My WCAG 2.0 AAA Implementation
A while back I mentioned I made a AAA web site that conformed to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0. The site was for California disability rights attorney, Lainey Feingold, who works primarily with the blind and visually impaired community on technology and information access issues. She is nationally recognized for negotiating accessibility agreements and for pioneering the collaborative advocacy and dispute resolution method known as Structured Negotiations. That’s from her site — a site which is one of just two AAA implementations (the other being Vision Australia).
I didn’t talk about it too much back when I made it. I was waiting for the higher-ups to hand down their verdict, confirm its status, and list it on their site. It passed. It’s now official. And it’s listed: you can check out the details of this implementation on this W3C WAI page. And now that that is done and the WCAG 2.0 is “real” — meaning officially implemented (proving it works) — and that it’s about to become our web accessibility guide after the proposed recommendation’s review period (the final recommendation is slated for release this December), it’s time to briefly discuss the overall experience of working within. Getting there, and making it so — some impressions.
Oh My
That heading best describes my impression of the WCAG 2.0 when I first set eyes on it. At the time I wasn’t looking forward to upgrading, so to speak. But that was down the road, albeit not nearly as far down that road as I had thought. I didn’t know I’d find myself neck deep in it so soon. I had a job to do, though, so I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I started by doing some reading. Lots of reading. Too much, I dare say. One of the problems I noted almost immediately was that I was reading typical W3C-generated content. In other words, long pages with wall-to-wall text, monster links from hell, well, you probably know what that’s like. While the WCAG 2.0 is very thorough, it suffers from a lack of simple readability.
I cannot fully lay blame on the publishers. It’s a conundrum. You’ve heard the expression that describes packing ten pounds of stuff in a five-pound bag, right? That’s what the W3C’s WAI had to do. Personally I’d prefer more page views with less scrolling and a narrower main column. That’s me. In my opinion that would aid readability and thus make the material easier to digest. Someone else, however, may like just the opposite. I think it’d be a good idea to add a style changer to better accommodate individual tastes allowing users to study under ideal conditions.
Regardless, all this aside, in no time at all it’ll be just like working under the WCAG 1.0: no heavy reading. We’ll be working with a document one has become familiar with. Give it time.
Getting Into It
It didn’t take days or even hours to sense the direction of the WCAG 2.0. Essentially I quickly saw it as more rigid and matter-of-fact. Less gray area. The WCAG 2.0 is very clear, albeit wordy. It leaves very little for erroneous interpretation, unlike the WCAG 1.0. I immediately felt that was a positive attribute. With the WCAG 2.0 there should be fewer false claims, fewer misleading icon fliers touting wishful thinking, and other “accessible site” maladies.
I also realized the core accessibility is essentially the same. A developer meets each applicable individual success criterion contained within each applicable guideline under the recommendation’s four principles. The game itself has changed very little in many regards. User needs haven’t suddenly changed, today’s accessibility requirements are much the same as they have been all along. Many developers, myself included, have been incorporating the logical bits of the WCAG 2.0 for a while. An example would be input placeholder text; it hasn’t been needed for quite a long time. I haven’t used it but once in the past three years, and it wasn’t for accessibility.
One change is how one has to be somewhat more methodical during development (but maybe that’s because I am new to the WCAG 2.0 even though I’ve worked with it), and how one publishes their optional conformance statement. Expect more tedious albeit optional paperwork getting there if it’s going to be official. It reminds me of growing organically. Anyone can become an organic grower, it’s easy, but if you want to sell a tomato and tell buyer’s it’s organically grown, by law you must support the claim via recognized certification.
In light of this it seems to me accessible sites will be made in one of two ways in the future. First you’ll have those who make a site, make it accessible, and then go on to the next project. Then there will be those who will make a site, make it accessible, then spend another day or more explaining what success criteria were applicable to the site, and how each applicable success criterion was met (or not). I will probably produce accessible sites the easy way, making no claims. This will satisfy most developers and most clients. Some companies, however, are going to want and need a proper conformance statement — documentation supporting the legal claim of their site’s accessibility. After all, why would they bother making their sites accessible if they aren’t complying with the law or being forced to. Sorry, I’m not trying to sound negative, but I don’t see many companies making their sites accessible for the sole purpose of providing access.
Room for Abuse?
