Achieving compliance with a CMS, continued
It’s ironic that ten years ago disabled users, including blind
and partially sighted people, deaf and hearing impaired people,
people with conditions that resulted in limited use of their arms
and people with cognitive disabilities, were able to use the Web
with relative ease.
This was largely due to the creation of access technologies
that would, for example, convert web text into audible, synthetic
speech that blind people could hear. Access technologies
worked relatively faultlessly because most websites were
hand-coded using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML
standards.
When Web authoring software tools hit the market, such as
FrontPage and Dreamweaver, most of them did not produce
W3C-compliant code, which meant that the web ceased to be based on
standards-compliant mark up and this was also true of many content
management systems too.
So while the web has undoubtedly moved on in terms of its
depth, breadth and capability, it has also gone backwards in some
respects.
The internet is about connecting individuals, businesses,
governments and the key to its success has always been that
it was developed on an open platform. Mobile devices and PDAs
are now able to access the internet and regardless of whether you
own an IBM compatible machine or a Macintosh computer, you are able
to connect to the internet.
The free flow of information has fueled the growth of the
World Wide Web but without standards, its growth is hindered.
Imagine if you could not access certain sites because it did not
support your browser or because of the type of computer that you
had, eventually if it happened often enough you would stop using
the web altogether.
XHTML compliancy is a standard that all websites
should adopt, especially websites that are in the process
of being redesigned or developed.
Apart from protection from litigation, there are
advantages to complying to web design standards which include
- ensuring that your website is widely accessible to people
across the range of computers and browsers means that you will not
lose a potential sale because your website did not render properly
on the website visitors computer
- compliant sites rank better on search engines, increasing
exposure of your website
- changes in technology, such as new versions of browsers are
less likely to affect the way your website renders
- the design of your website will look similar for different
browsers and computers. Without compliance, your website may look
bad and it may not allow visitors to navigate your website
XHTML code validation is not rocket science so it made sense
for us at Immediacy to build-in an XHTML checker so that, like the
accessibility checking that takes place before a site is published,
so too can it be checked for technical standards compliance before
going live.