Achieving compliance with a CMS
Compliance is a hot topic at the moment but it is one of those
terms that means different things to different people. So in
this article we cover three aspects of the term compliance and
how content management systems can be used to address them.
The first is accessibility compliance, the second is technical
standards compliance and the third is what we would describe as
accountability compliance which is being driven by regulations and
legislation. Accessibility issues are also covered in depth in
one of our other articles,
content management for
accessibility.
It is well worth pointing out that access to all – was, and
remains Tim Berners-Lee’s, the inventor of the web, vision and he
continues his good work in helping to achieve this.
"The power of the
web is in its universality. Access by everyone,
regardless of disability, is an essential
aspect."
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director, inventor of the
World Wide Web.
As it is Government legislation that is driving accessibility
compliance it is probably not surprising that it is Government and
public sector organisations that come in for the most scrutiny with
regard to the guidelines and their implementation.
Take the 2005 British general election as an example. In
the run up to the election an organisation called User Vision
reviewed six political party websites (Conservative, Green, Labour,
Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, and SNP) and assessed them against
recognised usability and accessibility standards.
Of the six categories of assessment (content, structure,
navigation, search, design and accessibility) accessibility scored
the lowest overall, with half the parties scoring only 1 out of a
possible 5, two scoring 3/5 and one 4/5. Fortunately for Labour,
they achieved the highest score but the researchers still had
plenty of justification for making the following concluding
statement in the report.
“We were surprised that the standard of accessibility was
not higher, as the parties should be showing good practice in
social inclusiveness. Most parties had an accessibility statement
but most did not live up to their promises. A bad sign.”
In some other recent research by City University for the
Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) an audit of 300
library, museum and archive websites found that six out of 10
failed the most basic Web accessibility tests. The results stated
that ‘only three percent of sites tested met the accessibility
standards that government websites are expected to achieve by
December 2005’.
As you may already know, the most widely acknowledged measure
of accessibility is the international Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines (WCAG) from the World Wide Web Consortium
(http://www.w3.org/WAI). These specify three levels of compliance:
'A', 'AA' and 'AAA'.
Research into the accessibility of council sites by the Royal
National Institute of the Blind, published in March this year by
the local government Society of IT Management, found that of the
468 UK council websites, just 62 met level 'A' standards, and none
achieved higher levels.
Subsequent research found that nine councils in the sample claimed
'AAA' accessibility for part or all of their sites at the time of
testing, even though the RNIB found that seven of these sites did
not even reach single 'A' accessibility, and the other two were are
only single 'A' sites. A further three claimed 'AA' where RNIB
found them to not even meet 'A', and six claimed 'A' status where
only two were entitled to do so - a total of 16 false claims in the
sample.