Farewell, Soundsdirty.com?
Yesterday I was writing a presentation about web accessibility to deliver at Southamption University as part of an Opera Education university tour, and decided to include an example of a site that was a business for disabled people.
The example I used was of soundsdirty.com, a website full of erotic mp3s for the visually impaired. (Previous safe-for-work write-up.)
They had movies with subtitles and audio description. They had an excellent visual design statement:
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user specified “text size” option in visual browsers. For a detailed overview of how to change font in your browsers please visit the ‘customize site’ link (access key U)
If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets at all, the content of each page is still readable. The site has the ability to quickly change the font and background color to a high contrast black and white page layout. This feature is recommended for partially sighted, dyslexic and color blind users.
They had the most interesting access keys I’ve ever seen:
- Access key E – Erotic Stories
- Access key F – XXX Films
- Access key X – Sex Sounds
- Access key M – Member Stories
- Access key D – Doctor Erotica
And even a panic button:
The site contains a ‘Blank out link’ (access key Q). This feature jumps to a blank page and will stop all assistive technologies. This feature can be useful if you need to get off the site quickly!
And now the domain name goes to one of those stupid “this domain has been acquired for a customer” placeholders.
I really hope it hasn’t gone .. well, tits up, as it was a good and memorable example of web accessibility. And it gave me the opportunity to title a slide “sounds dirty, code’s clean”.
4 Responses to “ Farewell, Soundsdirty.com? ”
Never mind Bruce, as I recall, you’ve got an *ahem* red-hot domain you could use for that purpose if they’ve lost the original, eh?
dyslexia is not that debiliating but it is somewhat limiting to the kind of job that you can get’:-
I was one of the team involved with Soundsdirty.com. It was an amazing idea and I just wish we could have carried it on going. Unfortuantley however it consumed a huge amount of time (we also had other jobs) and we didn’t have the money to publicise it the masses!
Ah yes, fond memories of this site; we did some testing for them when I was working at RNIB…