Accessible Irony

Advertisement for accessibletoronto.com above Sparkling Bubbles on Dundas Street East. Photo by Joe Clark.

It's hard to know where to start in our analysis of this ad for the website accessibletoronto.com, found above Sparkling Bubbles on Dundas Street East by local Web accessibility expert/TTC enthusiast Joe Clark. Needless to say, placing your wheelchair-emblazoned logo above a restaurant without a wheelchair ramp is sending mixed signals at best. The fact that the second floor of the building is boarded up—inaccessible to the world, you might call it—doesn't help. To top it off, the website in question is not actually accessible, at least to visually impaired visitors using screen-reading software that requires alt text, an HTML attribute that helps such programs properly interpret images.

Fortunately, some of accessibletoronto.com's more painful ironies may be short lived. Chris Karatsoreos, the company's project director, told Torontoist yesterday that the site is still under construction and will soon be accessible to all users. He also plans to replace the ad above Sparkling Bubbles with one large enough to cover the boarded-up windows. Slightly beside the point, perhaps, but a move in the right direction nonetheless. Now if only they would do something about all that placeholder text.