It looks as though the first high-profile test case for website accessibility may be heard in the courts, following allegations that blind charity Royal National Institution for the Blind is to sue the airline BMI on behalf of members who can't negotiate their website.

Legislation on making websites accessible was brought in in 2002, and although most - if not all - large organisations have made the right noises on their intentions in this area, Sitemorse continues to find many examples of non-accessible sites in its research.

No serious cases have come forward in the UK, but large companies have always worried that charities or pressure groups would eventually initiate action on  behalf of the large numbers of disabled and partly-disabled people who use screen-readers and other software aids to view websites and who cannot find their way around websites not designed for those aids.

Sitemorse has little sympathy for large organisations who have the resources to improve their sites but who so far have failed to do so, and we regularly hear a litany of excuses - including one from a major retailer who complained we always check their site on the wrong day of the week.

The long arm of the law may finally be catching up with those who could make their sites accessible in hours or days but who never seem to get around to it.

"One Foot in the Grave" actor Richard Wilson will be spotlighting the use of cookies this week  in a controversial Channel Four documentary that says routine tracking of web users made him feel 'spied on'.

He told the Daily Mail website: "Perhaps the most shocking discovery I made on the TV programme was that machines don't just make life more difficult, many are also tracking what we do.

"Like millions of others, I spend more and more time online. I love my Mac and laptop as much as the next person. During the making of the programme, the producers asked me  to look for something I might want  to buy on the internet. I chose a camera and looked at some sites. Then they told me to click on to a news website.

"Adverts for cameras immediately began popping up even though it was a completely unrelated site. It felt as though I was being spied on.

"And, according to web expert Dr Joss Wright, in a way, I was. He explained web browsers to me. This is the software that allows us to look at the internet. Every time we connect to a website, the browser puts a small piece of information on our computer called a cookie.

"These cookies build up a complete profile of our online activity and personal interests which are then traded by retailers and advertisers.

"There are now such things as 'retargeting companies' - which  are paid by a third party to try to move appropriate consumers to their site. I'd never even heard  of them yet apparently they are making hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

"In the spring, new laws will start to be enforced so that websites will need our consent before using cookies to retrieve and store our personal data. This will at least give us a say in who profits from our information." he added.

The programme is likely to bring the issue that most companies have been talking about to the wider public ahead of a one-year delay in implementing the new EU law he mentioned. The new law will apply to all companies with websites. Sitemorse offers products that will, among many other things, allow users to track their cookies - including our free Snapshot tool. For more information on the background to the legislation and how users can keep track of their cookies, see the Cookie Reports website.

The programme, On Hold, airs at 8pm on January 17 on Channel Four. The full article is available on the Daily Mail website.

There have been numerous, on-going discussions about whether Microsoft .Net code is Standards compliant or not.  We took part in subsequent discussions after this dialog between one of our Customers - the National Audit Office - and the W3C.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2010May/0028.html

In the discussions with the W3C following the dialog we got several different reactions from "ah yes looks like our validator is wrong not to highlight these errors" to "no we're absolutely correct in everything we do if you reference Appendix C and Addendum x and subsection something or other......." (this last one is somewhat paraphrased I have to admit).

What we have agreed on is (and this is essentially what the link says) that tags such as id="__VIEWSTATE" are OK if the page is declared as XHTML in the DOCTYPE but NOT if it's declared as HTML.

This changes to the Sitemorse engine were implemented late afternoon on Thursday 11th November 2010.  Audits running AFTER this will use these new rules.

Sitemorse reported these errors in the Code quality section of the Audit reports under the Badvalue error.  .Net users should, from now on, see a reduction in the number of Code quality errors reported, with a proportionate rise in their Code Quality score.

The comments in the link point out that, say, id="__VIEWSTATE" shouldn't cause modern browsers a problem, which is probably true in most cases.  But that isn't the purpose of Sitemorse.  It isn't possible to know just what all browser will do under different circumstances and combination of circumstances.  And as new versions are released they become more "standards compliant" i.e. LESS tolerant of non-standard code (hence IE's compatibility button).  So we tell you about everything that's wrong so that you can make a judgement on whether to correct the code. 

