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Re: Chronicle of Higher Education article "Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online"

for

From: Gunderson, Jon R
Date: Dec 13, 2010 8:48PM

John,

Rules Development Clarification

The rules were not developed only by people at the University of Illinois, but were developed in an open forum of the Web Best Practices Working Group:
http://collaborate.athenpro.org/group/web/
There are members from all over the united States.
Anyone can join the group and if people have better design rules the group would love to hear and consider them for inclusion.

The study included over 20,000 web pages were analyzed, please view the data details:
http://webaccessibility.cita.illinois.edu/data/

Grand Standing Charge Response

To the charge me personally with grandstanding, maybe so, I'll let individuals make their own judgement.
But without data on the inaccessibility of higher education websites being publicly available the inaccessibility will still continue to grow and get worse.
I talk to to many CIOs, IT professionals and vendors that tell me their web sites are accessible because they have a policy or a law like Section 508 that says it must be so.
Accessibility is more than policy, it requires setting design standards (rules) and auditing the use of the design standards,.

I hope people see this as an opportunity to raise awareness on their campuses of accessibility.
If you don't like the rules used in the data collection, I hope that you will define your own campus design rules that support functional accessibility by people with disabilities and also meet the design needs of developers.
I also hope you will make the design rules publicly available so people with disabilities know what to expect when they get to your campuses web sites.
Campuses need to treat accessibility like other IT issues, like security.
They need to have people assigned web accessibility responsibilities and they need to measure the implementation of their policies.

I should also note that passing these rules doesn't mean you are accessible, it just means you have the markup for accessibility.
There are many manual tests that must be made, but I don't need to tell this list that.

Future rules will be developed through the OpenAjax Alliance Accessibility (OAA) task force:

http://www.oaa-accessibility.org
and
http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/Accessibility

Jon

NOTE. Talk to the Chronicle about their web accessibility issues, I have already given them a report of the issues I found.


On Dec 13, 2010, at 8:20 PM, John Foliot wrote:

> Richard R. Hill wrote:
>>
>> Note that the FAE tool test for certain rules that are specific to that
>> tool (not generally required or labelled as a best practice by other
>> Web standards). For instance, the FAE tool marks folks down for have
>> more than one H1 on a page. This is a Illinois rule, not a W3C or 508
>> rule. SO, those who adhere to more of these will have slightly higher
>> rankings.
>>
>> Still unclear as to the scope and depth of the pages/sites tested.
>> –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
>> Rick Hill, Web CMS Administrator
>> University Communications, UC Davis
>
> (Rick: http://webaccessibility.cita.illinois.edu/data/school/235/)
>
>
> <Personal Opinion>
> I have to vehemently agree, and further express my disappointment and
> frustration at Jon Gunderson and his team for presuming to set
> accessibility standards for all of Higher Education. Evaluating other
> institutions against "rules" set by The University of Illinois is both
> misleading, and nothing more than Grandstanding: should we now go about
> judging their sites against other made up criteria as well?
>
> In particular, I point to the following "Rules" that are not part of
> either Section 508 nor the W3C WCAG 1 or 2 Guidelines (the 2 recognized
> benchmarks used by all other accessibility evaluation software):
>
> HEADING STRUCTURE:
> "The page must contain at least one h1 element."
> According to whom? While it is certainly good practice to ensure
> each page has appropriate heading structure, nowhere (outside of the FAE
> tool) is it *MANDATED* as such - a page that lacks an <h1> is not
> intrinsically inaccessible. False data - False results!
>
> "The page should contain no more than two h1 elements."
> Please point to one national or international guideline or
> recommendation that mandates this. Another false positive from a
> mechanical tool, fueled by internal University of Illinois politics and
> policies.
>
> "The text content of each h1 element should match all or part of the title
> content."
> "Each h1 element should have text content exclusive of the alt text of any
> img elements it contains."
> Bull Feathers! Made up standards by a small team with an agenda to
> promote their internal tool - and it should be noted that failing to do
> either of these things in no way makes a page "less accessible" - it just
> doesn't meet their FAE Guidelines.
>
>
> DATA TABLES:
> "For each data table, the first cell in each column must be a th element,
> and each row must contain at least one th element."
> Patently FALSE! In fact, the table of school rankings at the
> Chronicle of Higher Ed that Jon points to in his earlier email
> (http://chronicle.com/article/BestWorst-College-Web/125642/) does not meet
> this "pass" criteria, yet is not "inaccessible" because of it - in fact
> the size of the table (183 rows in length with little-to-no internal
> navigation) is more of an access issue than the failure for each row to
> start with a <th>.
>
> The following table is perfectly acceptable and valid, and meets (as far
> as I know) all required accessibility guidelines as established by both
> the Section 508 Standard and W3C Guidelines (yet fails the FAE tool):
>
> <table>
> <tr>
> <td></td>
> <th scope="col">Sunday</th>
> <th scope="col">Monday</th>
> <th scope="col">Tuesday</th>
> <th scope="col">Wednesday</th>
> <th scope="col">Thursday</th>
> <th scope="col">Friday</th>
> <th scope="col">Saturday</th>
> </tr>
> <tr>
> <th scope="row">Week 1</th>
> <td></td>
> <td></td>
> <td>1</td>
> <td>2</td>
> <td>3</td>
> <td>4</td>
> <td>5</td>
> </tr>
>
> ...etc.
> </table>
>
> "Each th element in a complex data table must have an id attribute whose
> value is unique relative to all ids on the page."
> Please explain how failing to add an ID attribute to a table
> header makes it less accessible.
>
> "Each td element in a complex data table must have a headers attribute
> that references the id attributes of associated th elements."
> Please explain how failing to add a HEADER attribute to a table
> cell makes it less accessible.
>
> What defines "complex"? How does a mechanical tool makes this
> assessment? The table code example shown above is perfectly valid, is
> extremely accessible, and would fail 3 of the 5 data-table 'rules' this
> testing imposes on *your* sites. This is simply unacceptable.
>
>
> IMAGES/ALT TEXT
> "Each img element with width or height less than 8 pixels should be
> removed; CSS techniques should be used instead."
> Really? How exactly was this determined? If I have an image that
> is 9 pixels X 2 pixels than it should have alt text and not be moved to
> CSS? That's what the tool and this testing tells. Furthermore, if your
> site has an image like this, it has now been deemed less accessible, thus
> ranks lower in the scores - leaving the impression that your pages are
> inaccessible.
>
> Clearly this is a tool that has some value, but to stake a single page's
> accessibility or lack of, never mind publishing public data that states
> that a University's web content is inaccessible on arbitrary Rules made up
> by one University and verified by mechanical means alone against 3 or 4
> pages is foolhardy, damaging to the general state of web accessibility (as
> it suggests that meeting a mechanical tester's results = job done), and
> unconscionable. It may also leave the University of Illinois open to libel
> suits and other legal remedies.
>
> I know Jon Gunderson personally, I like Jon Gunderson, and I respect the
> work that Jon has done to advance web accessibility over the years, but
> here, today, I must point the finger of shame at him and cry "Foul" - this
> is no more an assessment of true web accessibility than it is a rolling of
> chicken bones and voodoo chest-beating, and the damage caused here falls
> squarely at his feet.
> </Personal Opinion>
>
> NOTE: These are my personal opinions, and in no way reflect the opinion of
> Stanford University (with whom I am under contract), T-Base Communications
> (my employer), my associates or other professional affiliates with whom I
> do business with.
>
> JF
> ===========================> John Foliot
>
> Co-chair - W3C HTML5 Accessibility Task Force (Media)
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/HTML/wiki/Main_Page
>
> ===========================>
>
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