Web Access Centre Blog

OK - here’s your starter for 10: Who carries out the accessibility assessments for the annual Better Connected reports into the state of local authority websites in the UK?

I’m not sure why, but there is a persistent and widespread belief that the answer to that question is “SiteMorse”, which is kind of frustrating, since, in fact, it’s always been RNIB.

In 1999, Julie Howell carried out brief assessments of the “Top 20″ sites. I joined RNIB in March 2000 to set up this consultancy, and did similar “Top 20″ assessments for the next couple of Better Connected reports. Then, as this team began to grow, we did assessments of the “Top 50″ sites for a couple of years. For the 2004 report, we developed a methodology which would make it possible for us to assess all (468!) local authority websites against the WAI Guidelines, to Single-A standard. We used the same methodology for the 2005 report, then for last year’s 2006 report, we took the assessments up to Double-A standard. And that’s what we’re doing again for the 2007 report, which is due for publication in February/March.

This is a major undertaking for us each year, with automated assessments of all 468 sites (200 page sample of each) at WAI Single-A and Double-A standard, manual assessments at Single-A of all sites which pass the automated Single-A assessment (this year that’s over 350!), and then further manual assessment to Double-A of those sites which pass the initial automated and manual assessments. And it’s kind of frustrating to have everyone think it’s someone else doing the work!

So now you know - RNIB does the accessibility assessments for Socitm’s Better Connected reports. And yes, I know that means that if you’re a local authority web manager and disagree with the accessibility assessment of your site in the Better Connected report, it’s us you’ll be grumbling at now. That’s fine - we’re the ones who do the assessments, and we make ourselves available on the Socitm Insight forum each year to answer any questions there might be regarding those assessments.

Have you seen the e-Petitions section on the Prime Minister’s website? It was launched in November last year (2006), and is still in beta test, but it’s attracting a growing number of electronic petitions.

One which may be of interest to you was submitted by Ian Fenn and reads:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ensure that any website launched by the government complies with accessibility standards (WCAG AA at least).”

See http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/govaccessibility/

It continues with the following detail:

“In June 2006 the DTI launched their new website. Despite an approximate cost of £200,000, the website failed to meet basic accessibility standards. In short, this meant that the information on the website was inaccessible to some UK citizens - this is absolutely inexcusable. Further work (requiring further taxpayer money) was promised to bring the website up to Level AA of the Web Accessibility Initiative. The purpose of this petition is to ensure that all future government websites meet basic accessibility requirements from launch.”

Interesting, seeing this come up, that we’ve also just been copied in on an email complaining about the accessibility of this e-Petitions section of the site, so if any of you feel like wandering over there and having a look around, we’d be interested to hear what you think of it.

Wouldn’t do any harm to sign the petition while you’re there, too. :)

Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner have co-written an article about some improvements in the way later versions of the JAWS screen reader handles dynamic content updates and how this can be extended through the use of unobtrusive scripting.

Improving Ajax applications for JAWS users

The article focuses on the concept of virtual buffers used by some screen readers, in other words the means by which a screen reader user can interact with a web page using keyboard commands and how this works in dynamically updating pages. Useful code samples are also given

The article follows on from an earlier article which looks at Making screen readers work with AJAX.