There is blame to go around, for sure.
I had an accessibility issue just this morning, while trying to
find out about filing an insurance claim on my husband's car
(which someone ran into in the middle of the night ... and took
off). In Firefox, my browser of choice, the text on the page I
needed was overlapping, and many of the links were not
"clickable." I switched to IE, and the page was totally fine;
everything was in perfect working order.
I couldn't help but check the source code, and of course, it was
designed using tables. There were 187 errors, according to the W3C
validation service. I e-mailed the company and received a quick
reply that they had recently discovered an error that was
preventing "a small number of customers" from accessing their
claim information. Pretty generic, as expected.
The company is customer-service based, according to its policies
and my experience, so why would the powers that be within it not
choose to make its Web site accessible to all? It's not like they
don't have the money to make it happen. I propose that most people
would choose not to inform them of the difficulties they have in
the first place.
It reminds me of the days (long ago!) when I was a waitress. Most
of the customers who had a bad experience due to the food or the
service (from other waitresses, of course!) wouldn't complain or
explain; they'd merely pay their bills and leave, never to return,
intent on informing everyone they knew about that awful restaurant.
And then I think about how many times I personally have chosen to
just let bad experiences go in fast-food restaurants, convenience
stores, gas stations. The girl who jerked my money out of my hand
with a scowl on her face and no thank-you. The guy who took five
minutes to wait on me because he was too busy on his cell phone. I
have gone to the manager sometimes, but most of the time, I just
consider it too much hassle and let it go.
The same is surely true of Internet experiences, I propose, at an
exponentially greater rate of occurrence. The next page is just a
click away. If it's a page that must be accessed, however, as in
my insurance experience this morning, it's a different story, of
course. But most of the time, I personally simply leave the site
and make a note of what not to do.
I'm self-taught. I sorted through HTML as a sort of grief therapy
when I'd lost my baby (and almost gone with him) in 1999 and was
out of work for months. I began learning about CSS more than three
years ago and only learned about accessibility/Web standards
within the last couple of years. But I'm diligently learning as
much as I can (with three kids and a full-time teaching job that
invariably comes home with me most days...).
I'm going to make it my personal goal to begin contacting the
people who make sites that aren't accessible to let them know in
what way I had difficulty using their site. Not in a lofty,
condescending way, but in a "I thought you may want to know" way.
Maybe they won't care. Maybe they'll be offended. Maybe they won't
get it at all. Maybe it won't do any good.
But maybe it will.
Jo Hawke
http://www.viabledesign.com
On Jan 9, 2008 8:59 PM, Matthew Barben < [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
I tend to agree with Mark. IT guys in my experience tend not
to be
'joiners' you work in a corporate IT department and you will
quickly
realise that people use terms like 'Crypt' and 'Beige'
I have worked from both sides of the fence as both an indepentant
but also
as the main web guy within a large organisation. Yes there are
situations
where we have had to use external vendors to design websites
purely
because they have to resources to deliver quickly...and I can
see how
these agencies can produce very poor code and have the business
owner say
'yes'. But there are also organisations where they will impose a
set of
design guidelines upon these firms and really put the pressure on
them to
deliver (especially is industries where you are an essential
service and
need to deliver to a wide audience of both abled and disabled
people).
Does it make the firm a bunch of non-compliant
designers...perhaps. But I
say for every poorly design website, there is someone who says
'Yes that
is what I want' or 'that'll do'.
> Steve Green wrote:
>> Of course I made up that 1% figure but I don't suppose it's
far
out.
>> Just
>> look at the phenomenal number of crap websites out there.
There are
>> something like 100,000 people offering web design services in
the UK
>> (10,000
>> in London alone) yet GAWDS membership (which is global) is
only
around
>> 500
>> and I believe WSG membership is similar.
>
> Don't confuse volume with quantity. Lots of people do. There
are
a lot
> of crap sites out there but that doesn't mean there's 1 crap
designer
> for every crap site. A lot of the time, the crapness has to do
with the
> business manager who over-rules any technical considerations
because he
> wants animated pictures of little ponies flying round the
product.
>
> 1 crap designer can turn out many, many crap sites. The damage
done by
> Sieglal's Designing Killer Websites (1st edition - he recanted
later)
> was huge. Back when I was starting, I bought it and used it
as a
bible
> of what not to do, but many used it as a how-to guide, and some
of those
> sites still exist.
>
> Also add in the spectrum of experience from people creating
websites.
> Some are just learning, some are doing it on the side for their
schools
> or offices - these are not professional web designers and you
shouldn't
> include them in your 'spurious assessment' ;-) but they are
the key
> people to reach out to, if I could figure out how to do it.
>
> I started building web in 1996, when bandwidth was an issue
(9600 was
> common here in New Zealand and 56K was only just arriving)
and the
> techniques I learned were aimed at optimizing for speed and
volume.
> Funnily enough the same principles apply to accessibility but I
wasn't
> learning accessibility per se. I didn't join any groups
although
there
> were a few around, but I did get on several mailing lists (some
of which
> I'm still on). Some people just aren't joiners. And I don't see
> participation in the WSG as "joining" exactly, as there are no
dues, no
> elections and no formality - it's just a place to come and
talk.
>
> There may be lots of lone coders out there, religiously
adhering to
> standards we don't know and I can't think of a way to find out
for sure.
> Let's make our talking places more well known and inviting,
rather than
> the fearsome arena that many fora become, with the resident
experts
> snarling at the clueless. (Not saying that about the WSG as
it is
> usually quite civilized)
>
> Which is all to say "don't make up statistics that others will
take as
> gospel" as they'll come back and bit us all in the arse.
>
>
>> Those who take standards-compliant design seriously tend to be
>> individuals
>> producing small volumes of work,
>
> I call "unproven assumption" - you may be right but we just
don't know.
>
>> but the large volumes are typically
>> generated by organisations that neither know nor care about
>> standards-compliance. They are invariably tied to
enterprise-scale CMSs
>> that
>> guarantee the code will be horrible. Likewise, ASP.Net
implementations
>> can
>> be made to be standards-compliant but it takes a huge
amount of
work so
>> most
>> organisations just use it as it comes out of the box.
>>
> So the simple answer is 'focus on those manufacturers' - yes?
Get THEM
> to change and you won't need to bemoan those chumps who use
their stuff
> "out of the box" instead of hiring us bespoke designers at our
> outrageous rates.
>
> Curmudgeonly,
>
> Mark Harris
>
>
>
*******************************************************************
> List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/
guidelines.cfm
> Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm
> Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
*******************************************************************
>
>
*******************************************************************
List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
<http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm>
Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm
Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*******************************************************************
*******************************************************************
List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm
Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*******************************************************************