I mentioned applicability above but didn’t explain. It’s really quite simple. If you embed an image on a web page, for example, then any success criteria associated with doing so must be met in order to claim that page’s conformance. Conversely, if you have no embedded images on that page, then you can ignore the applicable criteria — for that page — claiming partial conformance or none at all. Where once having a failing page would’ve changed the status of the site as a whole, now pages and even whole sections can be written off. My concern is I wonder if we’ll see long and complex partial conformance statements cropping up, linked to from a global footer. One vaguely declaring an accessible site. You know, like a badge.
The WCAG 2.0 is more rigid and matter-of-fact, as I said before, but it may also be looser because of this partial conformance alternative. If one can discount individual pages, that helps lessen the challenge of actually having to figure out a way to get the job done right and going for that ever useful whole-site accessibility. Will developers be content making some accessible pages?
To the credit of the WCAG 2.0, one page that doesn’t make it can lead to whole sections not making it and that is quite fair. An online shop is a good example of how this might apply. A real example, in fact, is my hosting site. It’s very, very accessible, one of my better builds and one of my favorites. I didn’t bother claiming it, though (even though I could), as I’d have to disclaim the shopping part of the site in the statement. The shop itself is just fine, fully accessible, but final check out is at PayPal and I’m afraid they just aren’t there yet in terms of making their stuff conform. A la WCAG 1.0 thinking, I don’t feel comfortable “claiming” anything because of this issue. In my eyes a web site is a whole package and it is either accessible or it isn’t.
Current Thinking
Unless I am specifically hired to create a site that claims to conform to the WCAG 2.0, complete with documentation, I probably won’t bother. I’ll just make my typical AA whole-site and be happy people can use it. I will make no claims. Anyway, actions speak louder than words. If the site is accessible people will be able to use it. Claims or lack thereof won’t have a bearing on this fact.
My advice, make and keep your stuff accessible. If the WCAG 2.0 allows something you know isn’t as good as it could be, then do it right. Don’t take liberties at the expense of others just because you’re permitted to. Also, don’t bother with writing a conformance statement unless you’re prepared to upgrade the entire site, or at least the bulk of it. Don’t think you’ll be doing anyone any favors making an “accessible” site that “conforms” if you’ll be disclaiming big chunks of it. The WCAG 2.0 may allow and maybe even condone this, but I think it could be a cop out.
And if you do plan on doing it right, do it for the right reasons. In the case of LFLegal.com, some of what was added to the site was added solely for conformance. Some of it, like the dumbed down page summaries, I personally feel detract from the site’s usability, cluttering it unnecessary. In the case of that site, though, reaching AAA was an end, not a means.
Also be sure to charge appropriately. Not for the accessibility. That should already be part of your pricing and not an extra as you’ll do no less. If you’re going to claim the site, though, making it official, expect to burn away some hours doing so. I think a documentation up-charge of anywhere from 10-40% of the site’s projected cost will be reasonable and expected.
This is my opinion as of this time. I may be right, wrong, or simply confused. I am not yet intimate with the WCAG 2.0 (that’ll take years), but the observations I shared herein are what I came away with from this virginal experience. All in all, minus a few troubling items, I feel the WCAG 2 is generally headed in the right direction. A lot of its success will hinge on how developers use it and how companies try to abuse it. And of course, much will depend on whether or not businesses and institutions are compelled to even go there. Time will tell.
Thankee Sai
This was quite the experience and I did have some help along the way. Specifically I’d like to say thanks to Lainey Feingold for choosing me as her developer, to Jim Thatcher, Gregg Vanderheiden, Ben Caldwell, and Joshua Miele for their expert accessibility suggestions and insights, to Louis Libert for helping with content coding, and to Thierry Koblentz and Dave Woods for some CSS bug-tracking and screen shots, respectively.
David Zemens - 1955 Design responds:
Posted: November 7th, 2008 at 2:49 pm →
Congratulations on being recognized, Mike.
And many thanks for another article full of insight regarding accessible web design. With you branching off into photography (and good for you!) the rest of us lose out on more frequent articles from you regarding issues of web design.
Blair Millen responds:
Posted: November 8th, 2008 at 8:50 am →
Very interesting feedback Mike, particularly the aspect of making claims or not. I need to start my own WCAG 2.0 research now I think.
Steven Clark responds:
Posted: November 8th, 2008 at 6:44 pm →
Yes very interesting, Mike. I would have to agree with your concerns about partial conformance as most larger organisations that I’ve dealt with would have managers who aren’t “web people” but simply project managers in charge of these decisions. Cost, time - that’s where they’ll look. If they can justify partial conformance as alright to their manager (again not “web people”) then their objectives are met and they’ll tell the developers to shimmy under the bar. A lot, as you say, will depend on the uptake of the idea of WCAG 2 and how the wider industry adopts it.
