At last, after much toil and angst, Socitm’s Better Connected 2007 report is published.
Better Connected 2007: a snapshot of local authority websites
I want to mention one particular result here, since you’re guaranteed to see it mentioned elsewhere.
Dan Champion’s excellent website at Clackmannanshire council failed to achieve a pass at Level Double-A.
Why? Because in the 200 page sample, the automated test indicated 158 HTML validation errors. I checked that result manually shortly after it came in, and found a scattering of validation errors consistent with that number of errors being found over that number of pages.
Does this mean that Socitm or RNIB are saying that the website is inaccessible?
Don’t be daft. Of course not! What it means is that, at the time of testing, the site failed to achieve full compliance with all of the requirements of the WAI WCAG 1.0 guidelines at Level Double-A.
Because that’s what we assess for the Better Connected reports. The UK government specifies Level Double-A as the target for central government and local authority websites, so we test compliance at that level. And these assessments are a snapshot in time - resources simply don’t allow for any more in-depth or complex than that.
I outlined in a previous post here the methodology we use for these assessments, which involves a combination of automated and manual testing. And we include various margins in the automated tests to ensure we’re not failing sites because of a single missing ALT attribute or something equally draconian. For example, if fewer than 5% of all the images found in the sample lack an ALT attribute, the site will be given a provisional or “marginal” pass for that checkpoint, so that it can go forward for manual checking. Similarly, if we record fewer than 50 HTML validation errors, that checkpoint is given a “marginal” pass.
Confession: knowing how knowledgeable and committed to accessibility Dan is, I did, for a few seconds after I saw that result, consider the fact that I could quietly change the number at that point and no-one, except me, would be any the wiser. But how fair would that have been to other equally committed web managers in a similar position who I happen not to know? Quite. So I didn’t.
I’ve focussed on the Clackmannanshire website since it, and Dan, have rather a high profile. But there may be other web teams who find themselves in a similar position.
So, to Dan, and to any other local authority website managers who are disappointed with the results of our assessments for Better Connected 2007 - I’m sorry. But we have to assess on the basis of what we find at the time we carry out these assessments. We don’t set out to fail sites or enjoy failing them, but we do aim to be as fair and impartial as we can in our assessments.
Gary Hides | 02/03/2007 at 17:43 | Permalink
Interesting post. I’m kind of glad that the Clackmannanshire Council web site failed on the validation errors. The fact that you know Dan, and that he’s passionate about accessibility, shows you and others that there are lots of people who have accessibility at the very forefront of their agenda when it comes to web design but maybe do fail on a few of the automated testing points.
The main thing is: we are striving to improve, and make the web better for everyone.
P.S. I’m sure that Clackmannanshire Council web site HTML validation errors will soon be sorted now! :o)
Donna | 02/03/2007 at 18:48 | Permalink
Thanks Gary. Believe me - we’re well aware of the struggle some committed web teams face, what with inflexible content management systems and recalcitrant content editors.
I don’t want anyone to think I’m saying validation doesn’t matter though - it does for all sorts of reasons (as very nicely discussed by Ethan Marcotte in “Where Our Standards Went Wrong” in A List Apart), which is why Dan and others like him work hard to produce websites where every page does validate. However it’s also true that a scattering of validation errors doesn’t automatically mean that a site is out and out inaccessible.
Ian Dunmore | 02/03/2007 at 22:23 | Permalink
“Does this mean that Socitm or RNIB are saying that the website is inaccessible? … Don’t be daft. Of course not!”
Can you speak for Socitm then?
Here’s a quote from their press release on the matter:
”Website accessibility is not improving…2 sites reach level AA (3 in 2006) and 64 (62 in 2006) reach level A standard… gap between accessibility claims and reality is exposed.’
Sounds to me that’s exactly what they’re saying.
Donna | 03/03/2007 at 2:46 | Permalink
@ Ian:
“Can you speak for Socitm then?”
Well, with regard to web accessibility and the Better Connected report, yes I believe I can.
There’s nothing in that press release or in the Better Connected report which states or even implies that Clackmannanshire is an inaccessible website.
