Cynthia Says... Create Accessible Web Sites 35
Kynn writes "The folks at ICDRI, in partnership with the Internet society and HiSoftware, bring us Cynthia Says, a free service to help you evaluate your Web pages for accessibility. In other words, it's roughly equivalent to what Bobby used to be, before it went commercial. It features what seems to be a cartoon version of my friend Cynthia Waddell, which is a bit creepy, but in all honesty it's a much better symbol than the old cartoon cop used with Bobby. I always thought there was an implied menace, as if the smiling chap would happily bludgeon you with his truncheon if you created an inaccessible Web site." If only.
Might want to mirror the results. (Score:1, Interesting)
Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget to use ALT tags!
Ok, ok, so there's more to it than that. However, in my designs, I've begun to apply the following rule of thumb in regards to web accessibility:
The page is accessible if it can be properly viewed and navigated using a text-based browser (i.e. Lynx).
Lynx forces the page creator to use ALT tags liberally, and it reduces or eliminates the page's dependency on things like Javascript and Flash.
What else, really, has to be considered outside of the limitations of a text-based browser? I'd love to read some comments from folks with more expertise in this area.
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, why is Flash so bad for the web? Simple: say you have a blind user. How on earth are they supposed to navigate a Flash site when there are no ALT attributes to guide them and their screen readers can't "read" a
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:1)
For example, why is Flash so bad for the web? Simple: say you have a blind user. How on earth are they supposed to navigate a Flash site when there are no ALT attributes to guide them and their screen readers can't "read" a .swf file.
Spot on as far as I am concerned. At the moment there is far to much emphasis on looks rather than useability, which is more important? Useability. By far, after all your olds looked after you why shoulded we look after them, and everybody elses'!!
Nuf said and there is mu
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:3, Informative)
The correct way of embedding a Flash presentation into an HTML document is to use the <object> element. Alternative representations of the embedded object should be encoded as the contents of the <object> element. This is actually far more flexible than using an alt attribute.
Unfortunately, browser bugs interfere with this quite a bit
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:4, Informative)
I'd take advice like that with a pinch of salt, as the person dispensing it clearly demonstrates no understanding of the basic structure of an HTML document.
There is no such thing as an "alt tag". There is an alt attribute, which is a completely different thing.
That's a dangerous assumption. Take guiltless image use [stopdesign.com] as an example. Works fine in lynx, but fails miserably when you use a browser that renders CSS but does not display background images.
Website accessibility is a complex topic, and there's no way you can automatically test something like this. The best you can do is provide hints on what to look for.
I'm not particularly inclined to trust Cynthia, as the report document produced uses font sizes set at 12px and 10px verdana (!), and gives horizontal scrolling at 1024x768.
One tool I have found to be of high quality is Accessibility Valet [webthing.com].
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:2)
Yes, I do. But anybody qualified to assess the accessibility of a site would not make that mistake.
Bollocks. You don't just swap words when you feel like it. If a hardware techie started calling my monitor a TV, I'd run a mile. Attributes and tags are fundamentally different things, and there's no excuse for confusing them.
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:2)
Management doesn't have to justify itself to employees, and management doesn't need to know HTML in-depth. An accessibility tool, and somebody writing articles about accessibility on the web has to do both.
Hardly. If you look at my original post, you'll see that it was in the context of other a
Re:I'd have an easier time trusting you (Score:1)
Boo-fricken-hoo. I'm so hurt. Can't you read? Or is there something that confuses you when I say "This domain is mainly used for email"? Or maybe, just maybe, did you resort to insults when you found you couldn't argue against me effectively?
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:2)
It's getting hard to tell you cowards apart :)
My rule is simple: the more terminology a person gets wrong, the less reliable their advice. It's something I have observed over many years, and is very reliable. I'm sure others have similar rules. If anybody decides to screw around with terminology because they say it's easier to say "tag" than "attribute", fair enough, but it will have an impact on how others percieve them.
In particular, Bobby used to fail documents containing alt="" - which lead to
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:4, Informative)
You need to return false:
<a href="alternative.html" onclick="dostuff(); return false;">...</a>For instance, argos.co.uk [argos.co.uk] will refuse to handle gecko-based browsers. Idiocy.
