Yesterday the BBC reported on a study released by Southampton University in the UK that found a 60% failure rate in UK government websites where standards compliance is concerned. Since that report on the BBC I've noticed a bit of commentary on it and received a few emails along the lines of "have you seen this?" from shocked individuals. The biggest shock for me is, frankly, that people are shocked and surprised at all.

The BBC report certainly highlights an important issue but it also blurs some important points when it says:

"Some 60% of UK government websites contain HTML errors"

Then it later quotes the author of the study as saying:

"Although 61% of sites do not comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guide, the 39% which do is encouraging."

Is the 60% failure figure one of HTML validation issues, as the first quotation above suggests, or is it a 60% failure in terms of accessibility pass/fail ratio? If it's the latter, this is a little more worrying. As for the former, well, we all want the sites to use to validate, but with the general mush of various layers of in-house web development, outside agency involvement and hideously bad content management systems (CMSs), quite honestly I'd be amazed if the validation rate were anything even close to 40%.

For my money, this story tells me largely what I suspected about UK government sites (but couldn't be bothered to go out and collate the figures for myself). The best part of the story, I think, is the finishing quote from an anonymous 'spokesman for the Cabinet Office':

"One difficulty is that many authoring tools do not generate compliant HTML and make it difficult to edit the coding ... This is an issue that the IT industry must address and we are working with them on that."

It's refreshing to see a government official correctly identify that the authoring tools are often to blame here (cough, ATAG, cough!) . But just who is 'them' in that sentence and who are the 'we' in that sentence (given that the source is unnamed). If you have any further light to shed on this story - specifically about what those figures actually relate to - and also what action is being alluded to towards the end, I'd love to find out (use the comments please).

This post has been cross-posted at webstandards.org - please add any comments there

Just a little heads-up to say that there's a new review on the site - for Jeremy Keith's book Dom Scripting. It's been out a few months now, I know, but I've only just got around to reading the darn thing. Thankfully, it was worth the wait. You can check out Dom Scripting book review here.

Well, how many accessibility-related presentations have you seen online or in the real world that started with the quote from Tim "inventor of the World Wide Web" Berners-Lee:

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."

Bored of it? I know I am. So, thanks to Bruce and Patrick for coming up with some alternatives. I suspect that there may have been beer involved when they came up with this idea. Who's gonna use this one in their next accessibility presentation?

"Why would blind people be using a computer anyway?"

Typographic connoisseur and accessibility guru Joe Clark finally receives his copy of PAS 78:

The specification has a lot of typos and is inconsistent in several places, to be discussed below. However, I believe the authors have succeeded about 85% in achieving a document that teaches untrained people how to manage developers and user testing to arrive at an accessible Web site.

Joe Clark's review of PAS 78.

This update provides information on activities of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), for the "Web Accessibility Initiative: Training, Implementation, Education and Support" (WAI-TIES) Project in Europe.

Contents:

1. Improving the Accessibility of Your Web Site
2. Why Standards Harmonization is Essential for Web Accessibility
3. Using Combined Expertise to Evaluate Web Accessibility
4. Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA
5. Information about W3C, WAI, and WAI-TIES

1. Improving the Accessibility of Your Web Site

Improving the Accessibility of Your Web Site provides guidance for fixing accessibility barriers in existing Web sites. It describes strategies for identifying priorities, developing a retrofitting plan, and repairing accessibility barriers efficiently.

2. Why Standards Harmonization is Essential for Web Accessibility

Why Standards Harmonization is Essential for Web Accessibility describes the benefits of adopting a consistent set of international technical standards for Web accessibility. It explores reasons why people develop different standards, as well as the accelerated progress that can be made through adoption of a common standard.

3. Using Combined Expertise to Evaluate Web Accessibility

Using Combined Expertise to Evaluate Web Accessibility explores how to conduct higher quality evaluations of Web site accessibility by combining diverse kinds of expertise from different evaluators.

4. Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA

The W3C Note "Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA: Alternatives to Visual Turing Tests on the Web provides an updated explanation of why these increasingly frequent features of Web sites, often required to gain permission to sign up for services on a Web site, present accessibility barriers to many people with disabilities.

5. Information about W3C, WAI, and WAI-TIES

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international forum which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.

W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) addresses accessibility of the Web for people with disabilities, through a variety of activities, including technical and guidelines development and educational work.

If you are interested in ongoing news from WAI, sign up for WAI news feeds.