The first statement you quote about a lack of improvement in accessibility is, from what we saw, nothing other than fact. The number of sites which passed at level Single-A and level Double-A is almost identical to last year, and a substantial majority of sites still fail at Level Single A on things like missing or poor ALT text, lack of data table headings and reliance on JavaScript for essential functionality. Some individual sites passed at level Single-A this year where they had failed before, and some individual sites slipped back and failed this year where they had passed last year. But the overall picture is one of little change.
And the second statement in your quote from the Socitm press release is also quite true, but entirely unrelated to Clackmannanshire - there are many sites claiming levels of compliance with the WAI guidelines, either for the whole site or for individual pages, which are very wide of the mark.
Maybe I’m missing something here Ian, but I really don’t see how any of that can be taken to imply that the Clackmannanshire website is inaccessible.
Dan Champion | 03/03/2007 at 10:45 | Permalink
Thanks for posting this Donna. I have posted my perspective on this year’s Better Connected on my site at http://www.blether.com/archives/2007/03/better_connecte.php . It looks like we agree that part of the problem is the use of WCAG for Better Connected, and the sheer scale of the task of testing 468 sites in such a short time frame.
I would go a little further than this and say that the root of the problem is SOCITM’s desire to measure accessibility rather than develop authorities’ capacity to deliver on it. Pointing out year on year that there is a problem with the accessibility of local authority websites clearly isn’t helping to improve the situation, so perhaps it’s time for SOCITM to consider how they could use the resources they put in to BC to better effect?
Ian Dunmore | 03/03/2007 at 11:10 | Permalink
Not following your logic Donna.
You’ve gone to some pains to ‘exclude’ ClacksWeb from being ‘lumped in’ with other sites (which incidentally, Socitm itself hasn’t bothered doing in Better Connected) which certainly looks like you *do* feel an implication of some sort is bieng made.
That aside though, the point I’m making is that the sort of testing and ranking being carried out (which ‘fails’ a website acknowledged by you to be perfectly accessible) automatically categorises that site with the others when clearly accessibility itself isn’t what’s being measured.
Socitm is deliberately confusing adherence to WCAG with ‘accessibility’ then, on the basis of - important point - a completely arbitrary threshold (SiteMorse all over again) concluding ‘website accessibility isn’t improving’. That statement is possibly true, it’s just they blow the case out of the water with dodgy methodology which fails (and therefore implies inacesssibility of) perfectly good websites like ClacksWeb. So we’ll never know. This is doing more harm than good IMHO.
Unless of course it is I, not you, who’s missing something. Perhaps you could point me at it. The disclaimer from Socitm itself which clarifies all this.
Mike Abbott | 05/03/2007 at 10:44 | Permalink
The whole crux of the matter is not automated testing, but user testing, abd with 460+ websites, that is virtually impossible.
Ian, I feel you are picking Clacksweb out as Donna has mentioned it. As far as I know she has little personal knowledge of the other webmasters and has merely included Dan as an example not as a definative.
There are lessons to be learnt not stones to be thrown.
Mike Abbott | 05/03/2007 at 10:45 | Permalink
The whole crux of the matter is not automated testing, but user testing, and with 460+ websites, that is virtually impossible.
Ian, I feel you are picking Clacksweb out as Donna has mentioned it. As far as I know she has little personal knowledge of the other webmasters and has merely included Dan as an example not as a definative.
There are lessons to be learnt not stones to be thrown.
Donna | 05/03/2007 at 10:45 | Permalink
(Long post here - apologies!)
My concern is not that Socitm are implying that sites which fail at Level Double-A are “inaccessible” - rather that we know there are those who will read that into the reported results.
The problem here is the use of the blanket terms “accessible” and “inaccessible”. These imply a black and white situation - that a site is either completely accessible or completely inaccessible. That is rarely, if ever, the case. “Accessibility” is a sliding scale, with each site sitting somewhere on that scale. Taken as a whole, the checkpoints in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a pretty good way of measuring where a site sits on that scale, and the defined levels (Single-A, Double-A and Triple-A) mark points on that scale. These are hardly arbitrary thresholds. And indeed, for the report as a whole, Single-A is used as the “pass” threshold for accessibility, so Clackmannanshire is one of those sites which passed.