In Tasmania (where I live and work) the State Gov’t have had WCAG 2 on their web publishing policy documents since April with requirements for AA and as much of AAA as possible (stronger than WCAG 1 recommendations). But in recent work with the Department of Environment, Parks, Heritage and the Arts (DEPHA) I was simply told not to go there, they weren’t interested. Which was disappointing as I’d specifically been pulled in as a web standards developer. The more I mentioned gov’t policy the chillier it became until I left. So I’m not sure if that gap between policy and practice is quite gelling here yet. The non-webby managers tend to say “Can you make this happen today” (as a paste on supplemental issue)… which is probably what we’ve always been up against.
I have to admit though that originally I was not a big supporter of WCAG 2. I’ve done a reasonable amount of reading and look forward to shorter documentation (touch wood)…
Thanks for the article, it’s going to be a great resource for myself and others as we move forward.
Stomme poes responds:
Posted: November 13th, 2008 at 6:58 am →
Mike said: “…but I don’t see many companies making their sites accessible for the sole purpose of providing access.” (I didn’t dare use blockquote since I wasn’t sure if I could add the inner p or if that was dynamically added or what… bleh)
A big company, like Amazon, who realises more accessibility = more paying customers, they’ll do it. Esp when they already have a “working” site online, they can wait til the accessibility repairs are finished. In Amazon’s case, they were specifically focused on the blind, who are as a group more likely to do their shopping online anyway. We want to encourage this, rather than the fighting-back behaviour of Target.
As far as half-accessible sites, an accessibility group in the Netherlands is pondering the same question. While I think at least getting the newer stuff on a large, old site accessible is better than nothing (so let’s not discourage that!), of course it’s not the same as making a whole site accessible. Esp with the shopping cart example– what good is it to be able to shop and everything if you can’t pay? Lawlz.
Steven above wrote: The more I mentioned gov’t policy the chillier it became until I left.
Was is possible the problem was more “blind big-government demands rub us the wrong way” more than “we don’t want to be accessible”? What good reason did they have to build their site with barriers? It certainly doesn’t help them.
Christophe Strobbe responds:
Posted: November 14th, 2008 at 6:55 am →
Hi Mike,
This is a very nice article. I would like to respond to your concerns about partial conformance claims. You write:
It is important to understand that a statement of partial conformance is not a conformance claim but a statement of non-conformance. The language for a statement of partial conformance has been slightly adapted in the Proposed Recommendation to make this more evident; it now reads: “This page does not conform, but would conform to WCAG 2.0 at level X if the following parts from uncontrolled sources were removed…”
So you can’t “get away with” partial conformance. Either you conform to WCAG 2.0 or you don’t. If you don’t conform, there are certain conditions under which you can publish a statement of partial conformance.
The other part of the issue is what you include in a conformance claim. WCAG 2.0 allows you to claim conformance at different levels of granularity: a single page (but not parts of a page), a subsection of a site, or a complete web site. Developers should be able to use WCAG 2.0 even when they can’t make a complete webs site conformant all at once. (It was also impossible to provide an accurate definition of “web site” that covered all types of sites.) If a site owner excludes part of a web site from their conformance claim … well, that simply means that they don’t claim conformance for that part of their site. Policy makers can still decide that complete web sites (according to their definition of “web site”) must conform.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: November 15th, 2008 at 2:04 am →
Thank you, Christophe, that’s good to know. Apparently there’s been a bit of a change for the better.
I do still think abuse, though, is possible/probable by those who may make a footer text link, for example, to the statement detailing (possibly confusingly so) their non- or partial-conformance. Irregardless of whether it complies to any level on any page or not, it’d be a form of show. The text link, of course, would read “Site Accessibility” or something to that effect. Just enough to slightly mislead while not actually doing anything wrong. Companies can start the process of stripping problematic features from their sites and replacing them with accessible alternatives like good old fashioned HTML, write the statement, then drag their heels on the rest, all while possibly being in a legally defensible position. Of course that all depends on the law makers and whether laws with teeth and real deadlines are passed and then subsequently enforced.
In other words, for now anyway, we still need companies to do this for the right reasons so it’ll actually get done in a way that makes their sites not only accessible to those who need web accessibility, but in a way that makes them comfortably and enjoyably accessible. That’s how I see it, anyway. Hopefully I’m just being too pessimistic or negative.
