Disability Discrimination Act

[David Quinton]

<http://www.business2ww w.com/news.html?id=12 17547344>

Precis: "The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) requires businesses
and organisations to make websites accessible to all users,
particularly the disabled. Yet the DRC, the Royal National Institute
for the Blind (RNIB) and the Royal National Institute for the Deaf
(RNID), the supposed standard bearers for website accessibility,
continue to fail even the most basic A/AA requirements. The findings
and the reports produced by SiteMorse showed, for example, that the
DRC’s website failed both A / AA continually over the last few months.
"

[quoted from SiteMorse Press Release that I received today]
--
January Sales 2005 - Offers & Coupons - <http://www.ThisBritain .com/January-Sales-2005/>
Locate your Mobile phone: <http://www.bizorg.co.u k/news.html>

[Steve Pugh]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

David Quinton <usenet_2004D_e mail@REMOVETHIS BITbizorg.co.uk > wrote:
[color=blue]
><http://www.business2ww w.com/news.html?id=12 17547344>
>
>Precis: "The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) requires businesses
>and organisations to make websites accessible to all users,
>particularly the disabled. Yet the DRC, the Royal National Institute
>for the Blind (RNIB) and the Royal National Institute for the Deaf
>(RNID), the supposed standard bearers for website accessibility,
>continue to fail even the most basic A/AA requirements. The findings
>and the reports produced by SiteMorse showed, for example, that the
>DRC’s website failed both A / AA continually over the last few months.
>"
>
>[quoted from SiteMorse Press Release that I received today][/color]

Yeah, I got it too.

SiteMorse are a very funny outfit. They bleat on about standards but
as recently as September 2004 their technical director was so
incapable of reading a DTD that he maintained that the target
attribute wasn't deprecated.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/uk.net.web.authoring/msg/6c00f0090262b066

A Google Groups search for sitemore will turn up some other goodies.

Whilst the DRC, etc. sites have some problems and can certainly be
imprived they are more accessible that most and automated testing of
the sort that SiteMorse carry out can only be one part of any
accessibility check.

Human testing is more important and can tell you when to ignore the
guidelines - and when it comes to testing with real users with real
disabilities I'd take the DRC or the RNIB over SiteMorse any day.

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net > <http://steve.pugh.net/>

[Chris Morris]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

David Quinton <usenet_2004D_e mail@REMOVETHIS BITbizorg.co.uk > writes:[color=blue]
> <http://www.business2ww w.com/news.html?id=12 17547344>
>
> Precis: "The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) requires businesses
> and organisations to make websites accessible to all users,
> particularly the disabled. Yet the DRC, the Royal National Institute
> for the Blind (RNIB) and the Royal National Institute for the Deaf
> (RNID), the supposed standard bearers for website accessibility,
> continue to fail even the most basic A/AA requirements. The findings
> and the reports produced by SiteMorse showed, for example, that the
> DRC's website failed both A / AA continually over the last few months.
> "
>
> [quoted from SiteMorse Press Release that I received today][/color]

I'd be interested to hear which A requirement RNIB failed. Nothing
obvious at a first glance, unless you count the fact that, in common
with every website that exists or can exist, the text is not
*absolutely and objectively* the very clearest possible. But that's,
IMO, a bit of bad wording in/usage of the guidelines, and not what the
WAI intended. Depending on interpretation of the guidelines, yes it
fails AA.

DRC, yes, there's some poorly chosen alt text, which would count as an
A failure.

Of course, it's not like SiteMorse passes AA either (try doubling text
size, there's a form that opens a new window without warning, it may
not be fixed width but the minimum width is huge, 'click here for
yours' as a nice context-free link text) or A for that matter
(http://www.business2www.com/sitemorse/tests.html - you can't tell me
that's even close to clearest appropriate language).

But, carrying on to some of the other text of the press release:

"He seemed to place usability
testing through human interaction above web accessibility compliance."

Well, yes - believe it or not, sites are browsed by humans, not by
guideline documents. A little bit of usability testing with real
people might have helped the Sitemorse site not get those problems I
mentioned above.

