Stupidly, WordPress.com have introduced a new feature: Snap Preview.

Now, if you’ve ever come across this particular piece of JavaScript dirge, you’ll know that Snap takes a screenshot of any hyperlink destination and displays a preview to the visitor whenever they hover over the link.

I cannot think of a more pointless plugin for a website.

Anyway, Lorelle has voiced her opinion about the evils of Snap - it’s irritating, unexpected behaviour, causes additional loading time on a page and goes against accessibility best practices. In fact, she cites some specific cases where Snap has caused problems for vision and movement impaired visitors:

One nearly blind friend told me of her horrible first encounter with the Snap Preview. She uses her mouse to track what she is reading, moving it along with every word she slowly reads. She refuses to be “read to” by the Internet, wanting to use her eyes to the very last moment she can. When her mouse moved over the link, it became a graphic. Because it was out of her small circle of vision, when she got to it, she thought it was a graphic so scrolled down to the next line to read, thinking the text would wrap around the image as usual. It didn’t. She moved away before seeing the pop-up window go away and was totally lost in the content and confused. She went back up and experienced the same thing again.

I cannot think of a single reason to run the Snap plugin on a website. It doesn’t offer visitors any real advantage and is more likely to be an irritant than a help. I’m just glad other people feel the same way.

Time for Snap to go!

What’s the point of an accessibility statement? If you’re reading one, you’ve almost certainly proven that the website is ‘accessible’ enough to navigate to that page!

Roger Johansson’s latest article discusses the provision and content of accessibility statements. In my experience, accessibility statements are a promotional item, a means of saying “We’ve ticked that box. Accessibility’s in the bag.”

Roger points to Standards Schmandards’ alternative: a Site Help page. This seems like a more acceptable solution - more user-centric than a ’statement’, site help would be more about informing and educating visitors than proving you’ve met some robot’s interpretation of accessibility.

On my own websites, the furthest I’ve gone in creating a special ‘accessible’ arrangement is to create hidden ‘Jump to Content’ links at the very top of each page. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a statement unless the audience specifically requires it.

Why not create an accessibility statement, then track the number of hits that page receives over time. Hell, create a ‘Site Help’ page while you’re at it and see which one is more popular.

Something which Roger omits in his post is real world investigation into whether this information is necessary at all. For a mainstream or corporate website, it might be helpful to ask visitors their opinion, either through questionnaires or focus groups. Something tells me that most disadvantaged users will already have the tools they require to access a website, while the majority of users won’t know or care about your accessibility statement.