Preaching Not Practising. Web Accessibility And Governmental Organisations.
Governments and organisations make a big deal these days about the importance of accessibility. The US government has Section 508 legislation enforcing various accessibility standards, the UK references web standards in the Disability Discrimination Act, and the European Union and United Nations both have accessibility policies. So I thought I’d take a look at some of their pages and see how much they practice what they preach…and guess what, it’s not a particularly pretty sight!
I’ve used four tools to evaluate the sites. W3C’s HTML Validator, W3C’s CSS Validator, WebXACT and the Functional Accessibility Evaluator.
www.section508.gov
Section 508 legislation was added to the US Rehabilitation Act. It provides rules and regulations to Federal bodies that ensure equal information access to all.
- W3C HTML Validation - Failed validation for HTML 4.01 Transitional with 62 errors!
- W3C CSS Validation - Failed validation for CSS with 1 error. No seperate CSS document.
- WebXACT - Accessible to WCAG 1.0 A guidelines, failed AA and AAA.
- Functional Accessibility Evaluator - Poor performance. 42% failure on Navigation & Orientation and 100% failure on Styling.
All round it’s a poor performance. HTML 4.01 Transitional is not a particularly difficult validation compared to XHTML, and yet the site picks up 62 errors. The site also fails to include a seperate CSS file, instead including the styling information in the main HTML document and even making an error in that. The site satisfies the reasonably simple single ‘A’ ranking for WCAG guidlines, and performs badly on the Functional Accessibility Evaluator.
www.direct.gov.uk (section on Disability Rights)
Directgov is the UK government’s portal for information available to the general public. British legislation in regards to web accessibility is relatively undefined, but the section referenced has information on Disabled Rights in general.
- W3C HTML Validation - Passed XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- W3C CSS Validation - Passed with no errors.
- WebXACT - Accessible to WCAG 1.0 AA, failed AAA.
- Functional Accessibility Evaluator - Decent performance. 9% failure on Navigation & Orientation and 25% failure on Styling.
The most effective performance of any of the sites that we tested. Validating XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS, and with ‘AA’ accessibility according to WebXACT, this site has more than reasonable accessibility, and only a few errors on the Functional Accessibility Evaluator.
europa.eu (section on European Union Web Accessibility Policy)
The European Union’s influence over its member states in regard to rights impacting accessibility is potentially significant. Here they detail their accessibility policy.
- W3C HTML Validation - Passed HTML 4.01 Transitional
- W3C CSS Validation - Passed with no errors.
- WebXACT - Accessible to WCAG 1.0 A, failed AA and AAA.
- Functional Accessibility Evaluator - Mediocre performance. 14% fail on Navigation & Orientation and 80% failure on Styling.
The performance is mediocre at best. Basic validation for HTML and CSS goes fine, but again they achieve only the minimum single ‘A’ standard under WCAG guidlines. Their Functional Accessibility Evaluator performance is below average, with particular failures in overall Styling.
www.un.org (special section on Accessibility)
Given their potential focus on developing nations and web users who do not enjoy the technological or educational advantages enjoyed in the West. So it’s probably of prime importance that they pay close attention to their accessibility policies.
- W3C HTML Validation - Could not be validated due to failure in unicoding.
- W3C CSS Validation - Passed with no errors.
- WebXACT - Accessible to WCAG 1.0 A, failed AA and AAA.
- Functional Accessibility Evaluator - Mediocre performance. 14% fail on Navigation & Orientation, 20% failure on Styling, 66% failure on HTML Standards.
A really dire performance by the United Nations. Their HTML coding is so poor that even using default UTF-8 encoding (as the site does not define it) the W3C validator was unable to complete its tests. The HTML standards failure continues in the Functional Accessibility Evaluator, while the only real bright spot is passing CSS validation with no errors.
All in all it’s a disappointing performance all round by these governmental body sites, particularly given we’ve looked at the very sections that focus on accessibility. Only the British government comes out with any real credit, the the UN site is probably the weakest all round. Given the potential for governmental bodies to play a role in future definitions of universal web standards (a possible by-product of the recent Opera action against Microsoft in the EU for example), it doesn’t really fill me with confidence that their overall performance in practising what they preach is so decidedly poor.
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