If a site passes all of the priority 1 checkpoints (those required for level Single-A), as Clackmannanshire did, it has clearly moved some way from the bottom end of that scale, and it would be inaccurate to say it is “inaccessible”. But it would be true to say that a site which passes all of the priority 1 checkpoints but fails one or more of the priority 2 checkpoints (those required for level Double-A in addition to the priority 1 checkpoints) is likely to be less accessible in certain respects than one which passes all of the priority 1 and 2 checkpoints.
As a means of measuring trends in the accessibility of a defined group of websites over time, this actually works rather well. If there was an overall continuing improvement, we would expect to see an ever growing number of sites passing the level Single-A mark on the scale. It’s quite a long jump from Single-A to Double-A, with a wider range of issues to tackle than those which are addressed by the priority 1 checkpoints, so it would be understandable to see a slower increase in the number of sites achieving Double-A, given that many sites might reach a point between Single-A and Double-A and then hover there for some time because of issues which go beyond those under the direct control of the web team responsible for the site. The fact that, between BC2006 and BC2007, the number of sites which moved past the level Single-A mark was matched by almost the same number of sites slipping back to below that mark points to there being issues which are impacting on the implementation of accessible design, construction and maintenance.
BC2007, as with previous Better Connected reports, does look at some of the possible reasons for this. Last year, the report reviewed some of the content management systems used with local authority websites. This year, it reviews the most commonly found online payment systems and makes recommendations with regard to third party content.
The methodology used for the accessibility assessments in the Better Connected reports is ours, not Socitm’s, though of course they ultimately decide if it’s what they want to use in their reports.
There is an initial choice - to include accessibility in the report or not? Given its importance, it would be a glaring gap in the range of issues covered by the report if accessibility was not included.
The next choice - to review just a sample of sites, or all local authority sites? Either of these is a potentially valid approach. However it is more difficult to draw conclusions about local authority websites as a whole with regard to accessibility if only a sample of sites are assessed each year, so, after reviewing just a small sample of sites in the first few Better Connected reports, we decided to switch to a methodology that would enable us to review all sites.
Then - automated or manual assessments? Automated assessments can be useful, but on their own only provide a partial picture of the accessibility of a site. Completely manual assessments are too time consuming to make it possible to assess all 465 sites. So we devised a methodology that makes, we believe, best use of both approaches. All sites are assessed using a customised automated assessment tool, and those which pass those checkpoints which can be determined by an automated assessment (such as the provision of ALT attributes for images) go forward for expert manual review. The automated tool provides background data which helps to direct and speed up the manual assessment (e.g. it can provide example URLs for any image maps found in the sample of pages processed, enabling the human reviewer to go straight to those pages rather than having to hunt for image maps).
We’ve always been completely open about the methodology we use, and it’s provided in detail in each Better Connected report. I’ll look at posting a detailed description here later today if I can. If anyone can suggest ways of improving that methodology, we’ll definitely consider those suggestions seriously.
In terms of what one should be checking when reviewing a website for accessibility, the WAI guidelines provide the best framework available. They do define most of the key issues which need to be addressed, and the checkpoints defined within those guidelines provide a good framework for assessing the accessibility of a website. It’s not a case of confusing WCAG with accessibility - one provides a framework for assessing the other.
And I guess that brings me full circle - the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide a framework for assessing where a particular site sits on the sliding scale of accessibility. If a site - any site - passes all of the priority 1 checkpoints but fails one or more priority 2 checkpoints, it has failed to reach that level Double-A mark on the scale, but has reached or passed the level Single-A mark on the scale. So it would be wrong to categorise that site as “inaccessible”, and that’s not what the Better Connected report does. That’s all I was originally trying to convey.
Dan Champion | 05/03/2007 at 12:07 | Permalink
Donna, thanks for the comprehensive explanation of the why and how of your testing for BC. It does clarify a number of things, but not my two main concerns.
Firstly, that the threshold you have set to distinguish sites conforming to levels A and AA is arbitrary. Unless the two sites that were reported as conforming to level AA had zero validation errors across the sampled pages they did not achieve level AA.
