Do It Because You Care!

As I will be giving a Right Dynamic presentation on web accessibility at a SHAPE seminar next Tuesday (and again in February), I thought I would put down in pixels some of what I am going to divulge. The plan is to put more up about accessibility in the future, to act as bite-size documents you can read and digest.

I’m going to start with web accessibility guidelines. After all, Right Dynamic did chair the government committee on it and I wrote the resulting guidelines myself!

So, first up is probably the best known: WCAG 1.0. These are produced by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), a body of advisors and consultants led by Tim Berners-Lee (the guy what invented the web in the first place) as part of their Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Sorry, but as with everything web, there are a lot of acronyms.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines one point zero (to put English in to the acronym) have been knocking about since the 90s. So, they’re a little dated now, but they are the standard everyone uses. The W3C are working on WCAG 2.0 and hope to publish that set in 2008, although I think we’re most likely looking at next year…

To muddy those waters, there are those who think the W3C weren’t doing enough, or weren’t working fast enough or were simply getting things wrong. So we have WCAG Samurai. These guidelines have been written by some of leading figures in the word of web accessibility.

We helped draft the guidelines for government webmasters on the subject back in 2000 and much of whet we agreed still holds good today. Be aware, though, that these were for government sites, but everything we say can be applied to a private sector web site.

Beyond WCAG, we have PAS78, which was produced by the DRC (disability rights commission, now the Equality and Human Rights Commission) in association with the BSI in 2006. It’s actually quite similar to WCAG 1.0, and you can download a free copy of the PAS 78 guidelines from the EHRC web site.

There are a plethora of other guidelines out there including ISOs 13407 and 18529 as well as the notorious Section 508. I say notorious because it is often pedalled as something all sites MUST adhere to. Actually it is US legislation that forms part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998 requiring Federal Agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible. So, not much to do with the UK.

Then you have the RNIB, the RNID and other lobbying bodies that do great work raising the profile of accessibility. Interestingly, this raises the idea of who accessibility is for. For most people, it’s about the blind and partially sighted. But the deaf, those with motor disabilities, colour blindness and dyslexia – to name but a few – need to be considered as well.

That’s why accessibility cannot be a simple fire and forget, one-off checklist. It’s an iterative process. And this is where I’d like to introduce my own acronym:

DIBYC

Don’t make your site accessible because you feel it is a legal obligation and you think you might receive a fine or suffer an embarrassing court case and its resulting negative PR.

Do It Because You Care.

That’s what I believe and how Right Dynamic approaches the subject.

Who’s afraid of the big, bad WEB?

It used to annoy me back in 1998, so you may be able to imagine my frustration that the internet (and particularly the web) is still seen as inherently EVIL.

Back in those heady days, the web was evil because as many potential terrorists as you could fit in a training camp could simply ‘log on’ (don’t get me started on that one!) to the internet and find out how to make a nuclear bomb. Of course, those same potential terrorists could have gone to any decent library and found out the same information.

It was simply a case of bashing the new technology because in good, old fashioned luddite style, we fear change.

It also seems that old habits die hard.

Last week in EastEnders we had a situation in which a teenage boy was seen by his mum to be spending a lot of time on his laptop “on the internet”. His mum voiced her concerns to the local IT boffin (not someone who actually works in IT or web design or anything, you understand, merely someone who was young enough not to be a torch-bearing yokel on his way to burn something).

Could it be her son was in chat rooms being groomed by paedophiles? Or perhaps he was gay and meeting other gay men? (of course, the idea that this is something you may not want your offspring doing is questionable in the extreme, but then the BBC does have an obligation to raise these issues). “Nah”, said Bradley (the resident IT expert). “He’s a teenage boy, spending a lot of time on the net. Gotta be porn.”

Genius.

And I suppose that Bradley (or the scriptwriter) has never heard of Second Life or facebook? YouTube? Webmail? Even the BBC web site (which one could happily peruse for millennia)? Or indeed its magnificent iPlayer?

No. It had to be something negative.

One day it would be nice to think that when the word ‘internet’ is used that people won’t automatically picture the denizens of hell tapping away on keyboards to pervert society by any means possible.

Derr Derr Derrrrrrrrr: The Professionals!

In wandering the web, I visit all manner of fora, other blogs and general web sites. More often than not these are business related and - funnily enough - I am interested to see what pearls of wisdom these pages have concerning the internet itself.

Increasingly, I am seeing sites that tell people how easy to produce a web site using WYSIWYG editors and off-the-shelf content management systems. Simply stick your content in. And Robert is, basically, your uncle.

All very true. And all very well and good. If you want a site that looks like what it is: one that has been produced by a managing director or an owner-manager. Not one that looks like it has been produced by a professional designer and a professional coder.

I know that running an SME is fraught with financial decisions, but I am still amazed that business people cut corners when it comes to the presentation of their business. Your web site is like your handshake, your shop window and your calling card.

Why then do people have a DIY approach to this when they would never consider the same with legal or accountancy matters. I think I know the answer. Web designers are not professionals in the same way that lawyers and accountants are. They have trained and have letters after their names. Most web designers don’t.

And here’s my real moan. That one-man-bands and printers who fancy diversifying into sites can just say they’re web designers. While those of us who have served their apprenticeship, know the media very well, understand the complexities of cross-browser compatibility, W3C compliance and Search Engine Optimisation have to accept that we are on the same playing field.

For that reason my industry is not taken as seriously. For that reason people say: ‘Oh, well, I can get it cheaper from that bloke down the pub. Or my brother-in-law. Or his nephew. Or the printers. And yes, they can. But before they do, they would do well to consider whether this is the professional approach.

We are members of the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) and the UK Web Design Association (UKWDA), but anyone can join these.

A few years ago I tried to set up a new Trade Association called UKODA (guess where UKWDA got the idea?) that would basically act as the letters after our name. It would have said to potential clients that a member has achieved a certain level of competency and been in the industry for a certain number of years; it would have given the one-man-bands and the printers something to aim for.

Alas, despite interest and involvement from some of the top players in the industry it never took off.

However, Right Dynamic has always held true to the core values that UKODA would have enshrined. We don’t have the letters after our name, but not for want of anything other than the mechanism to put them there…