[blindlaw] Inaccessible legal web sites

[Russell J. Thomas, Jr]

Thank you for raising this very important issue.

Let me mention two issues:

First, are the links on the website easy to find with JAWS? This was a
serious problem with the website for the United States District Court for
the Central District of California. (www.cacd.uscourts.gov)   If you hit
"insert 7" and the "j", hoping to find a list of judges, you would not find
it.  To its credit, the Court has modified its site so that now it is very
accessible.  There are 36 links on the site which respond to JAWS commands. 

Second, it would be helpful if all courts within a court system would have
comparable websites so that the information is displayed in the same format
and roughly on the same area of the page.  For example, the website
www.mlb.com is the site for Major League baseball; Each team has its own
website, but each of those websites follows the same format as the mlb.com
site.

I would make the same observation for state court sites.  In California,
each county has its own particular site.  The sites range in quality from
very good to very bad.  It would be helpful if there was a uniform grid used
for all state court websites in a particular state.



Respectfully,

 

Russell J. Thomas, Jr.

THOMAS & ASSOCIATES

Orange County Office                      

2172 Dupont Drive, Suite 203                

Irvine, California 92612                             

T: (949) 752-0101                             

F: (949) 257-4756

M: (949) 466-7238

Beverly Hills Office

9107 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 450

Beverly Hills, California 90210 

T: (310) 461-3561

-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Nightingale, Noel
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 12:36 PM
To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
Subject: [blindlaw] Inaccessible legal web sites

Blindlaw listers:

If you have any information about web sites that are particularly
visited by lawyers, such as courts' web sites, bar association web
sites, legal publishers, and the like, will you send me the web site
address and a brief description of how the site is not accessible?  

I am making this request in connection to an effort to improve the
accessibility of such web sites. 

Thank you.

Noel Nightingale
nnightingale at earthlink.net