Steven Clark responds:
Posted: November 15th, 2008 at 10:05 pm →
Stomme, the issue at DEPHA is simply that they are managed by non-web project managers. That means they take their lead from the head designer who is pushing portfolio (graphic design) like at http://parks.tas.gov.au or speciality (flash) like http://arts.tas.gov.au. Because it’s about creating pretty pictures that pop in their view at present and if it works on IE6, IE7, IE8, latest Firefox, latest Safari and Chrome then in their perspective it works. They don’t want to know about wider audiences. And they have a mindset that everyone has access to broadband - which in Tasmania is a crock but that’s their view.
The view has been promoted a Tasmanian problem of patting everyone on the back and saying what a great job that they’ve done. So criticism or even critique is not welcome - no post mortems after a project, for example. The non-web manager says pretty picture and you make me look good, and graphic designer continues. They purposefully choose as a departmental policy not to underline links, for example, because that detracts from the design (said to me on my first day there).
They hired me as a web standardista… but their worldview of web standards was simply that they use CSS.
It’s not about blind gov’t demands at all. It reminds me of a student I had who stood up quite out of context and just blurted “I don’t care about blind people”. Some people don’t get it. And if project managers aren’t even aware of web technologies then the wrong people in the dev team can easily hijack the boat to make it about pretty pictures…
Just my 2 cents from experience. Sorry for the ranty reply, it’s just not always as simple as the idea that everyone would make the best choice if only we didn’t demand conformance. In their case they hired me as a standardista and for usability / accessibility. Unfortunately their worldview was somewhat askew in the first place. So I left… I doubt anyone could have pushed the barrow in that department for better practice.
Steven Clark responds:
Posted: November 15th, 2008 at 10:07 pm →
BTW if you click the Arts Tasmania link from my previous comment it shows an error - just refresh the page and the Flash will start.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: November 15th, 2008 at 10:37 pm →
Thanks Steven. Regarding broadband, I don’t think it’s available to everyone in the US either.
Steven Clark responds:
Posted: November 16th, 2008 at 4:58 pm →
Hi Mike, lol… Caught me with a faux pas.
Yes anywhere the assumption is wrong that everyone has broadband… and it gets frustrating when the people saying that are hostile towards their own public policy documents saying “Don’t go there”. And in a way I see their point - they want gov’t sites to be contemporary design rather than stark. The problem is that even an accessible stark gov’t website would be better than a 600K+ site. In Australia we’re actually paying for broadband with metered caps - pay extra or get tapped down to 68KB after we blow our limit for the month. So even if one has broadband, and even if one is willing to wait, then these large sites can impact on the user’s access or cost them penalty fees.
But it falls back to the “generic project manager” in my experience. You can’t expect a generic project manager who doesn’t know anything about the web to run these kinds of projects. Their decisions are swayed by other generic managers above.
Next year I’m moving my focus towards an MBA (Master of Business Administration) because that’s the level that I seem to run into the real barrier to progress. Without a change agent and high up support driving web initiatives they can become bogged down in the designer’s need to create pretty pictures, or the Flash guy’s need to flog his high end / high money skills. Without a strategic focus, in other words, it’s no wonder that the problem exists. I pointed out that the search on Parks, for example, was JavaScripted and those without JS enabled would be affected and not even notified why it wasn’t working. The reply, “Oh you mean the six people who use Linux won’t be able to search?”…
So, I guess it’s become a baton to carry after having run into similar issues in several departments that I’d like to see better government websites in Tasmania. Attractive is fine, but not at the cost of user experience.
Apologies for the long rant again Mike… but yeh, not only lack of broadband there’s mobile and other handheld devices, multicultural society not anglo saxon, there are literacy and numeracy issues, assistive devices etc etc. Our state has, for example, the oldest population in Australia. Yet accessibility is not necessarily passing from the public policy documentation to the practical field application.
OK will shut up now
Stomme poes responds:
Posted: November 17th, 2008 at 5:13 am →
Steve wrote: “It’s not about blind gov’t demands at all. It reminds me of a student I had who stood up quite out of context and just blurted “I don’t care about blind people”. Some people don’t get it.”
I hear ya man, my husband says that to me just to get me riled up (playing devil’s advocate, but also stating what is widely thought in web design– my colleagues joke always that “oh, now blind people can insure their motor vehicles, ha ha ha” because of my work). I would say a Parks and Recreation site is actually required to be beautiful (at least, in the US they need people’s support to send more tax money their way) but to do it at the detriment of others is inconsiderate at the least and hopefully illegal at the most.
