Web accessibility, and W3C is very much a self-regulatory thing. As the W3 site makes clear, they do not validate sites that use the logo and claim compliance, it's all based on trust you see.
Sadly though, the Women Liberal Democrats site doesn't actually comply to AA (priority 2) standards like they claim. Testing the site shows this (see image), testing alos shows that they have quite a few warning errors in their compliance with single A standards. Hopefully they will remove the logo and stop telling porkies - or maybe fix their code?
12 comments:
Has to be said - GEEK!
What testing engine do you use, Diz? Online or on your servers?
DK
http://webxact.watchfire.com/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/16/nbees16.xml
Still think the 'bees' story is a load of tosh ??
I didn't say it was tosh.
A little abstruse for me, Dizzy but if you say so ...
Abtruse, heheh! Basically, you're not menat to display these sort of logo if you're not actually compliant. The DTI was forced to remove their AA compliance last year after they were found to be fraudulently claiming accessibility standrards in their website.
Dizzy, you must be extremely bored!
Or you have too much time on your hands. Must remind you that there is an election in a few weeks!
If you still have time to spare, I have a dripping tap in my house that you can come and stare at!
it's funny you should say that really. Currently I am on a training course in Slough. Boredom doesn't come close
It is important to note that the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, in many cases, need interpretation and are not exact rules. Although automatic tools can highlight areas for consideration, they cannot determine the accessibility of a web site.
Different validators assess the performance of web sites against the guidelines differently. Although some of the validators at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/complete give the Women Liberal Democrats (and other sites we provide) a level 2 pass, it's fair to say (and we hadn't seen it until it was pointed out) that Watchfire does not.
Watchfire fails the site based on one specific guideline on the use of "relative" and not "absolute" sizes. This guideline is not an outright ban on absolute sizes but requires manual testing in a variety of browsers to ensure accessibility is not impaired by them. We have performed some of these tests and are confident our sites pass this check. We believe, in a very few instances, use of relative sizes would adversely affect accessibility.
However we have not retested the sites following significant recent development and will now perform a full audit. As this is a manual process it is not an insignificant task, but we hope to complete it within a month.
In the meantime we will only display WAI-A (level 1) accessibility badging on our sites.
Tim Prater
Prater Raines Partners
Supplier of the Women Lib Dems web site
Ibet your company hates me now
I doubt it Dizzy.
I think it's good when people point out issues like this.
Just a shame that it has to all be dressed up in language like "lies" and "hate".
There is a real world out there where people can be polite to each other and point out mistakes without dripping it in vitriol you know :-)
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