Secondly, and much more importantly, I fail to see how the enormous effort you and your colleagues put into compiling these results actually helps SOCITM’s members - surely there is a better way to channel that effort into improving the situation than simply reporting on it? Anyone who visits local authority websites regularly and has an understanding of web standards and accessibility knows that there’s a significant number failing to meet minimum acceptable standards. For me it is such a wasted opportunity to use the RNIB to confim that rather than to help overcome it.
Ian Dunmore | 05/03/2007 at 12:22 | Permalink
Sorry Donna, I just don’t buy it. Where in Better Connected does it say anything along the lines of what you’re getting at - that perfectly accessible sites can easily ‘fail’ using this methodology? And how many other examples of accessible sites are there that have ‘failed’ using it? One? Ten? One hundred? If you can provide a definitive list of them that would perhaps enlighten us further. As it is - and taking on board Dan’s points above - this exercise is little better (if at all) than what SiteMorse gets up to, and as you may recall, sometime ago we removed their rankings from PSF because they were felt to be misleading and without meaning. ClacksWeb is merely a working example of why exactly the same principle applies here.
Gary Hides | 05/03/2007 at 18:03 | Permalink
I’m sure Donna said that the web site that was discussed didn’t fail at all, it just didn’t reach the AA standard.
I applaud Donna and the RNIB on this post, due to it’s honesty, letting all of its readers know that whilst only 2 sites got the AA standard, quite a few more may have been very close. Although I do wonder if future posts will be as honest, due to the feedback.
I do agree with some of Dan’s post (on his web site) about teaching best practices. Although I don’t think it’s ever going to happen, as I suppose the reporting wouldn’t cost that much comparatively. Plus managers and the Government need (love) to have stats to compare just about everything now.
I blame Gordon Brown for that - being a financially orientated man. But this post is political enough without getting into that one.
James Corrigan | 06/03/2007 at 0:02 | Permalink
By throwing my hat into the ring, am I opening our site up for a kicking? Frankly, I don’t care if I am.
As if in a dark village hall at a meeting of Techies Anonymous, “Hello, my name’s James and I’m a webmaster of a local government website”.
Not a high-profile one, like Clacksweb (which I shamelessly use for comparisons - thanks, Dan) and one from which we have made a conscious decision to exclude badges that say we adhere to this standard or that. You won’t find a “trophy cabinet” of WCAG or Bobby on our homepage.
But my small team and I care passionately about accessibility. My story is that my 11 year old daughter is visually impaired. We’ve visited a lot of places with her, including the West of England School for Children with Little or No Sight in Exeter where I spent time in the ICT suite with children who really struggle with visual difficulties. I came away fundamentally moved and explained the situation to my colleagues. We agreed to do whatever we could to make our website accessible. I’d challenge you to find a wider selection of contrast choices on any other website! (http://www.eastdevon.gov.uk/customise.htm). Well, perhaps you can but, as I said, we’re not in it for the medals.
But my point is this. We don’t register on the AA scale (probably mucked up this or that on the A one too). So? Some of our content editors have put pictures in tables. Our inflexible CMS has done its own thing on 60 of our pages and thrown out our HTML. Not a lot the three of us can do about it when we’re also running a contact centre project, process mapping in a major department (outside our technical sphere of knowledge), running a project to swap a service department from one major third party system to another one, etc., etc…
We do our best. And to be smacked down constantly by SOCITM or Sitemorse or whoever because of this infringement or that does hurt. Or rather it used to. It doesn’t now because we’re doing our best and its better than most. And we’re proud as hell of that.
Better connected? I wish SOCITM’s survey were. I wish it was connected better to the struggles that we face. If there’s someone out there who could offer three talented and passionate web designers a job that gave them enough time, resource and creative space to achieve the level of technical perfection we’re supposed to pull out of a hat time and again, we’d love to hear from you. You only have to pick up the phone!
So at 11pm, I declare my working day finally over. Don’t tell me that I don’t care.
Rant over.
James
Kevin Lewis | 06/03/2007 at 10:21 | Permalink
Is this the end of measuring web accessibility? I’ve long believed that the concept is ridiculously flawed and I’m sure many others have too. Where else in life is accessibility measured on an arbitrary scale? Please enlighten me.