WAI Training, Implementation, Education and Support (WAI-TIES) a project of WAI, was funded by the European Commission Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme to increase training and implementation support on Web accessibility in Europe. This is the final WAI-TIES Update.

This WAI-TIES Update may be circulated to other mailing lists as appropriate, avoiding cross-postings. Additional materials produced through this project can be found at the WAI-TIES site.

Regards,

• Sylvie Duchateau, for the WAI-TIES Project.
• Shadi Abou-Zahra, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and WAI-TIES
• Judy Brewer, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative

Spotted via an entry on Matt Bailey's blog: Brian Rosmaita, assistant professor of computer science at Hamilton College in New York, presented a paper, Accessibility First! A New Approach to Web Design at the Association for Computing Machinery SIGCSE 2006 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in Houston on 3 March 2006.

His paper proposes an "accessibility first" pedagogy for web design, developed at Hamilton, in which the course is organized around therequirement of implementing web pages accessible to visually impaired computer users, as opposed to the traditional method of teaching accessibility only after students havealready learned web design.

News item on Rosmaita's paper on Hamilton College's site. This ought to be of interest to the WaSP Education Task Force.

The Usability Exchange website launches on 16 March 2006...

...to provide instant user testing with disabled users. Organisations can now find out what disabled people think of their website by logging on to www.usabilityexchange.com. This launch comes just as the British Standards Institution (BSI) published new guidance last week (PAS 78) for those who commission or maintain websites, to ensure that any site they make or maintain is user-friendly for disabled people.

The Usability Exchange allows website developers to receive direct feedback from disabled people regarding the accessibility and usability of their websites - developers can even watch testers attempt to navigate their website through the use of remote viewing software. [...]

Through the Usability Exchange, website developers can create simple or complex usability tests and submit them to a range of disabled users. Once a test has been submitted to testers, organisations can monitor users' feedback in real time, with some testers providing feedback within hours of being contacted. All testers receive payment for testing websites, offering a flexible source of income for disabled testers.

The service is aimed at organisations who want to conduct usability testing of their websites with disabled users, as well as charities and consultancies who require an effective platform for conducting disabled user testing on behalf of clients. Organisations or consultancies intending to submit large numbers of tests can sign up as 'premium partners' to receive volume discounts.

Full press release on the newly launched Usability Exchange.

The BBC has an interesting news article on the subject, including some good comments from Julie Howell:

Although she welcomed the arrival of the service, Ms Howell said she had a couple of concerns.

Firstly, she said Usability Exchange had to demonstrate the quality of the testing work being done.

It's one thing to put businesses in touch with disabled people, she said, but what's the quality of the process involved here?

The company would have to work hard to ensure the information fed back to clients was useful.

That does not mean making it all positive but making it all honest, said Ms Howell.

The last thing any business would want was to test with Usability Exchange and then find that disabled people cannot use their website.

Ms Howell said she also had worries about the well-being [ed.: meaning "best interest of" with regards to their welfare benefit payments] of the disabled testers employed by Usability Exchange.

She urged those taking part to let the government know they were taking on employed work.

Just a quick note to give you first option on the next MDAWG which will be on Thursday 20th April at 18:00 at the MDDA premises as usual.

We have just secured a presentation from Julie Howell, Digital Policy Manager for the RNIB, who was very heavily involved with the development of PAS 78.

Register by sending an email to awg@virtuaffinity.com

Rescheduled: to accommodate the rather heavy demands on Julie Howell's time, the presentation has been brought forward. We will now be starting a little earlier at 15:45 pm in the Cube Gallery next door to the MDDA on the 20th April. This is one to be very prompt for as Julie has very little time and will be starting at 16:00.

Mike Davies, aka Isofarro, has published his summary of the recently launched PAS 78.

Businesses want a clear DRC-approved direction on creating accessible websites. With the DRC's collaboration with the British Standards Institution, businesses now have access to that guidance in the form of PAS 78.

For web accessibility professionals and experts, PAS 78 introduces nothing new. It's based on web standards and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. PAS 78 brings the web standards and disability discrimination act requirements together into one overarching document.

Update: read about Mike Davies' personal reflections on PAS 78, including a scary photo of Bruce Lawson and me...

We've teased you for far too long, asked you to wait, to be patient. We've made promises you probably began to think we wouldn't ever keep. Well, here's our long awaited gift to you, the new WaSP redesign.

