Interesting reading: two articles on accessibility from First Monday

Joe Clark recently pointed out two new articles on First Monday:

• A comparative assessment of Web accessibility and technical standards
  conformance in four EU states by Carmen Marincu and Barry McMullin;
• Assessing the accessibility of fifty United States government Web pages:
  Using Bobby to check on Uncle Sam by Jim Ellison.

Although at first I was quite ready to harshly criticise both articles for their use of automated testing, I was pleased to see that this factor has been mentioned in their respective discussions section. So, flawed as the findings may be, they’re still an interesting read.

…and yes, the irony that both articles missed out ALT attributes and proper table headings has not escaped me, either, but I’ve already sent a friendly note to the First Monday HTML editor…