"He caused confusion when he inferred in a telephone conversation that
there are no legal standards for website accessibility, even though a
number of DRC speeches and documents (including comments made in the
Guardian) clearly state that it is a legal duty for organisations and
businesses to make their sites accessible to the UK's 8-10 million
disabled people."

Also entirely true. IANAL, but my reading of the law suggests that it
would be reasonable for a court to decide that multi-million-pound
corp would have to comply with WAI-A and WAI-AA on every page, whereas
a corner shop would only have to comply with WAI-A due to it being
unreasonable to expect it to spend the same amount on user testing,
etc. So it's a legal duty, no there isn't a specified cut off, just
make honest best efforts and quit complaining.

"Both the DRC and the RNIB doubt the validity and accuracy of automated
testing, even though SiteMorse - which is a specialist in this field -
has conducted research and received client feedback that shows its
clients have made significant improvements to their sites since using
the company's web accessibility testing tools."

Well, yes, automated testing can *help* improve sites, provided some
intelligence is used to back up the results, but it can't help fix
everything. They're aware of that, though, if you look at

http://www.business2www.com/keymorse/

"While there may be no legal duty to make a site usable, there is a
legal duty to make websites accessible to disabled people. Those
that ignore this could find themselves in court accused of
discrimination. "

Again, true, a site that works for no-one is legal and a site that
works for half the people isn't, but then usability and accessibility
are closely related anyway.

Besides, I would say a site that was easily usable by people with a
range of disabilities (as proven by user testing) as more likely to be
accessible than a site that had undergone little testing but
objectively met (one person's interpretation of) a set of
accessibility guidelines.

I'd test their site checker on a site that I've done a detailed
(manual and automatic) accessibility study on, to see what it thinks,
but I'm one of 10,000ish users behind 3 proxy servers, so the 1 test per
IP every 4 days gets in the way.

--
Chris

[Chris Morris]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net > writes:[color=blue]
> SiteMorse are a very funny outfit. They bleat on about standards but
> as recently as September 2004 their technical director was so
> incapable of reading a DTD that he maintained that the target
> attribute wasn't deprecated.
> http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...00f0090262b066[/color]

The target attribute is a bit of an anomaly, though. It's not in the
Strict DTD, but neither is it marked anywhere in the HTML 4 prose as
deprecated.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html lists it as only in
loose, but not as deprecated. The only other attribute this is true
for is 'width' when applied to <iframe> (and since <iframe> behaves in
the same way in the elements list, this makes sense)

Of course, you could take
<!--
This is HTML 4.01 Strict DTD, which excludes the presentation
attributes and elements that W3C expects to phase out as
support for style sheets matures.
.... etc

as meaning that the spec *should* have marked it as deprecated but
doesn't due to an error.
[color=blue]
> Human testing is more important and can tell you when to ignore the
> guidelines - and when it comes to testing with real users with real
> disabilities I'd take the DRC or the RNIB over SiteMorse any day.[/color]

Absolutely.

--
Chris

[Steve Pugh]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

Chris Morris <c.i.morris@dur ham.ac.uk> wrote:[color=blue]
>Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net > writes:[color=green]
>> SiteMorse are a very funny outfit. They bleat on about standards but
>> as recently as September 2004 their technical director was so
>> incapable of reading a DTD that he maintained that the target
>> attribute wasn't deprecated.
>> http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...00f0090262b066[/color]
>
>The target attribute is a bit of an anomaly, though. It's not in the
>Strict DTD, but neither is it marked anywhere in the HTML 4 prose as
>deprecated.
>
>http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html lists it as only in
>loose, but not as deprecated. The only other attribute this is true
>for is 'width' when applied to <iframe> (and since <iframe> behaves in
>the same way in the elements list, this makes sense)
>
>Of course, you could take
><!--
> This is HTML 4.01 Strict DTD, which excludes the presentation
> attributes and elements that W3C expects to phase out as
> support for style sheets matures.
>... etc
>
>as meaning that the spec *should* have marked it as deprecated but
>doesn't due to an error.[/color]

Quite true. I'd forgotten the details, but I vaguely remembered that
one had to looke in the DTD (hence "incapable of reading a DTD "
rather than "... the spec") to find that target was, in effect,
deprecated.

