We’ve just completed a job for a section of the Department for Education and Science that uses the Directgov brand. As part of that work we were asked to include some code so that the site would be integrated with the overall web statistics analysis package.

In amongst the criteria for Directgov are the requirements that the web pages must be Double-A accessible and be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. The code that the third party supplier (speed-trap) handed over would have failed on both of these counts - and therefore the same would be the case for all of the pages where it was included. We had a similar experience earlier on in the year with WebTrends.

In this instance only minor amendments were required to solve the problems, but these are the …

Last week I’d posted about the new Askability site produced for the Children’s Society. When I first saw it I had a quick look at the HTML code on the page - it’s a bit of a habit of mine. I was disappointed to see that they were using tables to create the image and text for each symbol, but didn’t mention it as there might be good reason for breaking with accepted best practice in this particular situation.

[Technical background - You’re only supposed to use tables to display content that is table data, not for producing a desired layout. So for example they can be used for listing the temperatures and weather for a set of cities; the results of a poll; etc. In this case tables are being used to line the content up correctly, therefore only for layout purposes. Aligning content vertically is surprisingly difficult …

Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was released for download on 18th October and it started to be made available through Windows Update on 1st November. It seems that it is now the second most popular browser version being used.

TheCounter.com offers a web site analysis tool for its clients and produces global aggregated result for free. The browser summary for November shows IE7 with 7% of the users (3rd in rank behind IE6 and Firefox). So far in December it’s moved ahead of Firefox (that is all versions of Firefox) with approximately 12% of market share. Over the same period IE6 was reduced from 76% to 70% - matching the rise in IE7. With approximately 80 million users in November and 17 million so far in December it’s fair to say that it’s a reasonable picture of current ‘normal’ …

Language has a nasty habit of tripping people up when it comes to accessibility. It’s not something that happens that frequently on most sites, but it’s priority level 1 in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines. So if something slips through the net then you won’t even make A compliance let alone Double-A.

The relevant checkpoint in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is 4.1:
Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document’s text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions).
The language for the page
So the first thing you might want to make sure is that a language has been specified for the page before thinking about your own content. After all there’s no real point in highlighting the exceptions if you haven’t said what is the rule.

When you view the HTML source for one of your content pages you search for ‘lang=’ - you could find this …

A key part of our quality control is to check a site and/or templates with different versions of a range of browsers. However it’s virtually impossible to run different versions of Internet Explorer (IE) on a single copy of Windows and to know that what you’re seeing is the behaviour in more normal circumstances. Windows and IE are very tightly integrated, so there isn’t even an ‘uninstall’ option available if you wanted to remove it from your computer.

One way around this is to have virtual copies of Windows running on your computer, each with their own single, different version of IE. Microsoft have such a product and have now made Virtual PC 2004 free to download (Virtual PC 2007 version has gone into beta testing, so that’ll be the version that you’d have to pay for in the future). To run it you’ll need a reasonable chunk of memory …

The theme of this year’s International Day of Disabled Persons was e-accessibility. The United Nations commissioned Nomensa to undertake a global audit of websites - 100 leading sites taken from 20 countries - and the results have been published. Only 3 achieved the minimum standards for accessibility - the German Chancellor’s site, the Spanish Government site and the British Prime Minister’s site.

Last month the Children’s Society launched a site aimed at children with learning difficulties, called Askability. It has been designed to display the content of the website in a pictorial language (Widgit Rebus Symbols) as well as text.

Out of curiosity I wandered over to one of the companies involved in the production of the site - Widgit - to find out what they did and came across their symbol browser - Webwide.

This takes the alternative approach to displaying a website using this language - and for the vast majority of us the more realistic approach. Rather than the Askability model of having software sitting on the web server that produces the symbols, the browser on the user’s computer does all the work.

The …

There’s a specialised human rights search engine that’s been launched - Hurisearch - involving most of the larger players in that field, and offering the opportunity for small organisations to join in.

Given the recent announcements about Google’s customised search offering I was anticipating that it would be built on the back of that technology. Instead it’s a service that has been developed over the last 3 years by FAST - an enterprise search company.

The timing of the two announcements though has the perennial development debate whirring away in the back of my mind - when is it better to use a ’shrink-wrapped’ solution or to ‘roll your own’?

In this case there’s an interesting fact tucked away in the Hurisearch documentation - they need $187,000 a year to keep the service going. Given the prominence …