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Amazon’s Inaccessible Election Map

Today’s Seattle times has an article talking about how Amazon has created a map illustrating the political leaning of a state based on book book purchases from this state. I mention this heare because after trying the page, it could serve as a model of how to make an inaccessible web page. It seems like every rule about basic web accessibility was ignored.

 

Unable to see pictures, well you are out of luck. Need info conveyed with something other than color. To bad, so sad.

 

On Tuesday, the Seattle-based retailer introduced an interactive map of the U.S. showing which states are “red” or “blue” based on their online book purchases.

For now, 36 states are pink or red. Six are blue. And eight, including Washington and Oregon, are purple, meaning residents are virtually split in their political book purchases between Republican and Democratic viewpoints.

 

The map, available at http://www.amazon.com/election2008, and updated daily, is based on sales of books with a political perspective, as identified in promotional material and customer classifications.

 

Take a browse and try and determine anything meaningful from this page if you are using a screen reader. Even the book titles from the most popular categories seem to be missing meaningful text. You can read fun links named things like I/518RvzD1MOL._AA110_.

 

I’ve sent feedback to Amazon but if anyone has real contacts beyond feedback links on web pages it would be good to let Amazon know.

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