Doug | 06/03/2007 at 16:42 | Permalink
Sorry Donna, but whilst I appreciate the honesty with which this post was made, to pretend that the measurements provide anything like a trend in accessibility for LA websites is deeply flawed. Drawing random dots on a piece of graph paper I could darw a trend line, and compare that to a second piece of paper likewise decorated. The comparison is meaningless, and to infer any conclusion would be pointless.
We know ClacksWeb is a good example of best practice. Perfect? Maybe not, but the fact it missed out on the ‘trend’ of improvement in LA accessibility is an indication of how random (or worse, arbitrary) this testing is. It would be as folly to point to ClacksWeb and use it as an example of how you can try hard and still fail.
Furthermore, this post doesn’t feature in the SOCTIM publication. We have been measured and we are being judged. This ‘erratum’ will not be in the mind of any of my managers and I suffer for their lack of their comprehension of the subject in the light of the ‘purity’ of the publication.
Regards,
Andy Key | 06/03/2007 at 17:52 | Permalink
Hmm… It just took me thirty seconds to find several real-life accessibility errors on Clacksweb. (Example: in a paragraph reading “Minutes from meetings of the partnership are available for download.”, the link is on the words “available for download”, not on “Minutes from meetings”. A clear error, but try picking that one up with an automated checker!)
Which isn’t to say that makes Clacksweb a bad site - you could doubtless find similar problems on our website even more quickly - but does suggest that Dan’s suggestion of “zero tolerance” may not be realistic. Any large, active site with multiple contributors is going to find it impossible to achieve WAI perfection.
My biggest problem with WAI AA is the “deprecated code” condition. This is where most of our failures come from in automated tests like Sitemorse. Bear in mind these aren’t HTML *errors*, they’re valid HTML which happens to be “deprecated” in current W3C standards. (”Deprecated” has a specific meaning in IT circles: it means it’s not actually WRONG to use it, but that you should avoid any new uses and eliminate old instances of it when the opportunity arises, as it may become invalid at some unspecified point in the future.) For instance, if you have a table element whose width is set to 50% in the HTML code, you’ve just failed AA. Nothing wrong with that table, it will render fine in any browser, people with visual impairments will be able to read what it says… but use of the width attribute is Deprecated. We would try to avoid deprecated code in new content, but in existing content it would cost us thousands of pounds and hundreds of man-hours that we don’t have to go back and remove all the deprecated code. Just for the sake of an AA tick in the box, that’s not justifiable. So we won’t. If, in due course, we migrate or delete or update those pages, THEN we’ll fix it.
Andy Davies | 06/03/2007 at 18:31 | Permalink
I can’t read the report as I don’t have access, but can someone clarify what aspects of accessibility this report covers? Does it just focus on those who can’t see, or does it consider people with motor difficulties etc.
Using automated testing seems a very weak way of checking accessibility as it’s often about context rather than things that can be measured by automated tools - can any of the tools pickup a a strange tab order or a piece of navigation that relies on javascript for example?
Andy
Donna | 06/03/2007 at 19:23 | Permalink
@Andy D: I mentioned yesterday that I planned to post a detailed description and breakdown of our methodology. Sorry I haven’t had a chance to do that yet - like everyone else, we’ve got more stuff to do than time to do it in! I’m going to try to get that up on the blog this evening. It’ll be quite lengthy, so I’ll put it up as a new post, but I’ll add a comment here with a direct link to it.
Ian Dunmore | 06/03/2007 at 20:20 | Permalink
Donna, while you’re at it and given you feel you *are* able to speak on behalf of Socitm on this one could you please also detail:
1) What benefits there are in the exercise and how it assists Socitm members;
2) The rationale for picking 50 (as opposed say to 20, or 60) allowable errors and how you & Socitm feel these (but not 51, or 60) constitute a ‘pass’ at AA WCAG conformance;
3) Why there’s no fuller explanation of all this within Better Connected & the sweeping statements made within accompanying announcements.
Thanks.
