I’ve been memed!
It would seem that I’ve been blog-tagged. Thanks, Grant!
I now have to come up with 5 things that most people don’t know about me. So here goes… I’ve been memed!: continue reading …
Best Practice Sharing
Mark Gristock, marketing director of usability firm Foviance has attacked web accessibility consultants and organisations for, in his opinion, deliberately witholding their knowledge of user requirements from the rest of the web design sector. He then goes onto say:
If they had any interest in raising standards, they would be sharing their findings with the world and opening dialogue with the design and business community about how best to integrate techniques with standard processes
What universe has Mr Gristock been inhabiting lately?
Supporting Legacy Browsers, or Not
Following a conversation about the problems of supplying accessible content to old (legacy) browsers Mike Cherim came up with a PHP solution that would allow developers to serve very plain content to legacy browsers but rich content to everyone else.
There’s nothing wrong with Mike’s code but I felt it could be tidied up and, possibly, tweaked to give faster performance. After all, if you’re going to use this on a big, high traffic site, performance could become an issue.
Global Accessibility Audit Results
A recent study conducted by Nomensa on behalf of the United Nations confirmed that many web sites around the world are beyond the reach of disabled persons. The report, published on 5th December 2006, also concluded that such sites could easily be improved to meet basic web accessibility levels.
Using a combination of manual and automated testing against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the study looked at 100 popular sites over 5 different sectors in 20 countries and found that 97 of the 100 sites tested failed to meet minimum web accessibility levels. Performance across the different sectors varied, with central government, retail and banking offering the strongest accessibility performances across all countries.