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

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 11, 2006 4:30PM

On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Daniel Champion wrote:

> Without full details of what's being tested and how, they are of very
> little value IMHO.

I am a bit surprised at the lack of information of what is regarded as
automatically testable WCAG 1.0 rules and exactly how they have been
tested. But that's not important right now. The whole idea is
counterproductive even if we ignore this vagueness:
- it does not help to improve web sites; mere comparisons and tests do
not change anything in reality - you need something that makes people
_utilize_ them somehow
- it wastes accessibility affectionados' time and energy that could be
spent better
- it strengthens the tendency to focus on the measurable rather than
the important and to aim at WCAG 1.0 conformance rather than
accessibility (which are related, but surely not the same thing).

Rather, explain to decision makers why the government sites are poorly
accessible and why that matters. They won't be impressed by any relative
rankings on some mystic (to them) scale.

> Why not rename it the "Validity World Cup" and measure
> something that's measurable?

Assuming you mean markup validity is measurable only on an on/off scale.
Either a document is valid, or it is not. The number of error messages
just indicates how a validator reports that the document is not valid, and
it is generally much affected by decisions like "should we report a
particular type of error in all occurrences, or just the first one?". We
already know that the vast majority of web pages are invalid, so the
contest would not be particularly interested. Besides, validity as such
has very little impact on accessibility.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/