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:2, Insightful)
For further things, take a look at Dive Into Accessibility [diveintoac...bility.org], a really good book.
Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article (Score:2)
A good start, but not strictly true. Lynx is a full-screen text browser, so you get a page by page view of a document. A better test would either be a line-mode browser (like the original W3 browser), or a speech browser like IBM's Homepage Reader.
Apparently the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) have accessibility packs that includes a blindfold.
Not very usable (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not very usable (Score:1)
They limit the number of tests you can run via the web interface, but they also sell a standalone and serv
Re:Not very usable (Score:2)
I hope you are not relying on the results of Bobby (or any automated accessibility checker) as the signal of compliance. It cannot be totally done automatically. For instance, the WCAG says that images must have meaningful alt attributes. A script can check that an alt attribute exists, but there's no way for
Re:Not very usable (Score:1)
As far as alt attributes are concerned, I don't use a whole lot of images on my site... and yes, the alt and title attributes I use aren't the best ones.
If the site was a government site or for a corporation, I would definitely not base the site's accessibility b
Avoid HiSoftware like the plague. (Score:1, Insightful)
It does NOT play very well W3C standards - so expect your nice XHTML Compliant webpage to be choke when it's run through the software. You can forget about CSS layouts "validating". You'll end up fighting the software instead of fixing your site.
If you want an accessible website that is Section 508 compliant, use the W3C's Web Content Accessability Guidelines. If you pass those, you'll pass government r
Accessibility Validators (and why most suck) (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a Google [google.com] of some resources and info, as well.
Ultimately, the biggest problem I have, is that too many web designers utterly rely on these validators. The problem is, they can only check for a few different parts of the standard. For instance, an automated validator may only be able to verify compliance with maybe half o
Here's another one... (Score:1)
If you intend to follow the guidelines or not... reading the results is often interesting in either case =)
Re:Here's another one... (Score:1)
Her own medicine (Score:3, Interesting)
Here it is:
http://www.bertilow.com/div/cynthias_medicine/
And here's her verdict:
Verified File Name:
http://www.bertilow.com/div/cynthias_medicine/
Emulated Browser: Cynthia 1.0
Date and Time: 3/14/2003 8:34:15 PM
Failed Automated Verification
Emulated Browser: Cynthia 1.0
She failed! The reason is the crappy markup with loads of deprecated stuff. What were they thinking?
Re:Her own medicine (Score:1)
I did quick tests against a few big name sites
www.sun.com - failed
www.ibm.com - failed
www.debian.org - failed
www.redhat.com - failed
www.slashdot.org - failed
www.microsoft.com - failed
www.w3c.org - failed
www.opera.com - failed
www.mozilla.org - passed
The failure closest to passing was www.opera.org, which has a _single_ minor error, probably a typo, rather than policy.
My web pages pass, but then again they're optimised for Lynx...
YAW.
humans needed (Score:3, Informative)
For instance, I have a textual "home" link on every page that takes you to the site's home page. It also happens that I have made the graphical banner on my pages into a clickable link that will also take you to my home page. A blind person doesn't need to worry that there are two methods for getting to the home page -- there's one method that can be read aloud with speech-to-text software.
On the other hand, there may be other things on my site that really are accessibility issues. The problem is, I can't tell from Cynthia's output what they are.
It seems to me that the real need is for actual humans with disabilities to test web sites. Yes, I know that's expecting them to do something that they really shouldn't have to do, but I just don't think there's any alternative.
I've been contacted once by a blind person who was having trouble using my site. The problem, however, was with my PDF files, not with my HTML. Bobby and Cynthia don't check PDF. And in fact, it wasn't something that I was able to solve, due to the realities of the way I created the PDFs.
......my belly-button (Score:1)
Re:......my belly-button (Score:2)
Obviously not website designers, that's why governments around the world feel compelled to legislate website designers into doing the right thing.
As Joe Clark [joeclark.org] points out, if you are making your website accessible because of legislation, then you are doing the right things for the wrong reasons.
To pre-empt the "its only government sites that need to be accessible" crowd, here's a counter-argument to the South Western misruling [findlaw.com].