Accessible crap advertising

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2004/12/30 22:38 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2004/12/30/344714.aspx

I have been noticing more and more web sites lately that contain an interesting type of ad. Have you seen any of the following?

In each of these you are playing a game where you are given an "easy" task (provided you don't believe that Pamela Anderson is a pop diva, of course!). All you have to do is click in a specific small area of the screen making up a small part of an image that is not in the tab index, has no accelerator, has no other keyboard access, and is thus generally unreachable to people who have accessibility issues and are unable to use the mouse.

I must admit that there is a part of me that gets mad any time I see inaccessible UI. Its unfair, its thoughtless, and it discrimates. It sucks.

I am also forced to admit that there is another, larger part of me that is a little jealous of people who can be spared the stupidity of these ads. Its almost like someone is saying to them "I know you have it tough, so we won't force you to deal with the pop-up hell our company wants to give everyone else on the web dumb enough to click here."

All of that is probably crap -- if the lifeless wingnuts who design these Beelzebub's hors d'oeuvres and serve them up on web sites that are so desperate to have the Internet make some money for them finally that they will pimp for the video game system target practice contests were to recognize that there was a whole crowd of suckers who would give them money, then they'd be packaging up a system to deliver the con to them.

Luckily they do not seem to be all too bright.

# Leons Petrazickis on 30 Dec 2004 11:53 PM:

I suspect that a lot of these ads have you win even if you deliberately try to miss.

# Michael Kaplan on 30 Dec 2004 11:57 PM:

Funny you should mention that!

Of these six, the four "shooting" ones would not take you somewhere if you did not hit them. But as you continue to miss your target starts working harder to get under your click.

# Tanveer Badar on 16 Dec 2007 4:10 AM:

Michael, please help. I couldn't get google translate to translate 'Beelzebub's hors d'oeuvres'. I took three guesses at it.

French to English,

Spanish to English and

Italian to Engligh.

Sadly, none worked.

# Michael S. Kaplan on 16 Dec 2007 11:23 AM:

Both words are English -- a proper name of a high level demon and a noun meaning "pre-meal snack".

In French it would be something like 'Hors d'oeuvres de Beelzebub'? :-)

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