It's a horrible wet Sunday so...
Christian Montoya wrote:
It's a really poor article altogether.
Agreed
The writer
Katie Ledger is a *presenter* not a journalist of any depth or note
AFAIK, so that explains the lack of research and understanding.
only interviewed *1* person, not an expert, and clearly someone with their own bias.
To be fair, Leonie Watson is blind herself [1] and seems at least as
well qualified to comment on accessibility as most I've encountered. I
don't know her personally (I live on the other side of the world) but
I'm willing to accept her opinions as valid in her experience. I don't
think you can dismiss her completely.
The
writer talked about *1* website, a completely unique example which
took *a lot* of money and work to accomplish.
That's a key problem with the article - it makes accessibility sound
really hard and something you have to get experts in for.
The writer didn't do her
research about CSS, and never mentioned section 508, valid HTML or any
of the other HTML-based accessibility/well-formedness measures.
Writer != journo, as mentioned earlier. But you can't really knock a
British writer for not mentioning an artificial American "measure" that
only applies to American Government agencies. I agree about the lack of
research though.
The
writer also mentioned *1* court case, and made it seem like only *1*
person has a problem with Target. That's just not how you write
articles. Throwing together all this barely related information
results in an article that is just about useless to the reader.
Click is a television program. Television is, by nature, superficial.
My take on the piece (one of about 3 on the site) is that someone at the
BBC said "we really should do something about this accessibility thing.
Who knows anyone?" and from there the trail lead to Nomensa and Watson.
Alex and Tony muttered about agendas and I do suspect that Nomensa has
an agenda to do with Flash - it does appear to be the only technology
mentioned on their site, and a quick search for "CSS" and "Cascading
Style Sheets" turns up nothing. I suspect they put out a press release
or something which someone handed to Ledger.
I'm not sure what they expect to achieve with that agenda though...
BTW They did a report [2] into accessibility of UK Central govt sites
which is interesting, although Jan 2005 is an age away now. It's not
downloadable from their website, but you can sneak it out of google ;-) [3].
[1] http://www.nomensa.com/about/key-people/leonie-watson.html
[2]
http://www.nomensa.com/resources/research/web-accessibility-in-central-government.html
[3]
http://www.iabf.or.kr/lib/common/download.asp?path=pds&file=Nomensa_Central_Government_Report_Jan_2005.pdf
Cheers
mark
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