Gilding the (accessibility) lily
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 without tables and it appears that this is the problem that they have encountered.]
However I thought that it was time to make my concerns in a public arena after looking at their accessibility page for the site. Now I’m full of admiration for the work that has been done to produce this website, but I don’t think that it’s credible to claim Priority Level 3 (Triple-A) accessibility compliance as defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.
[More technical background - apart from the issue of using tables for layout purposes rather than for displaying table data, there are further checkpoints that refer to marking up the structure of content correctly - for headings, lists & quotes. All of these are required for Double-A compliance and there are pages where these requirements are not met.
Headings appear to be marked-up with a DIV tag, such as this news item for the death of Pinochet. On screen the heading is underlined, but the only addition is that the class 'heading' has been applied - always a sign that something is wrong. In fact there is nothing that they can do about this with their current implementation as it is not possible to have a table inside a heading since this would create invalid XHTML (another requirement for Double-A compliance).
Similarly the list of news categories should be marked-up as a list, but it is just a series of symbols. (Intriguingly the list of news stories at the next level down does use lists correctly, and no tables are used to create the symbols.)
The form in the About Us page is also missing LABEL tags to associate the radio buttons with the text labels. Again this is a checkpoint for Double-A compliance.]
In part I can see how they might have felt justified to make the claim as they state that it has been checked by Bobby. This is an automated accessibility auditing program, and I can well imagine that it didn’t find any errors. However this form of assessing a website has its limitations as a number of the requirements require an understanding of the content before a judgement can be passed. Usually these are flagged up as warnings and the user is advised to manually check the page to ensure that the points have been complied with. That would be the case with the headings and lists - after all the program would not be able to judge whether a piece of text is a heading or not.
So full marks for breaking new ground with site that addresses this particular audience, but I would prefer the accessibility statement to be more realistic and state that it was only Priority Level 1 (A) compliant and aiming to improve to at least Priority Level 2 (Double-A).
According to the December issue of the Headstar E-Access Bulletin (not yet on their website) the Department of Trade & Industry had also claimed that their website was Priority Level 3 (Triple-A) compliant. I notice that the accessbility statement has been changed to say that it is only Priority Level 1 (A) compliant and their undertaking an audit to find out what is necessary to achieve Priority Level 2 (Double-A) compliance.
It might not be easy to state publicly but at least the intended audience are aware of what they are likely to encounter when using the website and make the necessary adjustments. I don’t think we, as developers, designers and website managers, are helping the cause of e-accessibility if we misrepresent the effort required to maintain the highest levels of conformance.
