Comments on: Opinion – Web Accessibility. Life In the Post-Guideline Age.

By: Shazia Shamim

Shazia Shamim — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:59:00 +0000

Accessibility is the biggest issue of disabled people especially blind people. Its true W3C is doing much and their guidelines are excellent but now its time to implement them as well. Most of the new website coming are still less accessible for disabled people.

How we can make sure this thing?

By: Graham

Graham — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:54:38 +0000

I see a lot of similarities here to discussions about cross-browser compatibility (e.g. getting pages to work in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.) that have been ongoing for 10+ years. Developing a site “from scratch has traditionally been a huge pain, especially considering the time needed to keep up with latest browser developments.

Most of these issues, however, are now “covered up” by commonly used APIs and software libraries, such as Yahoo User Interface, script.aculo.us, et al. These do all the hard work of making things work in different browsers, so the developer can concentrate on what they actually want to do. Entire development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails take this even further, making it even easier to develop a whole site that takes these issues into account automatically.

Surely the government is well placed to fund something similar, but which incorporates a philosophy of accessibility and navigational ease? The key would be to unite the “standardistas” (for the front-end standards), some “back-end” developers to get the framework running, appropriate users as testers, and an approach to “disseminating” the whole thing to government website developers that doesn’t suck. If such a thing were technically sound and (most importantly) developmentally friendly, the last part would be a lot easier.

I hate to “bring things down” to a technical level, but this seems to be one of those cases where centralising the hard work – and the investment in it – so that others can benefit makes a lot of sense.

Maybe there’s even something out there that does this already?

By: Joe Clark

Joe Clark — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:15:39 +0000

I believe what I meant (and explicitly said) was that standardistas already know by heart what they have to do to create an accessible site. Nobody pulls out a checklist and ticks one box after another anymore. Beginners, yes. Tables-and-font-tags losers… no, they don’t know this whole thing exists. But real developers do. And they don’t need guidelines.

By: Majeed Saleh

Majeed Saleh — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:54:59 +0000

Thanks for your comments. I think I’ve sorted out those problems now

By: Dennis at Web Axe

Dennis at Web Axe — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:03:59 +0000

This article supports the fact that usability ultimately is what differentiates a web site and especially a web application. That’s why companies with a more even ratio of front-end/design folks and back-end folks will tend to have a much better product.

Note: I see the spam also from the RSS feed, yikes! There are also two instances of breaks within a paragraph. See “where a single version” and “user experience preferable,”.

By: Matt Machell

Matt Machell — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:01:23 +0000

Just a quick note. It looks like your blog has a load of spam appended to this post and hidden inside a display:none. It’s visible in the RSS, which is how I noticed.

On the gap between guidelines and developers, it’s partly linked to the difference between a tick-box and real-world approach, but also movement of organisations to actually having professional web staff rather than people who happen to do web work.