1 Forum Debuts (off-topic)

We’ve just begun testing the new forums, produced by everyone’s favorite pixel-by-pixel animator (and ALA’s new List Mom), Waferbaby
(http://www.waferbaby.com/). If you run into a problem using the new forum, hit the Contact page http://www.alistapart.com/contact/ and let us know. Thanks!

Now back to our regularly scheduled topic discussion. – jeffrey

posted at 06:22 pm on April 8, 2002 by apartness

2 Accessability not just for disabled.

I wish more sites would follow accessability guidelines, not just because it helps the disabled but because a side effect is often a more useable website. It seems that when a site’s development team has to go through everything to make sure it’s accessible they also find spots where it’s easy to make the thing more usable: alt text for pictures, cleaner layout, more standard and thus more usable in non-IE browsers, etc.

My suggestion to everyone is to take two minutes to send a message to the contact of your favorite, non-accessible website and kindly ask them to become accessible to improve the experience for everyone.

posted at 08:39 am on April 9, 2002 by jrodenbiker

3 Anti-accessibility ethic

Sites should follow accesibile guidelines, however most of the time the people who put up the sites don’t care.

I think accessible development tools will greatly help the introduction of accesibile authoring. Accessibility is not a strategic issue for many websites, the people who commission them “the customer” are loathe to pay extra money to make sites accessible, after all they don’t pay to make their print adverts accesibile do they? And no I’m not saying that print and the Web are the same thing, but often advertising is a major purpose of the website.

Accessible orientated authoring tools are/will be a great step forward, but they are not the silver bullet that some people think they will be. There are plenty of ways to make applications more accessible but the average html author is just concerned with getting the page “done”, all the extra work is not worth it unless the author is quite self motivated or being paid to do it.

Authoring tools can’t force people to write accessible websites (if they tried many authors would switch to a different authoring platform because this on was “unfriendly”), but yes they can help.

posted at 09:03 am on April 9, 2002 by Ben M

4 Many care but have problems complying

And then there are those who WANT to make their sites accessible but have difficulty understanding Bobby’s WAI and 508 Reports.

I’m becoming more comfortable with 508 and with the checklists it generates on Bobby.

WAI is hard, in no small part because Bobby’s results are often so complex and seemingly contradictory.

One small example: You’re encouraged to use CSS, yet you’re flagged for it when you do so (because Bobby has no way of knowing that your site is usable even when CSS is turned off).

Another: you’re always flagged for using color and told to ensure your information is available even to those who can’t see color. Fair enough, but if you’ve taken pains to make sure your information DOES work for those who can’t see color, you still get flagged and therefore don’t get a clean bill of health on WAI.

508 has many of the same rules, but for some reason Bobby is smarter about granting you 508 approval while reminding you of the rules.

posted at 11:04 am on April 9, 2002 by apartness

5 Bobby isn't very smart

Bobby isn’t very smart when it comes to judging accessibility. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve had to try to explain to a client that there’s nothing wrong with their site, Bobby is merely highlighting potential problems it’s incapable of understanding. What’s possibly worse is that passing Bobby can give a false sense of security, bestowing upon some sites the seal of approval when they’re not actually very accessible.

The problem with most authoring tools is that they tend to reinforce the misconception that the Web is a purely visual medium, and companies know if they try to force their users to think about structure & markup yet more designers will grumble and move to Flash.

posted at 11:36 am on April 9, 2002 by Matt Round

6 general thoughts on accessiblity

It’s not always the designer’s fault. There are many (me included) who would dearly love to create proper XHTML & CSS designs, with the greatly increased accessibility this gives but are unable to due a combination of factors.

Firstly, most clients are concerned with how a site looks rather than the accessibility of the code. On almost all the projects I’ve worked on this has been the case. Generally there is also a demand for exact rendering in all browsers, necessitating the usual hacks and work a rounds.

Secondly, the usual site creation process I’ve encountered in most agencies is for design and build to be separated. So designs are created first by a designer in Photoshop or fireworks. The client then signs these off. The designs are then turned in to HTML templates by a developer. In my opinion this disconnect coupled with the importance placed on look & feel leads to the nasty non-valid HTML that makes up the current state of most of web.

I’ve tried time and time again to explain the benefits of XHTML & CSS designs to clients as well as to change to process of web-site creation but have met little success on this matter.

It would be interesting to hear of other people who have overcomes these problems as I’m sure someone out there must have.

posted at 12:20 pm on April 9, 2002 by Gwilym

7 Bobby and WAI

Although 508 has no legal importance over here (the UK) we still have the Disability Discrimination Act and the open.gov guidelines. I’m using Bobby for the first time on an Further Education site just now and agree with his Apartness’ views on its er, quirks.

I’m using JavaScript/DOM for visual enhancements that have no bearing on the function of the site, yet Bobby flags them up and there is no way to tell it to ignore these errors.

The client is, thankfully, very receptive to the idea (ideal?) of separating style from content. The truth is, however, that realistically, XHTML Strict + CSS just doesn’t cut the mustard yet – not for primetime sites. So for the moment we are making do with Transitional and checking things furiously on Bobby and in the accessibility lab that one of the colleges has.

posted at 12:50 pm on April 9, 2002 by Jackie McGhee

8 Right you are Jackie

Jackie, you’re right on the scripting/DOM issue as well. Bobby essentially will not pass any site that uses JavaScript even when the site works perfectly well with JavaScript turned off.

That’s another reason I feel better when I do Section 508 accessibility testing than WAI testing. Section 508 testing will pass a site that uses JavaScript and merely issue a perfunctory reminder that the site should work without JavaScript. WAI testing assumes if you use JavaScript you’re an evil cretin who doesn’t care about accessibility. It’s sad and wrong.

posted at 03:08 pm on April 9, 2002 by apartness

9 oops!

Correction to previous post:

“Bobby essentially will not pass” should be changed to “When testing for WAI compliance, Bobby essentially will not pass”

posted at 03:10 pm on April 9, 2002 by apartness

10 WebAim

If anyone is interested there’s an online event currently running at http://webaim.org/training2002/ addressing pretty much all aspects of accessability. I think they’re into week 2 now but everything from past weeks is going to remin online. They also have some discussion forums running which, whilst not being hyper-active all the time, have got some interestign debates going on. Go and take a peek . . .

posted at 06:14 am on April 10, 2002 by ADAM . . .