And the new daring design of the Web Standards Project is a thing of beauty. Once again a shining example of how it's possible to build standards-based, accessible sites without having to sacrifice aesthetics and design. Here's hoping that this revamped presence, together with the tireless efforts of all involved, will spread the message of web standards even further among the web design community.

Fashionably late, due to my not being around over the last two days...

PAS78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites was officially launched by the BSI this Wednesday, 8 March 2006, at a one day event in London.

The document is the result of a year's collaboration between the DRC, RNIB, BBC, Tesco, IBM, the W3C and many other contributors and reviewers.

Although it's not perfect, the PAS gives a lot of very common sense advice to people in charge of commissioning any web development. It extolls the business sense of accessible web sites and provides decision makers with the information they need to avoid snake oil salesmen. It wisely does not try to set up its own set of accessibility guidelines, but heavily refers to W3C's WAI WCAG, as well as making some excellent points (which directly address my usual "the onus is also on the user" argument) regarding UAAG and the need for users to meet developers half-way.

My partner in comedy crime for the day, Bruce Lawson, has an excellent run-down of the PAS' main points. Also see the BBC news item and the excellent OUT-LAW article.

PAS 78 is available to purchase for £30 (and yes, the price tag itself has been a hotly discussed issue at the launch already) from the BSI in a variety of formats (including the Daisy audio format and accessible PDF). Site licenses that enable organisations to place a copy of the document on their intranet for viewing/printing/transfer are also available.

Discuss PAS 78 on our forum.

About this time time last year, I heard about a sign in Florida airport that struck me as somewhat silly. Obviously I just didn't get it (as the two comments on that post clarified), and I was happy to find out more about the issue - and that is that while it may seem superfluous to include sign language when you have the written word, the fact is that for many deaf people the written language is their second language. With that in mind, I'd like to refer to an article I read today regarding live signing on web sites.

"... there are about 70,000 people in the UK who use British Sign Language [BSL] as a primary means of communication. It's not a straight translation of English ? it has its own word order, grammar and morphology ? so English is often a very poor second language to them."

On a related topic, I caught part of a program made especially for the deaf community here in the UK at the weekend (called Switch). It was just on in the background, following from something else I'd been watching. A great idea in theory, but is it just me who thinks some of the acting is dreadful? Or are my expectations too high as a non-deaf consumer (in other words, for a deaf person watching the show, a 'flat' delivery by one of the speaking characters - and I refer to non-mute or non-deaf characters in the show, I'm not critiquing a deaf person's vocal delivery! - is somewhat irrelevent, so does it matter?).

Hey Joe, your days over commandeering other people's PCS and insiting on switching on ClearType may soon be over - ClearType will be on by default with IE7

After 5 years of real world experience and research, we?re now quite confident that the benefits for using ClearType are significant, and it was a mistake that we didn?t turn it on by default in XP.

No problem, Joe's been doing his personal best to address it!

Just a quick congratulation to the hard working people over at German accessibility site Einfach für Alle (simply/simple for everybody) and their beautiful relaunch, which has been meticulously documented in their EfA relaunch article series.

Fellow WaSP Accessibility Task Force member and all-round nice guy Derek Featherstone is put under the spotlight in an interview over at Digital Web Magazine:

I start with "your brain" because accessibility isn't a black-or-white question - what may be accessible to one person may not be to another. Human judgment plays a critical role in the process, and that comes from your brain, and your bank of experience.

Ever the apologist, here I am again justifying lack of activity on this site (and some others) over the last year or two (the list of other time-suckers can be found here). What's the justification this time? Well, it's a good one.

While travelling around the globe a couple of years ago, I started doing some technical editing for Sitepoint. It was a great way to earn a bit of money to pay my way while not getting in the way of moving from place to place - no bar work or fruit-picking for me! Much of this editing work was carried out in the back of my van in the late hours while my wife-to-be snoozed. When I returned to UK after travelling, I was approached about some more potential writing work. Despite the fact that I knew I had an extremely busy year ahead of me, somehow I felt brave enough to take it on. Over seven months, while dealing with two house sales, buying a new house and making tentative wedding plans, I spent many evenings working on this project. Today, for the first time, I saw the evidence that it was finally coming to fruition - Sitepoint have added the book to their 'coming soon' section.

So, what's the book about?

At this point, it might be worth re-reading this post about the poor state of many beginner web design books on the market. The reason for my trip to the book shops was to really get a feel for what's out there and to make sure that I was on track with what I was writing. I couldn't have been happier at how bad it was - it made me realise that what I had started writing for Sitepoint was much needed and much overdue.

