Comments on: BC2007 is out

By: Charlie

Charlie — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:08:10 +0000

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.

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 18:10:33 +0000

@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.

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:50:40 +0000

@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.

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:45:51 +0000

@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

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:33:35 +0000

@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.

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:33:18 +0000

@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.

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:27:13 +0000

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/

By: Steve Collins

Steve Collins — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 10:22:39 +0000

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.

By: Ian Hinkley

Ian Hinkley — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:09:27 +0000

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.

By: Dan Champion

Dan Champion — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:51:46 +0000

“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.