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net > <http://steve.pugh.net/>

[Andy Dingley]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:04:39 +0000, Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net > wrote:
[color=blue]
>incapable of reading a DTD that he maintained that the target
>attribute wasn't deprecated.[/color]

_Is_ target deprecated ? AFAIK it isn't.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html

It's present in the Transitional DTD and is not deprecated in any note
that I can see. In Strict it's simply not there. Now "deprecated "
has a precise meaning in W3C docs, and neither of these are it. Nor
is a DTD where it would be specified - DTD just doesn't have a way to
express it.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/conform.html#deprecated

Now target _is_ seen as "requiring future rework before it's useful"
and there are many advisories about its mis-use being a bad thing, but
as to formal deprecation, then it's not reached that stage.

"A deprecated element or attribute is one that has been outdated by
newer constructs"
target is clearly due for this, but it hasn't happened yet. In the
interim, we can;t yet deprecate it.

A relevant example might be <b>, <i> and <u> (and of course
<font>)

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/changes.html#h-A.3.1.2

Although there's a rush to CSS (slowest rush in history), <u> and
<font> _are_ deprecated, but <b> and <i> aren't. We can't stop talking
locally about whether they should be used or not, but they're accepted
as sufficiently credible that a formal deprecation is inappropriate.
--
Smert' spamionam

[Andy Dingley]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:38:54 +0000, David Quinton
<usenet_2004D_e mail@REMOVETHIS BITbizorg.co.uk > wrote:
[color=blue]
><http://www.business2ww w.com/news.html?id=12 17547344>[/color]

Ooh, a scrolling letterbox to read the content through ! Well _they_
must know all about accessibility then.

[Steve Pugh]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

Andy Dingley <dingbat@codesm iths.com> wrote:
[color=blue]
>On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:04:39 +0000, Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net > wrote:
>[color=green]
>>incapable of reading a DTD that he maintained that the target
>>attribute wasn't deprecated.[/color]
>
>_Is_ target deprecated ? AFAIK it isn't.[/color]

Yes. Sorry. It's "not deprecated, not obsolete, no any category
defined in the spec, but its still bad and naught and not in Strict".
We need a word for that.

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net > <http://steve.pugh.net/>

[Neal]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net > wrote:
[color=blue]
> Andy Dingley <dingbat@codesm iths.com> wrote:
>[color=green]
>> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:04:39 +0000, Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net >
>> wrote:
>>[color=darkred]
>>> incapable of reading a DTD that he maintained that the target
>>> attribute wasn't deprecated.[/color]
>>
>> _Is_ target deprecated ? AFAIK it isn't.[/color]
>
> Yes. Sorry. It's "not deprecated, not obsolete, no any category
> defined in the spec, but its still bad and naught and not in Strict".
> We need a word for that.[/color]

Oddly, at <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html > the ONLY
attribute marked as loose but not also marked as deprecated is target.

I had always assumed "deprecated " meant it's not available in Strict,
but I'm guessing my assumption is wrong. What shall I assume now?

[Andy Dingley]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

On 19 Jan 2005 16:40:41 +0000, Chris Morris <c.i.morris@dur ham.ac.uk>
wrote:
[color=blue]
>as meaning that the spec *should* have marked it as deprecated but
>doesn't due to an error.[/color]

Not an error, IMHO, but a question of tense. Target can go when we
have the replacement for it, but not before. CSS can't do it and the
relevant X<,foobar> hasn't happened yet.
--
Smert' spamionam

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

Andy Dingley <dingbat@codesm iths.com> wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>>as meaning that the spec *should* have marked it as deprecated but
>>doesn't due to an error.[/color]
>
> Not an error, IMHO, but a question of tense. Target can go when we
> have the replacement for it, but not before. CSS can't do it and the
> relevant X<,foobar> hasn't happened yet.[/color]

But JavaScript can be used. OK, it can be disabled. So can CSS.