The Linktarget issues reported under "AA" Accessibility are caused by having multiple links on a page that have the same "name" but link to different pages.

A good example I saw recently was on a fashion retailers site.  They had tabs under the banner for things like Men, Women, Denim, Lifestyle.  When you hover over a tab you get a hover box appear with the sub categories for the tab.  The problem was that under both the Men and Women tabs you had sub-categories like Shirts, Shorts, Footwear and Denim.  When you moved the mouse over a sub-category the hover-box came up with just the same word.  So someone using a screen reader reading out the links on the page would struggle to know whether they'd end up at women's shorts or men's shorts.  With Denim it's even worse because the link from the Denim tab as well as the ones under men's and women were all called Denim.

An easy way to remedy this is to use a Title attribute

title="Women's Shorts" href="Store/Browse.aspx?DepartmentId=Womens&amp;CategoryId=Womens_Shorts">Shorts</a>

Most of your navigation will probably be in your Templates so it's a relatively minor change that will have a big impact on the whole of your site

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.

View  full size image

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

I've received a few emails asking why SOCITM, Shaw Trust and AbilityNet assess sites as achieving high levels of accessibility and yet these same sites do not rank highly in the Sitemorse Surveys.  People find it curious, particularly as SOCITM use Sitemorse data as part of their assessment.

A recent email came in specifically asking about Manchester, Oxfordshire and Mendip councils.

The simple answer is that whereas the aforementioned organisations primarily assess a site's accessibility,  Sitemorse, on the otherhand, checks for many more things (Function, Accessibility, HTML code compliance, Performance, Metadata, Spelling, eMail links, PDFs etc)  and scores the site across all of the tests we perform.  So we are rating the sites by far more criteria, hence the potential for different ratings.  This is particularly true of Manchester and Mendip.  They achieved an OK score for Accessibility but scored poorly for Performance and Function. (Function is primarily checking links, so they both had problems with broken links).  We still found issues with their AA compliance on some of their pages and this is another difference between manual testing and automated testing.

It isn't practical, or cost effective, to test a large number of pages when assessing a site using manual testing.  Whereas Sitemorse is exceptionally good at checking hundreds or thousands of pages on a website where the only way to test is by looking at every single page and every item on every page to check them against the guidelines and standards  However, manual testing is very good at assessing a site where it is necessary to make the more subjective judgements that are necessary when assessing a site.  How intuitive is the navigation of a site ?  Is something that is ideally suited to a manual check and very difficult to accurately assess using automated methods.  That is why we always advise our clients to use a mixture of manual testing as well as using Sitemorse.

And, of course, sites change over time.  So SOCITM's assessment of sites that was carried out at the end of 2008 for the Better Connected report was valid at the time but isn't necessarily accurate come May 2009.  So on-going testing and monitoring of a website's quality and accessibility is essential.  Again something that plays to the strengths of automated testing  and is again not very cost effective when looking at manual testing.

So I haven't really thought about the detail of this.  It's more of a musing than an informed article.

I've been reading various news articles about the advancements in touch screen technology and how it will become ubiquitous over the next few years. Microsoft are researching the possibilities of having the main UI for Windows and even the possibility of combining touch and voice recognition in an attempt to do away with the keyboard and mouse altogether.

So is that an improvement in terms of accessibility ?  We already use voice recognition quite successfully to aid navigation and the technology is improving all the time, so that it is becoming a viable option for composing text content - though editing can be quite painful.

But if the design of the User Interface shifts to tough screens will this make life easier of more difficult ?  Will the navigation be easier ?  Think of what makes an iPod Touch or iPhone's interface so easy to use.  It's all about flicking a finger across the screen to scroll around, or moving your finger and thumb apart or together to expand of shrink an image.  How does this work for someone that can't currently control a mouse or keyboard ?  If designers aren't careful they could add a layer of complexity here that makes life even more difficult for disabled users to use their websites.  I haven't read through the WCAG 2.0 document yet (it's on the list now that it's in final stages of ratification) so I don't know what it has to say about this subject.