Who is this book aimed at?

Well, chances are it's not aimed at you. As much as I'd like to say it's a cutting edge book about CSS tricks that you and I love to peruse, or an accessibility book with a slightly different angle than those currently out there, it's neither. This is what it is:

• It's a book that you can give to your web newbie mother/sister/auntie
• It doesn't presume any foreknowledge of HTML or ownership of any expensive/fancy web authoring software (nor does it suggest going out and buying any)
• While it's for beginners, it's not going to call anyone a dummy ;-)
• It's a web design book that refuses to teach bad, outdated practices as a way of getting eye-catching results more quickly than the 'proper' method. For example, the first time you will see page layout covered is with CSS in chapter 4. Tables are covered - but in a chapter about managing data in tables, just where they should be .

In short, it's a book that aims to teach complete beginners how to build web sites that conform to web standards such that they won't need to unlearn bad practices at a later date, or even know that those bad practices exist.

Well, I've talked it up so much, about time I provided a link:

Build Your First Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS

Publication date is March/April (I believe the latter ismore likely). If you think you know someone that this could be of benefit to, please do add your name to the notification list (by joining the Sitepoint Book Buyers' Club). I am looking forward to seeing the finished result ... and I really do wonder what bizarre and completely off-topic picture this book will have on the cover!

Via a discussion over at the Accessify forum I stumbled across an article on the British Dyslexia Association site entitled Big Button Report: FTSE and Fortune 500 review.

The report by Serena Thomson - a degree student at the University of British Columbia - attempts to give a fairly reasonable overview of the issues surrounding users with disabilities and corporate web sites. However, already from the summary, the report itself is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions. To pick out a few choice passages:

The Big Button Report, sponsored by the Communication Foundation, highlights just four companies which meet the minimum requirements of text size button which dyslexic people need. This means that the other 96 organisations are failing to meet the legal obligations of the 1995 and 2004 Disabilities Discrimination Act (DDA) which requires companies to make 'reasonable adjustments' to help people with disabilities.

Minimum requirements of text size button? Text resizing is a function of the browser / user agent. Web sites should be built according to best practices, separating content from presentation, thus allowing users to set their own preferred text size, foreground/background colour combination etc in their browser. Not implementing a site specific text resize button or widget is certainly not a failure to meet the obligations of the DDA, and claiming so in the opener to the article is a dangerous piece of misinformation.

The "Americans with Disabilities" Act requires that businesses and organizations make "reasonable accommodations" to provide equal access for customers and employees who have disabilities. To reconstruct a website to make it fully accessible - by giving the option available to increase the font size, or by providing text equivalents for visual content - is certainly "reasonable" when one considers the business itself will benefit from this consumer.

If a site avoids the use of absolute and pixel-based font sizes (which cannot be resized in Internet Explorer), users can employ their browser's built-in functionality to resize the text size to best suit their needs, without the need for a site-specific option available to increase the font size. Putting text size widgets on par with such a fundamental requirement as the provision of text equivalents is, once again, dangerously misinformed.

The presentation of logical arguments is only so effective in convincing a person to carry out an action. More often the threat of a hefty lawsuit upon his or her failure to execute said action does a better job in half the time. Such was the case in the UK when after years of waiting, consumers who had struggled with inaccessible facilities - both concrete and electronic - celebrated the last part of the Disability Discrimination Act coming into force on 1st October 2004.

A fairly common mistake, but: the often quoted October 2004 deadline related to the provision of physical adjustments (access ramps, for instance). The web was already covered by the DDA prior to that, as it's arguably not a physical premise.

In the near future a high level of accessibility will be standard in all new technology. It will be integrated into the experience of everybody who uses the internet, instead of added as an afterthought or allocated to a separate page.

The author seems to be confusing the technology (read: browsers) used to deliver web content and the web content itself here.

There are many more inconsistencies and slight errors, but in conclusion, the author's intentions are obviously valid ... however, this report seems to be drawing conclusions based on a set of flawed criteria which make me question the validity of the results.

And certainly only the most cynical among us would draw any conclusion from the fact that the article's author, and indeed the Communication Foundation itself, has direct ties with Textic, the company whose web based toolbar product provides the text resize widget functionality on the BDA web site itself...(hat tip to Torsten for a bit of web based investigative research)