UK government AA accessibility recommendations spell trouble for CMS vendors
Posted by Dan Eastwell
This interesting article covering UK government proposals to make WCAG AA standard mandatory for .gov.uk websites corresponds to my earlier qualms concerning making government websites AA complient.
I'm now coming round to the opinion that at least government websites should cover AA compatibility.
Having worked on fairly non-compliant, inaccessible websites, or websites where 'buy the book' accessibility is adhered to ('it validates so it must be accessible'), I think it's worth going through a minimal level of accessibility on any site (does it work with a keyboard only, for example).
What Bruce Lawson's WaSP article highlighted are a couple of main points:
- Firstly, CMS generated sites need to ensure that all output content validates
- and that the administration systems themselves for CMSs need to be accessible
Valid output HTML
What this means practially is that if a rogue unencoded ampersand can invalidate a page of code, then letting non-expert staff add raw HTML into managed content systems can mean running the risk of losing a site it's .gov.uk domain name.
A positive side effect of this possible legislation might well be a great rise in the use of WYSIWYM content adding tools, rather that allowing staff to add their own code (not least, from a business point of view, as WYSIWYG and HTML-editable CMSs risk breaking site branding).
Accessible admin systems
This may well be an article in itself, but one of my main bugbears is that admin systems for building and maintaining sites by non-technical staff needs to be as, if not more, usable and accessible as the main site itself.
Generally admin systems are, at worst, an afterthought, or at best, an unusable off-the-shelf system. Adding, updating and deleting content on a website necessarily requires a much larger site that the site itself (in terms of page templates). They require just as much user experience design, just as much accessibility design and just as much care and attention.
Hopefully this recommendation, if it ever becomes law, will provide the kick up the backside necessary to site commissioners, and site design and build agencies to push for the time needed to build usable and accessible administration systems as thoroughly thought through as their main sites.