James Corrigan | 07/03/2007 at 0:02 | Permalink
Well, hasn’t this just stirred up a lot of noise over the past 24 hours? I’ve received a number of e-mails from webbie contacts across the country since I posted at the same time last night. It seems that there’s a greater feeling about this than a few local govt accessibility vigilantes getting all stormy in their own little teacups. It’s progressing from some bruised pride to something of an issue. Having stirred the pot, I’d like to make one further, non-technical point, if I may. (I’m going to anyway…)
The furore over Sitemorse (in which I was a vocal participant) a few years back centred as much around the marketing approach of the company as their technical criteria for making their judgements. Nobody here is going to point the finger at the RNIB in the same way. Yet, I’m getting the feeling that there’s more than a dusting of concern that the RNIB’s relationship with Better Connected raises valid issues without offering practical strategies to deal with them.
I know that the RNIB can offer a service at a price to pass its eye over your website. Unfortunately, that’s beyond our purse. What would be helpful is to take Dan’s point above that it would be better to “channel that effort into improving the situation than simply reporting on it”.
I genuinely hope that organisations don’t take the opportunity to use this sudden profile to pitch costly services to local government. Software companies (and I torch many salesmen in a week) don’t yet seem to have cottoned on to the fact that the e-gov cashcow is in the slaughterhouse. Five years’ experience in the local government web world have honed my defensive instincts and I’m beginning to twitch…
JackP | 07/03/2007 at 10:34 | Permalink
Heh. Just to be a bit of a pain, can I ask how the RNIB ensured how you were absolutely positively sure that the sites which you claimed did pass AA did not, on any of the pages tested, contain a direct quotation which was not correctly marked up as a quotation.
Or didn’t you check for this?
If you didn’t check for this, then could you explain the reasons why some WCAG-AA checkpoints are tested against and others would be arbitrarily ignored? And what this actually means in terms of the testing being used as a measure of WCAG passing?
Dan Champion | 07/03/2007 at 10:35 | Permalink
@Andy Key: Andy, I wasn’t suggesting that we adopt a stance of zero tolerance, quite the opposite. A single validation error means you’ve failed to conform to WCAG level AA, I was simply pointing out the pointlessness of measuring sites on that basis. Nor do I hold ClacksWeb up as flawless - like everyone else I’m trying to run a site with thousands of pages contributed and maintained by dozens of editors on a budget of next to nothing. There are many problems with the site which compete for available time and resources with all the new things we’re expected to deliver.
James has nailed the crux of the debate IMHO, which is quite how Better Connected in it current form helps us to improve the accessibility of our sites.
Andy Key | 07/03/2007 at 11:25 | Permalink
Dan, my “zero tolerance” was a reference to the idea that a single error means you’ve failed to conform to the guidelines. I think I’d tend more towards the RNIB view that it’s counter-productive to expect a site to be entirely free of errors before classifying it as compliant, because that means no real-life site will EVER be compliant. (I bet if we went hunting we could find accessibility failings on the W3C/WAI site itself, and I’ve certainly seen them on the RNIB site in the past.) Targets need to be achievable. And of course some of those guidelines are open to subjective interpretation.
I agree that the important thing is whether the BC survey actually provides us with any useful learning points in the accessibility section: probably not, and it won’t do unless SOCITM bite the bullet and commission hands-on human testing of every site.
Dan Champion | 07/03/2007 at 12:51 | Permalink
“it’s counter-productive to expect a site to be entirely free of errors before classifying it as compliant, because that means no real-life site will EVER be compliant.”
The first of those statements is true, the second probably true (at least for sites of any reasonable size). So are you suggesting that it’s right to ignore the clear, unequivocal requirements of WCAG for validity to claim that sites are level AA compliant?
“Targets need to be achievable.”
Indeed, which is why WCAG AA is an unreasonable target to set.
“And of course some of those guidelines are open to subjective interpretation.”
Not checkpoint 3.2, “Create documents that validate to published formal grammars.” It’s a binary state, there is no subjectivity involved.
Ian Hinkley | 07/03/2007 at 23:09 | Permalink
I was wondering if anyone tests SOCITM?
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=better+connected&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
- The top result on Google for ‘Better Connetced’ is an error page.
- Then try clicking on the left navigation item: “Exchange” - this sends you to a generic ‘Microsoft Content Server” pgae.
