JavaWoman considers…

A fast-flying long-bodied predatory insect of the order Odonata, suborder Anisoptera. Valued by humans for their ability to spot and hunt down harmful bugs from great distances

For a while now, Opera has had a teaser page up for Opera Dragonfly. Last I looked, it had nothing but a nice image, and a dictionary definition for Dragonfly that is obviously intended to create some buzz — successfully so, since it triggered a thread on the My Opera Community forums, with a lot of speculation, and Opera Watch asking What is Opera Dragonfly? referring to an equally teasing blog post by David Storey. Opera, meanwhile, still ain't telling.

Now I'm not the type to check such a teaser page every day, but this morning I discovered the Opera Dragonfly page has acquired a form where you can subscribe for an e-mail list to receive news about Dragonfly and other upcoming Opera products — if you don't have any visual impairments that is.

What really bugs me is that this sign-up form is totally inaccessible:

• no label tags for any of the input fields
• JavaScript-controlled "prompts" inside the fields, that confusingly stay as part of the content on focus when JavaScript is not active; even when JavaScript is enabled, that text is not a substitute for label tags
• text/prompt color inside the entry fields has way too little contrast with the background
• text in all text fields is confusingly right-aligned
• a visual (image) Captcha to reliably keep out anyone who needs a screen reader, without any alternative
• the image used for the submit button doesn't have an alt attribute (required)

The WAVE toolbar flags many of the problems in the form

That's really shocking. Are new Opera products not intended to be accessible? If they are, why are they excluding a good part of their target audience?

Generally Opera is quite standards-savvy and My Opera provides a framework that is close to completely accessible (just a few minor things to fix, really) - one of the major reasons why I chose to set up a photo album and blog here. For anonymous comments we even get textual Captchas that are accessible. So some people within Opera at least know how to do accessibility.

This subscription form may look "cool" to those of us who are blindless but it isn't cool to be inaccessible! Whoever designed this form is apparently totally ignorant of even the basics of accessibility, or plain doesn't care.

Let's see... there's a comment at the end of the page:

<!--
  -* Generated by mod-xslt 1.3.9; http://www.mod-xslt2.com/
  -* Copyright (C) 2002,2003 Carlo Contavalli - <ccontavalli at masobit.net>
  -* derived from work by Philipp Dunkel and others (http://www.mod-xslt2.com/main/credits.xml)
  -* Thanks to http://www.masobit.net/ for paying me while working on mod-xslt
  -* and for providing resources to the project. -->

That would mean that either the XML source Opera uses is missing the necessary accessibility features to be translated into an accessible form by mod-xslt2, or the module itself isn't capable of producing accessible forms - or both.

There really is no need for a secure form to be inaccessible, and Opera knows it, as evidenced by the blog comment forms. So how did this one get past QA at Opera??

Tagged: accessibility, Opera, Dragonfly