I DO have broadband (but Flash and scripts off) and that page took a good 30 seconds to load, which I consider slow compared to what I’m used to. Now I’ve seen beautiful, image-rich sites that were pretty accessible, so their only excuse is don’t-want-to attitude. But I had just been wondering if that was it or if the attitude had come more from “authority issues” because that is sometimes a problem also in web design, people not liking being told to do something even though it’s clearly a Good Thing.
If I had had to work for those guys, I’d have no hair left– it’d be pulled out from frustration (though I run into some of the same stuff here).
Mike, I’ve kept going back to that Feingold site now for various things I keep seeing in there… the “showing off-to-the-side skip links” thing is new to me. I immediately saw the use, but had never shown skip links unless they were on the page and hovered. I’m going to implement it in the site I’m currently working on, as well as some other stuff I’ve seen in there.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: November 19th, 2008 at 11:44 pm →
Cool news. The LF Legal site has been added to the WordPress Showcase.
MrsMarshall responds:
Posted: December 16th, 2008 at 10:33 am →
Help
I have been designing accessible sites, well trying to,for the past 10 years and was great at rattling off which guideline sat in which priority and explaining what they really meant. I am really struggling to get my head a round the new guidelines.
We have always used Priority 2 as a standard and provided clients with documentation to show conformance as best we could. I don’t know where to start now. Does anyone know of an automated tool that has been updated to test against the new requirements?
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: December 17th, 2008 at 3:26 pm →
I don’t MrsMarshall, but then again, most of the things the automated tools can pick up haven’t really changed. Sorry for the delay. Big storm here. No power for six days (so far).
Patrick Burke responds:
Posted: January 26th, 2009 at 3:46 pm →
Mike, this is a fantastic article. Sorry not to have found it earlier!
About paying with Paypal: As a screen reader user I have been using Paypal for years without much incident. So I’m wondering what accessibility problems you refer to. Then again, I haven’t done a checkpoint-by-checkpoint study of the site. … Is the main issue the heavy use of Javascript etc?
We’re using Wordpress for our site, so I found your other article extremely valuable as well.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: January 26th, 2009 at 4:06 pm →
Hi Patrick. First thanks for stopping by. Second, as it pertains to PayPal it’s more a matter of not using alt attributes well, reliance on JavaScript, and other such things like that. Some of the issues I have with PP really wouldn’t impact accessibility too greatly, but then again most folks who I’ve talked to regarding actual users is that these users have adapted. In other words they rose to the challenge and succeeded. My take, however, is that there should be much on an extra challenge for disabled users to rise to. If a site is done right a blind user, for example, should really notice this. They should just be able to use the site without having to overcome things. Another beef I have with PP is the lack of web standards applied to code that they distribute. For a long time I have argued that if they produce valid, semantic code, those who don’t care (most) won’t be bothered by the quality code, but those who do care will be given quality from the onset, without having to “fix” things like adding form labels and whatnot. My take is that PP has a responsibility to distribute quality code instead of code that’s sub par. If they do it right on their end, that means there will be a lot less bad code out there right from the start.
Richard Morton - Accessible Web Testing and Design responds:
Posted: May 28th, 2009 at 9:06 am →
Mike,
Very interesting article and particularly useful to me as I am likely to need to design and build a site with AAA compliance in the near future. As I was reading through I was thinking I would suggest charging more for claiming compliance but you beat me to it. I’m not sure that it’s possible to add up to 40% though, it just doesn’t sound realistic. Since your original post what has been your experience of this (and apologies if you have written about it elsewhere and I just haven’t seen it).
Richard
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: May 28th, 2009 at 10:16 am →
I haven’t done much since, Richard, so I guess I cannot really say. Based on the amount of work I think up to 40% is actually reasonable, but of course that would depend on your base charges. I never charged as much as my peers so the 40% would have been less. For someone charging more — and depending on the size of the site and scope of the work — 20% might be quite adequate.
Dr. Siena Jonnes responds:
Posted: July 31st, 2010 at 5:21 pm →
I DO have broadband (but Flash and scripts off) and that page took a good 30 seconds to load, which I consider slow compared to what I’m used to. Now I’ve seen beautiful, image-rich sites that were pretty accessible, so their only excuse is don’t-want-to attitude. But I had just been wondering if that was it or if the attitude had come more from “authority issues” because that is sometimes a problem also in web design, people not liking being told to do something even though it’s clearly a Good Thing.