- The Better Connected page fails W3C XHTML validation with 29 errors.
I found these is 6 minutes browsing their site.
Hardly accessible, useful, usable or anything else. Its a travesty.
Steve Collins | 08/03/2007 at 11:22 | Permalink
Could I suggest that the RNIB (and SOCITM) publish their table of accessibility findings for all the websites they looked at for the SOCITM BC 2007 review.
This would show us all what the RNIB and SOCITM were looking for, where we fell down, and what we need to improve on.
We are all striving to provide fully accessible websites, and any help we can be given would be greatfully received.
If we don’t know what we are failing on then we can’t improve our sites, but if you know where we have failed and tell us then we can do something about it.
If the results can’t be published on your website(s), then can they be e-mailed out to the webmasters of all the council websites across the country?
We can also look at the sites that have performed best in these tests to see how they tackled the points that others have failed on.
Donna | 09/03/2007 at 18:27 | Permalink
I’ve just posted the detailed description of how we carry out these accessibility assessments:
“Multiple web accessibility assessments”
http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/general-accessibility/multiple-web-accessibility-assessments/
Donna | 09/03/2007 at 18:33 | Permalink
@Doug: My original post wasn’t intended as an erratum to the report. I was apologising to Dan and anyone else disappointed with the result of our assessment of their site.
Donna | 09/03/2007 at 18:33 | Permalink
@Andy: Ummm… you’re using a Strict doctype in your web pages, which is presumably why you’re getting lots of “deprecated code” errors. Would it be feasible to switch to using a Transitional doctype until you know you’ve got rid of all or most of the old deprecated stuff? That would stop those errors from appearing, and is fine in terms of Double-A.
Donna | 09/03/2007 at 18:45 | Permalink
@Ian: Speaking for RNIB - if we don’t attempt to measure how local authority websites perform, how will we know if they’re improving, and how will we identify some of the common problems they face? We’d be limited to anecdotal knowledge about what’s happening, and since not all local authority web managers frequent the forums and discussion lists, that anecdotal knowledge would be limited and patchy. No method for assessing websites is going to be perfect, but if we can identify the problem areas (and that shifts as technology advances) we can a. highlight these so that those in a position to make changes can do so, and b. where possible, suggest solutions, or highlight those who have found solutions. And we can’t identify those examples of good practice without carrying out some sort of assessment to try to find them in the first place.
I’ve explained in detail in my most recent post what these marginal allowances are and how they work:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/general-accessibility/multiple-web-accessibility-assessments/#marginal
Donna | 09/03/2007 at 18:50 | Permalink
@JackP: Just for you Jack, I included, in the details of the methodology we use, details of the questions we use in our assessment spreadsheet re quotations and the use of BLOCKQUOTE and Q:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/general-accessibility/multiple-web-accessibility-assessments/#quote
Essentially, if we see an actual quotation (block or inline) we look at the source code to see if it’s coded as a quotation. And the flipside of that is that if the automated assessment flags the presence of the BLOCKQUOTE or Q element, we check to see if these are being used for actual quotations, and not for visual effect.
Donna | 09/03/2007 at 19:10 | Permalink
@Andy K: Socitm bit the bullet 4 years ago in terms of including every local authority website in the accessibility testing we do for the Better Connected reports. My post detailing the methodology we use describes how we combine automated and human testing in those assessments. The result of the methodology we use means that for this report we carried out manual assessments of 384 of the 465 local authority websites.
@Steve: The data from the assessment belongs to Socitm - they commission us to carry it out for the Better Connected report. The detailed findings are available for download from Socitm’s website for Socitm Insight subscribers and those who purchase the report. They also receive, each year, direct enquiries from local authority web managers about the results - where those relate to the accessibility assessments, we do our best to provide the detail requested. So I do recommend you contact Socitm Insight directly with regard to requesting that detail information.
Charlie | 13/03/2007 at 17:08 | Permalink
Hi,
Whilst Socitm publish the Top 20 councils in the country, how about publishing the rest so we don’t have to spend nearly £400 to find out where we came. Not only do the top 20 come in the top 20 they save themselves a shed load of money as they don’t need to buy the report. Hardly Fair.