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Re: New version of Guidelines for Swedish Public Sector Web Sites released

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Nov 20, 2006 4:40AM

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Peter Krantz wrote:

> Verva, the Swedish Administrative Development Agency, has released an
> updated version of the guidelines for Swedish public sector web sites.

Thank you for the information.

This is yet another indication of pseudo-accessibility. That is, new and
new recommendations and guidelines on accessibility are issued, instead of
actually doing something to accessibility.

We don't need any new recommendations. We need organizations and people to
start implementing the sensible parts of old recommendations. At present,
the recommendations ridicule themselves by their appearance on the web in
formats that grossly violate accessibility principles.

For example, the site http://www.verva.se/ as a whole argues with visitors
about their choice of font size (by setting font-size: 70%) and contains
excessive navigation on all pages, making them hard to use. It even uses
grey text on just a little lighter grey background - for "Last update"
notices, but it is still _bad_ practice and _bad_ example. The most
depressing thing is that even you explain such things in detail to people
responsible for this mess, nothing happens. Nobody cares. The project of
creating the guidelines has ended.

If what you do contradicts what you tell others to do, it's what you do
that matters. Give people ten nice guidelines and one bad example, and
they will apply the example.

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