Usability firm User Vision said that the logo and parts of the promotional movie contravene basic W3C accessibility guidelines. These warn content developers to ‘avoid causing the screen to flicker’.
Charity Epilepsy Action received numerous reports of people having epileptic seizures as a result of viewing the promotional footage. Professor Graham Harding, a leading expert in the field of photosensitive epilepsy, said that the animated footage has failed to meet the Ofcom safety guidelines and should not have been screened. The animated footage has now been removed from the official LOGOC web site.
Chris Rourke, MD at User Vision, claimed the logo also fails on colour contrast guidelines to protect visibility impaired users. He said: “We looked at colours for the text and background colours – they all fail.” W3C guidelines states that ‘foreground and background colour combinations should provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having colour deficits.”
A LOGOC spokesman said: “Any suggestion that the logo has not gone through testing is ridiculous. We consulted RNIB and AbilityNet extensively tested the entire site and logo. The promotional film was created by another agency, and was removed following complaints.”
The logo was designed by leading branding consultancy Wolff Olins to be ‘inclusive’. This was to reflect the first time the logo spans both the Olympic and Paralympic games. This is not the first accessibility issue that the Olympics has faced. In 2000, a blind man successfully took the Sydney Olympics Committee to court, claiming he could not access information on the official web site, built by IBM.
Nearly 45,000 people have so far signed a petition demanding London's 2012 Olympics logo be scrapped.
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