Well, this was inevitable: Our Story is now Section 508 compliant. That means that people with disabilities are better able to explore this site due to slight tweaks here and there in our code. If this sounds esoteric to you, you might want to check out these links.
Mark Pilgrim: The myths of web accessibility. The next time someone stands up in a design meeting and claims that you don’t have any blind customers, ask them if they care about search engine placement. Then remind them that Google is a blind user who reads the entire Internet every month, and then reports what it sees to millions of its closest friends.
Nic Steenhout: Accessibility: Build it, and They Will Come. I asked Pete to put in a ramp. He then asked me, ‘why should I put a ramp in? You’re the only customer I have in a wheelchair.’ I asked him why he thought that was.
Jim Byrne: This HTML Kills. Anti-discrimination legislation in Britain and in America is increasing awareness of accessibility. The Americans with Disabilities Act makes it illegal for companies offering services on the web to discriminate against people with disabilities. There are already examples of citizens taking action against companies with inaccessible websites.
Section 508, by the way, is a set of accessibility guidelines that are required by government agencies and businesses by law. It’s been in place since 2001. WAI, on the other hand, is a set of guidelines determined by the World Wide Web Consortium–the standards body for the Internet. These guidlines have been a W3C recommendation since 1999.
Accessibility is both easy and hard to do for your site. It’s hard in the sense that retrofitting any website with any new technology is just difficult. This is a huge argument against XHTML and CSS right now–it’s simply too costly to overhaul the site, and who has the money? But, it’s also easy in the sense that, if your site is reasonably well laid-out, it doesn’t take a lot to reach section 508 or WAI priority 1 compliance. The trick is to decide how well-structured you’re going to make your website. If you’re stuck using web design techniques from the mid-nineties, then working towards a well-structured site will not only offer you better accessibility, but less bandwidth used (com’on, you are paying for your bandwidth, aren’t you?) and easier maintainability. Google also rewards well structured pages. No, seriously, it does.
Once your markup validates, taking care of accessibility issues is a lot simpler–there are far fewer errors that come out of the validator, and the ones that do are reasonably intelligible. I recommend checking out Mark Pilgrim’s online book, Dive Into Acessibility. Going through the instructions there alone got me to Section 508 compliance. A few more tweaks here and there qualified the site for WAI priority 1 accessibility.
Unfortunately, though, that’s as far as I got. The only thing keeping this site from priority 2 accessibility is this problem: “Do not use the same link phrase more than once when the links point to different URLs.” What that means is that there are links on this site that use the same exact text, but point to different places–namely the “n Comments” links. There will be the occassion, from time to time, when two blogs will have the same number of comments and will break this rule for priority 2 accessibility. The Bobby validator would seem to imply that changing the title attribute of the offending <a> tag would solve the problem, but it didn’t. Interestingly enough, another validator, “Cynthia Says” let me off with a warning about repeated link phrases. Hm. Jukka Korpela notes this as being an odd behavior in the Bobby validator–even the W3C home page has repeated link phrases that point to different locations.
For more resources on Accessibility, you may want to check out these links:
* Dive Into Mark: Accessibility
* Jeffrey Zeldman: Accessibility and Section 508
* A List Apart: Accessibility
* World Wide Web Consortium: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
* Section508.gov
Update: Rather than trying to deal with what otherwise seems like a bug in the Bobby validator, I’ve settled on posting a WAI badge–rather than an AAA badge–on the footer of Our Story. As best I can tell, this site is in compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium Accessibility Initiative, Priority 3.
Go Ken! You oughta ask Nic Steenhout to take a peruse through your site just to give you a relevant perspective! That guy’s pretty cool and knowledgeable about this kinda stuff. Plus, I think his dog will like the pictures of Sasha
Oh, and by the way Ken, if you place this code as your Comment Link (in the template) you will probably pass Bobby AA:
<a href=” <$MTEntryPermalink$>#comments” title=”<$MTEntryTitle$>”>
This way every link with the phrase “comments” will have a unique title attribute. See if that works after rebuild.
Jai, I’ve already done this–it doesn’t help: “The ‘Bobby’ validator would seem to imply that changing the title attribute of the offending <a> tag would solve the problem, but it didn’t.”
See the Jukka Korpela link for more discussion.
Hmm… odd. I read that, then I went and checked the comments links on the front page and all the tool tips were comming up “comments”. After I posted my comment, then they all came up with unique title attributes. It was like the twilight zone. But I wonder if what I was seeing prior to my commnt is what Bobby is seeing… I dunno. It’s all weird to me. I still find it cool though, that you got 508 and Bobby A compliance. I got bored here at work and made the “Dynamic Banners” ( http://www.jaiandbecky.com/?blog=dy ) version of my site XHTML validable. Yeah, it has tables, but validation is just such a nice feeling of accomplishment, isn’t it?
I wish I could make simple pages look as nice as you do. I looked at the Templates page and was so impressed by the simplicity and elegance. You’re the real deal K!
“Yeah, it has tables, but validation is just such a nice feeling of accomplishment, isn’t it?”
Sure does! I wish that accessibility was so easy. There’s something to be said for the quick postitive-feedback loop that validators provide. They let you know that what you’re doing is good and encourage you to keep going.
The Eclipse IDE project http://www.eclipse.org/ from what I read, lets you write “unit tests” for your code while you’re programming. They effectively act as a code validator for whatever language you’re working in. So long as your code passes your tests, a little green “light” icon stays in your status bar. If you break something, it turns red.
I wish everything in life came with a validator icon.
Yeah, the W3C validators are nice (when you get the hang of ‘em), but those accessability ones are too vague and not black and white enough for me. They shouldn’t match suggestions in the midst of technical validation (IE “you should do this if your website could do this, but if not,don’t worry about it” should be separtated from “you don’t have alt tags, fix it”). That Eclipse project looks VERY cool.