WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re[2]: information for non-profits

for

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Sep 29, 2004 7:33AM

About the neilsquire.ca pages. That is a bit of sad news for me about their
site.

I regularly track changes to most major, nonprofit disability-related info
sites in Canada and I remember distinctly when the Neil Squire first
produced a standards compliant page back in 2002 or so. Check out The
Waybackmachine for May 2002:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020527084012/http://www.neilsquire.ca/

They were I think the first in the field in Canada to start using the W3C
logos to promote the standards compliance of their site -- the other leader
in the field in Canada, the CNIB , was using a
proprietary accessibility logo at the time, though the CNIB have now
switched to the W3C logos.

While not perfect, I remember feeling in 2002 that the Neil Squire site was
actually moving more quickly towards a fully accessible site than most other
non-profits in that field in Canada, and that they should be commended as a
leader in the area of web accessibility.

Needless to say, I was surprised to see them taken to task for their site
here on the WebAIM list...and even more surprised to see that indeed, as
Glenda and Iain have suggested, their current site is not really very
accessible at all. It is sad to see that they've actually moved _backwards_
in terms of standards compliance and accessibility. This must have happend
during the last major overhaul of their site I think. In fact, the new site
hasn't actually deleted all the old accessibility info, logo, and link
references from the actual XHTML code, they've simply commented out all the
old accessibility stuff which used to be there in the old design -- if
you're interested, check out the end of the source code page for their home
page and you can see the old code still sitting there.

Philip Kiff.

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Philip Kiff
Networking & Information Consultant
New Brunswick Easter Seal March of Dimes
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Fax: (416) 760-8324
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
WWW : www.nbeastersealmarchofdimes.ca
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