Thanks Vlad > 1. Form fields don't have a <label>
True and that is my responsibility (or lack thereof....) > 2. Some decorative images have alt text. For example > http://www.blacktown.nsw.gov.au/blacktown/pics/spacer.gif > ..has alt="dms stats recording image" > Alternate text for decorative images should be written as: alt="" I know, but there is nothing that I can do about that at the moment - its another areas that is locked off by the CMS. > 3. There is a bit too much reliance on JavaScript - I disabled active > scripting in IE and the menu bar displayed incorrectly. A lot of time and effort has gone into making sure that navigation does work without javascript. If you have javascript off and CSS on, you get problems. But without javascript and without CSS the menus are still accessible. > However, the biggest obstacle to accessibility, in my opinion, is > non-validating markup. You are relying on the user-agent's ability to > correctly parse markup that is incorrectly structure/nested/authored. Most > user agents will do an okay job but why leave something as import as markup > to interpretation and parsing ability of user agents. If you write markup to > spec, then you know there isn't going to be any problems. Yes I agree - validation is important. There are three aspects to the site's content: - CMS generated output - Author provided content - Template layout code I'm responsible for the last one, but every validation error on the page is from one of the first two sources. > Mark, a few replies to your post have mentioned the need for an XHTML editor. > I hope you will consider XStandard. XStandard is a standards-compliant XHTML > (Strict or 1.1) WYSIWYG editor for CMS. Here is an article on what the editor > does to make sure content authored is accessible and standards-compliant: I agree. The editor in Shado is built in and I am stuct with it at the moment. There are somethings it does very well, but other things it does quite poorly. Maybe you should approach Straker, the makers of Shado about this? Contact me off list if you need contact details. Thanks for your post mate - I appreciate the feedback. -- Mark Stanton Gruden Pty Ltd http://www.gruden.com ********************************************************* The CMS discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *********************************************************
