BBC Publishes Something Really Stupid

Thank god my license is paying for quality journalism like this

Patrick,
I totally disagree with your views about the BBC’s intentions. Yes, they were damn stupid to include the wrong price comparison websites (although this could be down to other reasons). But I applaud the BBC – more people need to be thinking about accessibility, and you would know for SEO reasons amongst others.

Alternatively it suggests that communication to those less able is difficult! Perhaps they were given a list over the phone and asked to find it on the internet.
I do agree that it undermines the whole message – what a shame because if they had gone to the right sites, it would have been quite interesting.
I try not to put people down for moving in the right direction!

George, while it’s good that the BBC is highlighting accessibility issues, I think there’s something very basically wrong with what they’ve done. If I did a site audit on a client website, and then realised that I’d moronically (somehow) done a site audit on what is obviously the wrong site, I wouldn’t then send them the site audit. Or be in business.

I’m actually not entirely sure how to take this. In some way it indicates the difficulties a visually impaired user would have knowing whether they had visited the correct site or not.

For us seasoned web-users it is blindingly obvious that she’s on a spam site, but if you can’t see well then it is a lot harder to know.

Clearly some mistakes were made here – namely the editor didn’t check whether the correct sites had been tested – and it would have been significantly more useful to have tested confused.com and gocompare.com, however, the point stands that the lady doing the test was unable to tell the difference between the websites.

Thanks Rick, unfortunately there’s no easy fix to the problem as there is no reliable way to genuinely highlight whether a page is the correct source or not. We can see it from the screen, but if you’re visually impaired, or not particularly web-savvy (and there are plenty of these people using the web!) then it’s difficult to know.

Maybe something like Google’s PageRank could give an indication, but it needs to be turned into a form which is trusted and consumer in nature.

Maybe, a plug-in called “trusted” which just reports back the PR of a site after converting into bands like “Trusted, “Unsure”, “Not trusted”, etc. But the you have the problem of marketing to un-web-savvy people and gaining their trust – which is difficult…

Yep – this seems like the perfect place to add it.

Frankly I can just see the “head in hands” moment when you were viewing that video for the first time!

Confuse.com is just a parked domain. Sometimes journalists have no idea what are they talking about.

Hey Patrick,
I am absolutely in favor of your thoughts against BBC’s stupidity. I just hate those people who pretend to have great knowledge of internet but actually don’t have that knowledge.
I am not directly against BBC. Its one of my favorite news channels. I am against that story publisher. I think BBC is very responsible and will take appropriate action.
Congratulations Patrick for the great post.

Regards
Laksh
http://makemoneyonline-withme.blogspot.com/

Wow, it’s good to know that we have such good quality journalism out there.

What I don’t get is why is there insurance ads on http://CoNfuSe.com, I think confuse.com domain name is confusing enough, they should just put a confusing blog, it would make a lot of money.