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For us, this really starts to get at some of the root causes of the accessibility compliance challenge.

 

The marketplace is full of products that can tell organisations when a site is out of compliance, according to that product's particular interpretation of a certain accessibility standard.  But there are certainly a few issues here.

 

Firstly there are different standards, particularly if you are dealing with a global audience.

 

It is much, much easier to generate a list of non-compliant code than generate replacement code that complies with the accessibility standards yet still delivers a usable site for the visual browser.

 

Many of the accessibility checking tools are freely available on the web. To use these quite often means that content has to already be live before checking can be undertaken and sometimes it is only feasible to check a few pages at a time rather than an entire site.

 

But we would suggest that perhaps the biggest reason the local authority sites failed, or wrongly accredited themselves in that survey is that managing websites is a continual process. We would imagine that a fair proportion of those sites were originally designed for a high degree of compliance but, what may have been a AAA compliant site at launch has had this compliance eroded over time as changes are made to content without the proper reference to accessibility guidelines.

 

We believe a better philosophy to follow is encapsulated by these following sayings

 

 

 

In other words, we, as a content management system vendor could give you a set of  AAA compliant templates and style-sheets with which to launch your site. It means we can tick the compliance box and you can too – at least for the launch of your site. We could also provide training about accessibility compliance to developers and users. But the better thing to do would be to build in the compliance standards into the system itself. Therefore, as content is developed day by day, week by week, month by month the system continues to teach whoever is using it which accessibility compliance issues they should be addressing, why it’s important and also how they should do it. Better still, link the guidance with freely available, regularly updated open source code that contains the latest guideline developments

 

It may not surprise you to hear therefore that we, at Immediacy, have done just these things in the 5.1 release of our web content management system. To find out more on this follow the link to the Immediacy built-in accessibility checker.

 

Before we move on from the issue of accessibility compliance, it may interest you to know that the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) has commissioned the British Standards Institution (BSI) to produce new guidance to plug the knowledge gap it identified during its extensive research into website accessibility over the last couple of years. The guidance will aim to inform those involved in web development of their obligations and of good practice in this area. This guidance takes the form of a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) and, although not a full British Standard, it is being developed using the same rigorous processes. It is due to be published this Autumn and will be updated every two years as a minimum.

The PAS - 'PAS 78: Guide to good practice in designing accessible websites' - will remind web developers of the vital importance of Web standards and describe the standards that websites should conform to. It will also tackle many of the myths and confusions surrounding web accessibility.

 

You can be sure that one of the key elements of this new guide will be something called XHTML compliance.