Who told the Hiscox CIO that their website was OK ?
This is a theme we touch on a lot in our conversations with customers, the press and in our blog. There are things we find through our testing that are clearly unacceptable yet they exist on the websites of organisations and they are there each time we test the sites, not just an unlucky one-off.
So in Hiscox's case we find that their Accessibility Webpage on which they say they are going to work with the Shaw Trust to get their site to meet AA compliance. That's a good thing to be doing it's just that on this page the main navigation buttons across the top of the page are images and 3 of the 5 don't have AltTxt defined so even on their Accessibility page they fail the most basic of the Accessibility guidelines. I just can't imagine that anyone with responsibility for the Hiscox website would find these sorts of failings acceptable. Working with specialist Accessibility organisations like The Shaw Trust is not about solving such simple problems. That would be a shameful waste of money and the specialist skills of the Shaw Trust consultants.
So why does this situation arise ? Is this 'accessibility' page simply paying lip service to a legal requirement, are the company kidding themselves or are they being told lies by those testing the site ? When discussions with the in-house web team or the external design agency take place are either of these groups explaining the exact state of the quality of the website ? (And, yes, let's broaden it out beyond just accessibility now as we find in our surveys that sites that score low on one category, say Accessibility, of our tests often also score low under our Function and Code Quality categories as well.)
I would doubt that any real, tangible information is disclosed and in its place are mere platitudes and generalities that are intended to placate those asking the questions (assuming that the questions are asked, of course)
So in place of relying on this I'd suggest that regular reports that independently assess and report on the quality of an organisations web estate is the only viable way for those responsible to really know what's going on.
The image below shows the Sitemorse Instant Snapshot view of the page showing Accessibility issues by drawing blue boxes around the problems. The hover box tells you that there's a missing AltTxt (which is true of the 3 middle tabs. And the black arrow shows where they say they will always have AltTxt) The other blue boxes mostly relate to the use of Deprecated code.
We're not targeting Hiscox in any malicious way, it's just the irony of having such blatant Accessibility issues on their Accessibility page. If we take a look at a page we've mentioned before, the Toshiba Telecoms Home Page, we find 2 broken links. But not just any old broken links. The "Terms and Conditions" and the "Privacy Policy" links don't work, which is a bit more of a problem than the normal run-of-the-mill links as these are both legal requirements.
Again is anyone telling the CIO/CEO that everything is fine with the site and that they are compliant with all the legal requirements placed on organisations with a website ? I suspect they are because I'm sure no one is saying "we're fine apart from these 2 crucial links on our Home Page".
Oh and it's worth pointing out that they've been broken since at least the middle of October 2009 when we spotted them. (that's over THREE months ago)
Take a look at the full size view
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