Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.
Why Triple-A Sites Aren’t
Accessites.org boasts an impressive showcase of some of the most attractive and accessible sites around. Yet, if you check any of these sites out, you’ll find very few of them sport a “Triple-A” badge. Most only claim Double-A compliance. Why? If these sites are amongst the “best of the best”, why aren’t they Triple-A?
Because the reality is that true Triple-A compliance isn’t practical in the Real Worldtm.
Most of the Priority 3 checkpoints are relatively easy to attain – such as:
4.2 Specify the expansion of each abbreviation or acronym in a document where it first occurs.
or
13.6 Group related links, identify the group (for user agents), and, until user agents do so, provide a way to bypass the group.
The stumbling block is Checkpoint 11.3
Provide information so that users may receive documents according to their preferences (e.g., language, content type, etc.)
Content negotiation can, and often is, used to to serve content per the client request. Aural style sheets can be incorporated into a site (although screen reader support for aural css is poor). But different written/spoken languages? In theory, a given site could be visited by a Swahili speaker one day and then an Hindi speaker the next. And that’s without even considering non-spoken languages such as the various flavours of sign langauge.
Ethnologue.com suggests that there are almost 7,000 living languages worldwide. Given these kinds of numbers, there is no way that any one web site can hope to provide copies of every page in every possible language. So it follows that no site can ever claim true Triple-A compliance. In my experience, many ‘Triple-A’ sites have simply run pages through a mechanical accessibility validator without any manual checks whatsoever and I’d be very suspicious of any such claim with some sort of qualifier.
The showcased sites on Accessites.org that claim the Double-A compliance aren’t “lesser sites” at all. In fact, their refusal to claim something that they know cannot be reached demonstrates a far better understanding of web accessibility than all of the so-called Triple-A sites put together.
Totally agree. I am in the process of a re-design of an Australian government website and the original designers claimed that it was a level 3 in accessibility. I did not believe them and now I know that they were falsly claiming it. Im guessing it was a ‘mechanical accessibility validator’ like you suggested in your article.
A question I have raised about these levels of accessibility is does it matter what doctype you use?? Read hear for more info
I’d argue that it’s better to use a Strict doctype as the approach imposed by this specification will tend to stop the developer from making some of the more common accessibility mistakes. Plus the greater emphasis on the separation of content from presentation will lend itself to a more accessible page. That said, given that many of the WAI checkpoints require manual checking, it’s still possible to produce a fairly inaccessible document that validates as Strict.
Accessites.org has a good article on the subject of doctypes generally, explaining why it’s time to kill off transitional doctypes.
Yeah I never really coded with Transitional after I read that in the actual doctype page it talks that you should use Strict rather than transitional, to me that taught me that I should stick with Strict….
Thanks for the article