An interesting post on 456 Berea Street entitled Accessibility charlatans highlights how difficult it is to tell if a web page is accessible or not ... It's not that hard to design an accessible page if you are already paying attention to web standards and people like Joe Clark. Sadly many sites slap "accessible" badges on their pages as soon as Cynthia or Bobby give no explicit "no" answers, but that's not enough.
The example that the trainees stumbled upon during a recent day's accessibility training was hyfinity whose site (in February 2005 at least) was an inaccessible mess of unsemantic div and span tags with oodles of CSS classes (a clear case of divitis and classitis!) They're a company that proclaims Our Web Accessibility programme is designed to ensure your web applications conform to WAI guidelines
but passing Bobby or Cynthia does not necessarily mean your page is accessible.
I suppose it's a case of caveat emptor but how does the buyer know to be aware? Perhaps each country with specific disability legislation needs a certification programme run by genuine experts in accessibility? Sadly it could easily add to the real expense of implementing an accessible site.
7 comments:
Hi,
I recently came across your blog entry. I read the following comment regarding "unsemantic div and span tags with oodles of CSS classes (a clear case of divitis and classitis!)
Could you explain what the problem is? The DIVS and SPANS are used for visual characterstics only, so I can't see the relevance to being "unsemantic".
I'm unclear as to the issues? It would be useful for you to explain the issues and provide the background to your students analysis.
Hi Steve. The problem was that the page used nothing but div and span elements, which are elements with zero meaning (intentionally) and ignored the possibility of using HTML elements for what they are designed for. E.g. paragraphs of text were contained in <div> when they should have been in paragraphs <p>
Btw, obviously the post was not clear>: I was a student on the course... The HTML Dog himself was the trainer :-) James.
Just checked again and here's an excerpt from the source <shudder>
<div class="orderedlist-item">
<span class="para">Dynamic data driven self-service web applications...
I suspect the page is generated automatically, e.g. by a CMS or XML transformation.
It's crazy to use a <div> with a class called "orderedlist" instead of <ul> etc.
James.
Furthermore, on the accessibility page it states: "...website conformant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to AAA standard..."
So the failure to use semantic elements like lists (& I meant <ol> above for ordered-list) violates WCAG 1 Guideline 3, Priority 2, i.e. it's not even "AA" let alone "AAA" compliant :-(
James
Hi James,
Thanks for your comments.
I would be interested to know whether the site nows resolves the semantic issue.
http://www.hyfinity.com
Does the new site (9th May 2007) resolve semantic issues? No, I'm afraid it does not, e.g.: <ul class="orderedlist-item"> is an unordered list item with a class making it an ordered list! Why not use an <ol> <p class="para"> Repetition: It's a paragraph -- why does it need a class called para(graph)? And the same for <a class="hyperlink">...
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