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Thread: relying too much on automated validation checks!

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From: Helen A
Date: Fri, Jan 06 2006 5:00AM
Subject: relying too much on automated validation checks!
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An offshoot of the campaigning section of Scope
(www.scope.org.uk) launched a campaign to get
illustrations of disabled kids into picture books
yesterday and I had a look and the email below is the result!

Btw the files referred to below are online at
http://users.powernet.co.uk/tanquen/suggestion.htm
and
http://users.powernet.co.uk/tanquen/inthepicture.jpg
in case anyone wants to see what I sent.

>Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2006 10:01:49 +0000
>To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
>From: HAA < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
>Subject: flaws in the design of the In the Picture website
>
>I have just visited the website
><http://www.inthepicture.org.uk/>;www.inthepicture.org.uk
>having heard of it on a small discussion group.
>While I totally agree with the goals of the
>campaign I do have problems with the physical markup of the site.
>
>The 'Back to Top' links are in tables which have
>been placed between paragraphs (without being in
>a paragraph of their own). This leads to text
>from the paragraph below the link wrapping round
>the right-aligned table to give the following
>literal left-to-right reading (exampe taken from
><http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/au_illustrateview.htm>;www<http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/au_illustrateview.htm>;.childreninthepicture.org.uk/au_illustrateview.htm
>but could come from any page):
>
>So what are the problems? Why do my Back to Top
>attempts so often stumble at the first hurdle? And
>what can we do to change things?
>
>I have removed the formatting (bold and
>hyperlinks) from the example above, but the
>accompanying graphic, inthepicture.jpg, shows
>the same paragraph in place on the website. Now
>I do not have any problems with reading or
>comprehension but the first time I encountered
>this problem I had to re-read it in order to
>work out what was wrong. At first I thought it
>might be linked to the size of my monitor
>display (800x600) so I resized my screen size to
>1024x768 but the problem persisted. I then
>opened the code to find the following code:
>
> 
> <table width="10%" border="0"
> align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="back to top">
> <tr>
> <td><img
> src="images/totop.gif" alt="top" width="15" height="13"></td>
> <td nowrap><p><a
> href="#top">Back to Top </a></p></td>
> </tr>
> </table>
> 
> <p><strong>So what are the problems?
> Why do my attempts so often stumble at the
> first hurdle? And what can we do to change things?</strong></p>
>
>Ignoring the template comment markup, 
>

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Fri, Jan 06 2006 5:40AM
Subject: Re: relying too much on automated validation checks!
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On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Helen A wrote:

> An offshoot of the campaigning section of Scope (www.scope.org.uk) launched a
> campaign to get illustrations of disabled kids into picture books yesterday
> and I had a look and the email below is the result!

You seem to have got a boilerplate answer, which means that either your
message was ignored or it may be considered (and perhaps even answered in
a meaningful way) later. I would not hold my breath.

>> I have just visited the website
>> <http://www.inthepicture.org.uk/>;www.inthepicture.org.uk having heard of it
>> on a small discussion group.

The main page is rather confusing even to "normal" people, in its
association of people's faces with texts like "HE INFO" and "WHAT NEXT?"
with no apparent connections. It's a good idea to use text and image
together in some links, but not a good idea to do so when the image has
nothing obvious to do with the meaning of the text and the linked
resource. (Besides, there is no indication of their being links.)

I'm mentioning this because such a fundamental design flaw, which
undoubtedly looks like a great innovation to the designers, implies that
the designers will not be very receptive to comments on (in)accessibility.
They will, at most, concentrate on defending their decisions, not on
thinking whether they should change the design, or redesign it.

>> The 'Back to Top' links are in tables which have been placed between
>> paragraphs (without being in a paragraph of their own).

That's clumsy markup for sure, and may cause problems to some software.
Yet, the main problem is the presence of "Back to Top" links, not their
implementation. There's no excuse for such links. _Every_ browser has a
function for moving to the start of the current document; in most cases,
it is easier to use that function (e.g., press the Home key) than to
follow a link. The "Back to Top" links are esthetically poor, they
distract from the content, and to the inexperienced user (and the Web has
thousands of new inexperienced users every day) it is not clear what it
means: back to where? Top of site, or what? Besides, they look stupid in
printed copies.

I'm not sure what your problems with the links are, but they probably add
some points to the reasons of saying an emphatic "No!" to "Back to Top"
links. Those links might be implemented in a wrong way, making them fail
to work at times. (Technically, <a name="top"></a>, with no content
between the tags, is a correct way of setting up a destination anchor,
but browsers have been reported to fail with links pointing to such
destinations. The best way to refer to the start of a document is to use
a link with href="#", but links to the start are hardly every useful.)

>> An alternative and much more user friendly way of coding these links is
>> given below and the whole page is attached as suggestion.htm.
>>
>> <p align="right"><a href="#top"><img src="images/totop.gif" alt="top"
>> width="15" height="13"><br>
>> Back to Top </a></p>

I wouldn't recommend an improvement to the way of doing the wrong thing,
unless it it impossible to remove the wrong thing and there is some hope
of real improvement if it is made in a better way.

Besides, "top Back to Top" does not look or sound good, and that's what
you get in no-images mode from the above.

If you absolutely must have "Back to Top" links, with text and icons, use
something like

<div class="back"><a href="#" title="Move to start of the current page">
To top of page <img src="images/totop.gif" alt="" width="15" height="13"
border="0"></a></div>

What puzzles me is the Subject line of your message. It surely describes
an important problem, but does the site you commented on actually
use automated validation checks, or even rely on them? Besides, validation
has relatively little to do with accessibility.

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