In terms of testing, we'll still be able to check the code that underlies the new interface so it doesn't make a great deal of difference to the bulk of our tests.  And if there are Accessibility guidelines that relate to the touch screen technology we'll review them and implement them if possible.

We've been working on various aspects of the Sitemorse service in order to improve the service and information we provide.

We will be launching a new look and feel to the general side of the site (i.e. those pages accessible without logging in) and will gradually work through the "business" end of the site.  We are always focused on making the interface as easy and consistent as we can so that you don't need long training sessions to become familiar with the interface.  And when we explain things to you in the help screens or inform you of report availability or monitoring alerts via our emails we aim to keep them clear and simple.  As new features and updates come up I will schedule training sessions a refresher sessions to bring you up to speed.

I'm writing this because I (attempted) to read a news article about a preview of Microsoft's research efforts.  No big deal you might think, the usual stuff about touch screens and voice recognition with some unified messaging messages.  Well take a look at the following snippets

The automated receptionist is one of the fruits of a Microsoft Research effort, known as the Situated Interaction project. Other projects the Situated Interaction team is investigating include "multi-participant engagement and dialog models, conversational scene analysis, spatio-temporal trajectory reasoning, and behavioural modelling".

and the ever so slightly more accessible:-

Mundie referred to the demo as an example of "first life" - which he described as "a mirror world of 3D that everybody can participate in constructing and maintaining and which gives us a navigational metaphor that's completely consistent with the world we already live in".

I deliberately used the word accessible there as it is a great example of how what you write can make a website as inaccessible to people as whether you're meeting WCAG.  And writing such gobbledygook affects every single person that uses your site.  So make sure that you don't sprinkle little gems of incomprehensible techno speak in your content.  "Keep it simple, stupid" is a good rule.  You don't have to make your descriptions mono-syllabic and boring but just make sure that, even when you are writing something for a techno savvy audience that you don't slip into the terrible trap that Microsoft's Mr. Mudie did.  It'll drive away your prospects just a quickly as a broken link, slow performance or failing accessibility standards.

I'm not going to rant on about the campaign for plain English and such.  This is just something that hit me today.  I wanted to find something out about something that should have been able to be expressed in relatively simple terms.  Yet I came away with absolutely no idea whatsoever what they were on about.  And instead of coming away with a positive view of what Microsoft are doing, I came away feeling somewhat contemptuous of them - it felt to me as if it was a bunch of guys that needed to show how much cleverer than me they are.  Well guys, what I actually needed was a brief outline of what new things you are working on that may affect me shortly.

Must go, I need to crack on with constructing and maintaining my mirror world of 3D otherwise I wont have my navigational metaphor ready so won't be able to find the sandwich shop at lunchtime.  

This is one objection that our sales people get quite a lot.  Often because people in this position are starting to look at how they'll test the new site before launching and enquire about our services.

Website managers often hold the view that until the new site is heavily populated with content that it isn't worth spending time testing as there's nothing to test.  So, yes, they are interested in Sitemorse but "not just yet". 

However, lets look at the rationale behind the presumption that taking Sitemorse when you've just embarked on a major redesign of your site is a waste of time.

Will ABSOLUTELY NONE of the content from the old site move to the new site ?

Unlikely.  So you can be testing the current content right now to make sure it's OK.  That way you don't taint the new site with old errors.

PDFs are a great case in point.  I would suspect that most of your PDFs will move to the new site.  Make sure that they are all accessible and that any links and mailto: links work.

How about Templates and Style sheets ?

They may change but who wrote the old ones and who is writing the new ones ?

If it's the same people or the old ones are being updated rather than scrapped you could bring poor quality practices into the new site from the old.  Test them now and clean them up.  That way your developers will familiarise themselves with best practice BEFORE coding the new site.  It's often easier to learn by your (or others') mistakes than to learn from a text book.

What about external links and feeds ?

