How’s your squash game? Let’s work on that at www.guide-to-squash.org. Go ahead and open up the page. For the 90 percent of you who have JavaScript enabled, you won’t even notice the first problem, but for the 10 percent who don’t, it’s readily apparent. Without JavaScript enabled, this is what you get:

A blank screen. There actually is text on the page, but because they assumed no one would be seeing it, they made it the same color as the page background. When you highlight the text, you find that it is indeed a link—back to this same page. The only way for someone with JavaScript disabled to actually enter the web page is to open the page’s source code, wade through the JavaScript redirect, copy the page filename, and paste it into his or her browser. That’s the equivalent of inviting your friend over for dinner, locking your door, and hiding the key somewhere in the front yard.

I should also point out that the main reason people turn off JavaScript in the first place is because of JavaScript redirects. Some of the more dubious web sites on the Internet fill a page with keywords and other content to get ranked in search engines. Once the user clicks the link, the page uses JavaScript to redirect the user to another page—usually a page that’s selling some sort of dubious product or service. For this reason, sites that use JavaScript redirects are often banned from search engines altogether. If a JavaScript-disabled user opened up the source code and saw what was going on, he or she would probably hit back on the browser rather quickly.

Once (or if) you get to the real home page, it doesn’t look so bad. But we have a slight problem: For users with images turned off (I’m not sure on the stat, but those people are out there) or users with visual disabilities (approximately 4.7 million in the U.S. alone), there’s nothing tying the descriptions on the left to the links on the right. What’s worse, the links on the right disappear entirely for those people. Without images, the only links you get are “Intermediate drill section,” “Gaultier v Beachill in World Teams” and “Pamela Nimmo in Amsterdam.” That’s the equivalent of inviting your blind friend over for dinner and hiding the door.

That problem actually gets worse when you go a little further. Click the top link. (I can’t read what it says because my images are turned off.) The main navigation is in Flash (completely invisible to this group, and remember that there are still a few people without Flash). For Internet Explorer users, a Flash file has to be clicked on before it can be used, so you don’t even really know that it’s a nav bar until you activate it. There’s a description of each link—but the links themselves are tiny images with no alt text. Even with images turned on, that’s not the most intuitive interface. It’s the equivalent of telling your friend what you’re making for dinner, but never actually telling him that he’s invited.

This site may be able to get away with some of this as blind people and people who turn off their JavaScript (nerds) probably don’t play a lot of squash, but these are bad design principles. Looks can be deceiving, and the flashiest sites can sometimes be the worst for usability and accessibility. And remember, web sites are considered public accommodations and must therefore be accessible to those with disabilities by way of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. It’s not just something web designers yell about. It’s the law. Make sure whoever is designing your web site takes these things into consideration in addition to aesthetic concerns, or your web site might get featured in one of my blog posts. That’s the equivalent of me inviting you over for dinner and then laughing at you.