If I had had to work for those guys, I’d have no hair left– it’d be pulled out from frustration (though I run into some of the same stuff here).
Mike, I’ve kept going back to that Feingold site now for various things I keep seeing in there… the “showing off-to-the-side skip links” thing is new to me. I immediately saw the use, but had never shown skip links unless they were on the page and hovered. I’m going to implement it in the site I’m currently working on, as well as some other stuff I’ve seen in there.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: July 31st, 2010 at 6:08 pm →
Thirty seconds is a very long time, and I’ve never seen that on that site, but slow-downs can result from numerous things. I wouldn’t think it’s the norm. I’m glad you like what you saw there.
Drew Farnham responds:
Posted: August 2nd, 2010 at 8:50 am →
I feel that it is very important to understand that a statement of partial conformance is not a conformance claim but a statement of non-conformance. The language for a statement of partial conformance has been slightly adapted in the Proposed Recommendation to make this more evident; it now reads: “This page does not conform, but would conform to WCAG 2.0 at level X if the following parts from uncontrolled sources were removed…” So you can’t “get away with” partial conformance. Either you conform to WCAG 2.0 or you don’t. If you don’t conform, there are certain conditions under which you can publish a statement of partial conformance.
The other part of the issue is what you include in a conformance claim. WCAG 2.0 allows you to claim conformance at different levels of granularity: a single page (but not parts of a page), a subsection of a site, or a complete web site. Developers should be able to use WCAG 2.0 even when they can’t make a complete webs site conformant all at once. (It was also impossible to provide an accurate definition of “web site” that covered all types of sites.) If a site owner excludes part of a web site from their conformance claim … well, that simply means that they don’t claim conformance for that part of their site. Policy makers can still decide that complete web sites (according to their definition of “web site”) must conform.
Thanks for the info.
Vera Bradley responds:
Posted: August 4th, 2010 at 5:49 pm →
Congrats on your success and I am a long time proponent of WCAG 2. Thank you
Gulf Shores responds:
Posted: August 16th, 2010 at 10:46 am →
Thanks for your blog post. A big company, like Amazon, who realises more accessibility = more paying customers, they’ll do it. Esp when they already have a “working” site online, they can wait til the accessibility repairs are finished. In Amazon’s case, they were specifically focused on the blind, who are as a group more likely to do their shopping online anyway. We want to encourage this, rather than the fighting-back behaviour of Target.
As far as half-accessible sites, an accessibility group in the Netherlands is pondering the same question. While I think at least getting the newer stuff on a large, old site accessible is better than nothing (so let’s not discourage that!), of course it’s not the same as making a whole site accessible. Esp with the shopping cart example– what good is it to be able to shop and everything if you can’t pay? Lawlz.
Steven above wrote: The more I mentioned gov’t policy the chillier it became until I left.
Was is possible the problem was more “blind big-government demands rub us the wrong way” more than “we don’t want to be accessible”? What good reason did they have to build their site with barriers? It certainly doesn’t help them.
John Howard responds:
Posted: August 17th, 2010 at 3:52 pm →
Way to go with the recognition and I wish you continued success. I agree about the progress with the WCAG 2 but I am an old dude and behind the times now. Thanks again, JH
Murfreesboro Homes responds:
Posted: August 27th, 2010 at 3:48 pm →
Thanks for great info in the post. Next year I’m moving my focus towards an MBA (Master of Business Administration) because that’s the level that I seem to run into the real barrier to progress. Without a change agent and high up support driving web initiatives they can become bogged down in the designer’s need to create pretty pictures, or the Flash guy’s need to flog his high end / high money skills. Without a strategic focus, in other words, it’s no wonder that the problem exists. I pointed out that the search on Parks, for example, was JavaScripted and those without JS enabled would be affected and not even notified why it wasn’t working. The reply, “Oh you mean the six people who use Linux won’t be able to search?”…
So, I guess it’s become a baton to carry after having run into similar issues in several departments that I’d like to see better government websites in Tasmania. Attractive is fine, but not at the cost of user experience.
Thanks again,
Gulf Shores AL responds:
Posted: August 28th, 2010 at 7:42 am →
I agree with M Homes to some degree in that functionality is most important. Most of the time simple is best but we’ve got to leave room for the artists as well. There’s no reason we can’t have both!!