browser and my work flow. You have no right to mess with my browser so I will never go to your site again and I will tell people not to go there as you have no respect for others. Generally speaking you will just piss people off with such scripts.
There is no way to protect images on the internet, either live with it or do not put them online. Even using a password only blocks some people form grabbing the images, those with access can still steal them.
Mar
6
The folks at “A List Apart” have published a test they did to see how JavaScript really interacts with assistive technology.
A few points:
- Vanilla - by this they mean the plain browser without any add on assistive Technology
- JAWS is the most widely spread screenreader, followed I think by Connect Outloud
- Note how many No you will find in the first test. This is why I say JS is to much a risk for a web site when other languages can do things better.
I was surprised by how much support is there for forms, Yes falling not to far from No support. However many of those No’s are very important indeed. - Keep in mind these are Browser-based screenreaders. It is a software package that sits on a standard browser piggyback. This way much of what the browser does understand from the JS, it feeds the screenreader the finished product. Some screenreaders, especially some older models are text based and do not support JS at all.
- Worth noting is that Firefox is included with three screenreaders. 1 year ago screenreaders only worked with IE, so Firefox is putting the pressure on IE in this market as well.