Don't look for more logic behind deprecation (or declaring something as
Transitional) than there is.

The value="..." attribute, for example, in <ol> has been deprecated (and
made Transitional); there is no CSS way to replace it.

The width="..." attribute in <td> has not been deprecated (or made
Transitional); yet there is a perfectly working CSS was to replace it.

And so on.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Alan J. Flavell]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Andy Dingley wrote:
[color=blue]
> Not an error, IMHO, but a question of tense. Target can go when we
> have the replacement for it, but not before.[/color]
[color=blue]
> CSS can't do it[/color]

But "do" what? The whole point of strict HTML is that it doesn't
actively "do" anything: it's meant to be an adjectival declaration,
not an imperative verb.

The snag is that the only way HTML offers to -defeat- targets is to
-use- one: target="_top" is needed in order to defeat someone else's
frames. So, one needs to use an "inaccessib le" attribute in order to
defeat someone else's inaccessibility . Does the barber shave himself?

[Nick Kew]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

David Quinton wrote:
[color=blue]
> ... Yet the DRC, the Royal National Institute
> for the Blind (RNIB) and the Royal National Institute for the Deaf
> (RNID), the supposed standard bearers for website accessibility,
> continue to fail even the most basic A/AA requirements. ...[/color]

Perhaps a little strong, but not without merit.
[color=blue]
> [quoted from SiteMorse Press Release that I received today][/color]

Ooooh, the irony. Pot, Kettle.
Nah, that's unfair on the charities. None of them even come close to
as disastrous as sitemorse.

--
Nick Kew

[Steve Pugh]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tu t.fi> wrote:
[color=blue]
>Don't look for more logic behind deprecation (or declaring something as
>Transitional ) than there is.
>
>The value="..." attribute, for example, in <ol> has been deprecated (and
>made Transitional); there is no CSS way to replace it.[/color]

That reminds me of a discussion I had with SiteMorse. I was explaining
that some Government web pages contain information with complicated
structure - such as a numbered list with headings between some
sections of the list.

e.g.
heading
1
2
3
heading
4
heading
5
6
heading
7
8

One way to mark this up is to use multiple <ol>s with the start
attribute to keep the numbering flowinf from one section to the next.
The CSS equivalent is both complicated and poorly supported, and most
importantly, when CSS is absent changes the numbering entirely. (I
know that some people here argue that if the numbering is important it
should be in the content and not even left up to HTML let alone CSS).

When I pointed this out to SiteMorse and explained that due to this
some pages would need to use the deprecated start attribute and hence
would never pass their automated Level AA test their response was
basically along the lines of "Oh, we've never seen a page that
actually uses that attribute".

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <steve@pugh.net > <http://steve.pugh.net/>

[Isofarro]

Re: Disability Discrimination Act

Nick Kew wrote:
[color=blue]
> David Quinton wrote:
>[color=green]
>> ... Yet the DRC, the Royal National Institute
>> for the Blind (RNIB) and the Royal National Institute for the Deaf
>> (RNID), the supposed standard bearers for website accessibility,
>> continue to fail even the most basic A/AA requirements. ...[/color]
>
> Perhaps a little strong, but not without merit.
>[color=green]
>> [quoted from SiteMorse Press Release that I received today][/color]
>
> Ooooh, the irony. Pot, Kettle.
> Nah, that's unfair on the charities. None of them even come close to
> as disastrous as sitemorse.[/color]

It also gets very interesting. The actual report which slates the DRC and
RNIB - the organisation on top is a web design agency called RedAnt - which
registered what looks to be a perfect score. Strangely this is the only web
design agency on the list.

Where it becomes interesting is that RedAnt did the design for the sitemorse
website. They even buy the "Sitemorse" adword on google searches. Looking
through the site it looks to be optimised for automated checking tools.



--
Isofarro.
FAQ: http://www.html-faq.com/
Recommended Hosting: http://www.affordablehost.com/
isolani: http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/