It's pretty likely that you'll retain a high proportion of your existing links and feeds.  Do you know how well they all work right now ?  How many links fail on your site currently ?  How many have permanent redirects set up ?  How may mailto: links go to non-existent email addresses ?  Now is a good time to find out before you port them to the new site.  Sitemorse will also test the first page of a linked site, running all of its test on that page.  If it fails miserably you might choose not to link to it anymore as it would taint your new site's image.

How accessible is your current site ?

If you find out what you didn't do too well on the old site you can make sure you don't repeat the same mistakes on the new site. 

Hindsight is OK but foresight is much better.

And is your code standards compliant.

As this is the section that most organisations get their lowest score it's reasonable to assume that the most likely case is that it isn't.  Internet Explorer has been very tolerant of non-compliant code (see my blog posts http://blog.sitemorse.com/2008/06/firefox-3-hits-8-million-downl.html and http://blog.sitemorse.com/2008/06/ie8-standards-compliance-issue.html) which has allowed coders to write code that they assume is fine because it seems to work OK.  My blog posts explore this topic in more detail but essentially that fact is becoming less true as Opera, Firefox, Safari and now IE8 become much less tolerant.  Check out what you do wrong in your old site now so you don't make the same errors in the new site. 

It's MUCH cheaper to engineer out errors while you're coding than to correct them later when you're testing or they fail on the Live site.

I believe the answer to the question of when should you start testing your new site is BEFORE you even start to develop it. 

We have seen many new site launches spoiled by poor content transferred from the old site.

In June 2007 I wrote a piece that made the point that it was time that the DRC took action against sites that were clearly not meeting a reasonable level of accessibility. (http://www.sitemorse.com/news.html?id=1288457167)  The premise was that sitting back waiting for the "market" to drive sites towards accessibility, so they didn't miss out on the £6bn of spending power estimated to be up for grabs, was clearly not working.  A year on and has anything changed ?

Well there hasn't been a flurry of legal cases hitting the courts.  If you search for instances of court cases the are very few and you always find the same tired old examples of AOL and Target in the US, the Sydney Olympics in Australia.  But nothing that would put the frighteners on a website owner looking to assess the risk of prosecution if they do nothing about accessibility.

So if the stick isn't being wielded and therefore the threat of it's use is becoming less and less effective how are the carrots doing ?

The main carrot as always is MONEY.  What's the return on investment if I spend £x thousands on making a site accessible.  I found one site that was a usability and accessibility consultancy that had an ROI calculator - great, I thought, that'll make this bit of my blog easy.  When you look at it they ask "What return do you expect from improved usability?" and have the following options - low 0.5%, medium 1%, high 2%.   That seems low to me.  Another site pointed out that there are 54 million disabled Americans with a discretionary spending power of $175bn - although another site gave the same number of people a spending power of $700bn !  And the best another site came up with was the following bullet points

Accessibility= ROI

• Avoid the courtroom.
• Get your information out and process less enquiries.
• Create better software practises, and cut down on code maintenance and server load.
• Move to alternative browsing technologies with less development.
• Gain prestige by being a leader.

So it looks like there are no tangible numbers or percentages out there to quote which would act as an easy justification for the effort involved. (apart from 0.5%, 1% or 2% which aren't going to set the world alight).  The above bullet points are all valid, they are just difficult to put monetary values against.

If we look at our Sector Surveys and see how the Retail, Food & Beverage and FTSE 100 sites are doing (they get the carrots) compared to Local Government sites (where varying sizes of sticks have been wielded) we see the following percentage of pages passing our Accessibility tests

Local Gov.          "A" - 95%   "AA" - 26%

FTSE100            "A" -  77%   "AA" - 8%

Food & Bev.        "A" - 64%    "AA" - 5%

Retail                   "A" - 52%    "AA" - 0.44%

So the people with the most to gain from the spending power of the disabled community are taking the least notice.  As my blog from yesterday discussed, the COI are bringing in further "incentives" for .gov.uk sites to improve their sites (which are already pretty good and certainly well ahead of the private sector) with the threat of (though I doubt it will ever come to it) removing the right to use .gov.uk.

And my conclusion is ?  BRING BACK THE BIRCH !