Posted by Dan Eastwell
Sun, 04 Nov 2007 22:24:00 GMT
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.
Posted in CSS, XHTML, Accessibility, The Web | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Fri, 01 Dec 2006 11:10:00 GMT
"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ensure that any website launched by the government complies with accessibility standards (WCAG AA at least):"
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/govaccessibility/
Sounds worthwhile, doesn't it? I, however, won't be signing it. It's all well intentioned, but in general, I'd say the following:
If the government followed that petition up and government sites were legally obliged to conform to WCAG AA accessibility, you'd end up with problems for any government site that you launched that involved legacy code. The re-development overheads could be enormous on sites that were too large, too complex or too costly to get up to standard.
More than that, you'd be setting a legal, rather than procedural, status on the WCAG. That would mean that anyone could take what are essentially guidelines, not procedures, and apply them as law to your code, I would have thought.
It sets a dangerous precedent for converting guidelines to normative regulations. See my earlier thoughts on this matter (http://www.thoughtballoon.co.uk/blog/articles/2006/06/21/the-problem-with-validation )
Stick with the DDA's what I say. A general law is a much neater idea than a specific set of guidelines on what is a very fast moving field.
Posted in Accessibility | 8 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:19:00 GMT
Last Thursday, I went to the BBC Innovation Labs introductory talks, in Hove. The intention of the day was to give prospective pitches to the BBC the information they'd need to pitch. Ultimately, the best formal pitches would be picked to go on a 'retreat' to 'brainstorm' ideas which would hopefully be realised on BBC websites, mobile phones, iTV, etc.
Read more...
Posted in Interface Development, Accessibility | Tags BBC, business, ideas, innovation, pitch | no comments | 1 trackback
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Tue, 04 Jul 2006 18:17:00 GMT
Another post in what is becoming a series concerning how us designers and developers have forgotten what it’s like being hampered by either older or lower spec technology or a lack of computer use experience.
I’m posting this in a wifi enabled café, but the connection we have at our rented place is dial-up on a fairly old PC. It's an extremely frustrating experience trying to view pages at a download speed of 40kbps.
It’s another experience to bear in mind when developing, and being aware that even though broadband use in the UK is rising that there still remains approximately 40% of users who don’t use broadband. And that’s according to a site devoted to promoting investment in the UK.
It might be worth 'investing' in slow machine, with a throttled connection, in order to understand the sense of doom you feel when you realise that you have to open a 300kb PDF file.
Posted in Usability, Accessibility | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Tue, 04 Jul 2006 17:40:00 GMT
I’ve just got myself a new W800i mobile phone in order to keep in touch whilst in Canada.
I gave the built in WAP browser a shot and found my homepage a little hard to navigate.
The IE5 trick to centre content does not seem to get overwritten, and my fixed width layout is forcing horizontal scrollbars.
As a result I'm tempted to go to a liquid layout and have the content first. I'm still in two minds about the skip navigation link...
EDIT: I've just read this article on 456 Berea Street which gives more tips on how to design pages for mobile phones.
The points he makes about tableless layout etc are the same conmmonsense ideas that Standards types like myself use to build sites. I note he also uses the opera mini browser, I wonder whether it's the browser itself that is optimised for table-free layouts, or whether all on board browsers linearise tables (giving sites with navigations and long left columns that come first in the code (like the BBC (no BBC-bashing intended)) a great deal of scroll before getting to the main content).
Posted in Browsers, CSS, XHTML, Interface Development, Accessibility | 1 comment | 1 trackback
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:46:50 GMT
It’s been a long struggle, but finally accessible, and by extension valid, web pages are the norm, with innaccessible HTML and CSS banished to the last millenium
However, as with all goals, there can be the tendency for them to go too far and for the means to become more important than the means.
As a result, there’s a tendency to treat the WCAG as rules, rather than the guidelines they are.
The guidelines are littered with 'where appropriate's 'may's and 'until user agent's, thus you can’t, and really shouldn’t treat them as normative, let alone as pseudo-legal, documents
I've not been on the sharp end of this in any great way, yet, but it would be odd to not get a sign-off on a project just because of a spurious validation error. This is especially significant as validators don't necessarily come up with the same results each time.
Posted in Usability, CSS, XHTML, Interface Development, Accessibility | no comments | 1 trackback
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Mon, 19 Jun 2006 08:21:00 GMT
Everyone knows what a hyperlink looks like, don't they? Everyone knows what the submit button looks like and where it will be, surely, by now?
I'm afraid I've been guilty of making similar assumptions: that a hyperlink nowadays is just 'different somehow' to normal text, that a submit button is 'probably on the bottom right'.
This weekend was my Grandad's 90th birthday, and my family clubbed together to get him a PC, for shopping online and sending emails to family overseas.
I gave him what I thought would be a quick once over, by giving him the task of finding out what time my train would leave, using National Rail.
It was a real eye-opener.
Read more...
Posted in Usability, Interface Development, Accessibility | no comments | no trackbacks
