Yelp is one of the more popular web sites for restaurant reviews. I’ve recently started using it as one of my research tools when deciding where to dine.
I’m also a big fan of giving back to the information community on the web. My philosophy is that if you find the info on sites like Yelp of value, you should contribute by sharing your experiences.
Recently I wanted to write a review for a restaurant and started by trying to select the star rating. Sadly web site construction here leaves these rating selections very inaccessible to keyboard and screen reader users. Hint, most things that say “roll your mouse over” are a good sign that there’s likely to be an accessibility challenge unless more effort is made to make such a construction accessible. Yelp doesn’t appear to have made this effort.
I recognize that even today the vast majority of folks creating web sites do not know about accessibility. I’ve left the folks at Yelp feedback about the issue and suggestions on how to correct it. I’ll consider my first attempt to write a review the appetizer for using the web site and hope with feedback and action from Yelp the sour taste I have today can be replaced with something more palatable and accessible.
For those so inclined, feedback for the folks at Yelp can be left on their contact page.
Hello Kelly,
Think this is one those situations where Yelp is getting bigger and bigger, thus having more problems based on it’s popularity.
Overall, I think there will be a “war” going on amongst all these local listing websites. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, City Search, Merchant Circle, Local.com and 60 others that we have found. All of them looking for the consumer to come to them an post their experiences.
For the local business and small business this will become quite the nightmare to maintain and manage local listings at various local listing websites.
As you can imagine a solution already exists for the local and small business. At KillerStartUps a company was recently reviewed providing Local Business Listing Management servers for local and small businesses. You can read up on KillerStartUps perspective of this at:
http://www.killerstartups.com/Search/smartfindslocallisting-com-be-found-online
Although, this will be a time consuming effort for the local and small business to manage their local business listing at multiple websites, this is the first time that the Internet is actually helping the local and small business. Hopefully, this business group can be early adopters for a change and embrace the technology so they can benefit sooner rather than later.
Great discussion here. Thanks.
As the years since accessibility guidelines were first published grow into decades, I grow increasingly cynical. Most web sites are made with DreamWeaver or some other authoring tool, why can’t Adobe et al turn on accessibility checking by default and pester the authors into universal access? Because most accessibility issues can be solved by typing a simple text string, I think the web hackers will do it as they are not trying to discriminate but, rather, are uninformed.