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Re[2]: Re[2]: WAI Icons. Was: Include default text?

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From: Iain Harrison
Date: Oct 23, 2004 2:34AM

Saturday, October 23, 2004, 5:47:48 AM, andrew.arch85 wrote:

> Yes - but how many people put the logo on every page?

On some sites we do, it is part of the page footer, on every page.

> Yet most would claim
> that it applies to the whole site. And do all the site authors validate
> before publishing? Our experience with accessibility testing is that very
> few do (even if they have the logos).

Very few site authors are competent. That does not mean that any
competent author will validate every new or changed page.

In a business where there are no basic qualifications, and one that
has historically been dominated by advertising and marketing
companies, it is no surprise that technical competence is in short
supply in the marketplace.

In my experience, very few clients know the difference between a
well-designed, standards-compliant design that is accessible and a
flash-infested sliced-images monstrosity.

Web design and development companies exploit this to their own ends.
In the UK, the DDA has applied to websites for years, but virtually
none developed in that period are accessible. The clients don't know
or care, and the web development firms lack the will (and probably
the expertise) to do it right, unless pressed to by their clients.

A few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to be asked to develop
accessible "white label" templates for a multinational's web sites
across the world. It was my first-ever request for an accessible
site.

The templates were done months ago, but I don't expect to see the
results for a few months more, partly because I'm fairly sure that
the web design companies they use won't have a clue how to work with
them: they have hitherto sliced photoshop images and called that a
web page.


--

Iain