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Re: Yes!!! It's the Accessibility World Cup!

for

From: St
Date: Jun 10, 2006 8:20AM

<quote who='Daniel Champion' when='09/06/2006 16:28'>

>> What, like this? http://www.timandkathy.co.uk/validaq/
>
> Oh yes, very good, it would be splendid if someone produced something like
> that on a regular basis for government sites, major corporates etc. I'd
> wager valid (X)HTML is a reasonable proxy for accessibility on large
> sites, and at least the ranking would be transparent.

<disclaimer>
I belong to the company who's cofounding the automated tool John's been
talking about.
</disclaimer>

Yeah, well, don't wager too much.

Most projects I work with say they don't mind about the overall quality
of their code (they're awfully invalid, and more awfully
less-than-structured most of the times), as long as we (I'm part of an
internal accessibility team for a big company) can test a 'pragmatic'
accessibility: blind, low-vision, daltonism, etc. A project manager even
went as far as accusing me of wanting (quote) "beautiful code" and
(quote again) "getting away from the initial intent which was to be
accessible enough for our needs".

(side note: I sure know it's awfully biased on vision and doesn't care
about the rest, especially interoperability, gracefully degrading with
no JS, etc. But we're working on broadening the mentalities.)

Yet the one thing many projects object about is when I tell them valide,
well-structured code is the first step. They've all moved to skip links
and unambiguous links etc.

On the other hand, I've seem many valid-valid-valid people who couldn't
care less about accessibility. They just cared about zero error in a
validator. And as all of us know this can be done with badly-structured
and non-accessible conception.

In a more recent message I see that John says he's merging validity into
the process. It's a good thing, as we've got to cross both tests:
validity in itself is not intrinsically a proof that accessibility is a
concern for any given site.


--
St