Bus Eireann webpage takes a step back to 1999

 – posted November 13th, 2006 by Colm McBarron     Comments (5)

Looking for the bus timetable on friday evening brought me to the Bus Éireann website. First thing that struck was some kind of a redesign to the homepage.

A bit of 1999

The new Bus Eireann homepage

Above: the homepage from November 2006

The first thing that strikes is the visuals which are to say the least, poor. The blurry images/icons on the left hand side which get even harder to read as you mouse over them.

And the boxes in the middle with different size headings and stretched out gradients make it look a little too 1999 to me, this coupled with the flash movie of a few pictures of buses and a chunk of white space in the middle, make the redesign look like it’s taken a step back.

The old Bus Éireann homepage taken from a few months back

Above: the homepage from May 2006

In fact the 1999 version of the website (courtesy of the archive.org) actually looks better, from a visual perspective, than the recent redesign

Accessibility

Poor visuals and images can be easily updated, but there’s quite a few major underlying accessibility issues, the first being no alt text on the images on the left, the javascript dropdown menu and the purely javascript based news ticker. What’s even more disturbing is that there’s a hidden message to screenreader users:

Welcome the Bus Éireann website. This site has been developed for both the visually impaired and non visually impaired. If you would like to use the visually impaired version of this site please goto www.buseireann.ie/v i p, or press ALT and I together and then press enter Link for Visually Impaired Version

The website has been developed for visually impaired and non-visually impaired? Thats funny because there actually seems to be 2 separate websites - one standard one, and one high contrast one with slightly different content.

Although using hidden messages for screenreaders can be a good idea, and so can accesskeys, having a completely alternative version of your website just for someone who is visually impaired is probably one of the worst things that you could do.

And as for accesskeys and screenreaders - an article by a Canadian accessibility company outlines that there are only 9 keys that aren’t used by any one of the major screen readers.

From our experience any website who offers a text-only / visual impaired version should really be thinking about a web-standards based redesign using (X)HTML and CSS, where they can allow users to just change a stylesheet rather than load up a completely new website.

A step backwards

It looks very much like a step backwards for the Bus Eireann website, lets hope they return to 2006 sometime soon.

Categories Accessibility, Design, Site reviews

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