Simon Willison’s Weblog

Ye gods. Dave Pawson must be apoplectic.

Dorothea Salo - 25th June 2003 01:42 - #

That's just pathetic! Truly a stuff-up to match that of the RIAA's 'site security'.

Lach - 25th June 2003 03:28 - #

You're right to point out what they do well -we all know how easy it is to slag off other people's work - but...

...one of the RNIB's aims must be to encourage web developers to produce accessible web sites. [At this point I tried to lift a quote from the RNIB's site itself but all it is so littered with broken links generated by their CMS I can't get anywhere]. To make this a commercially viable reality we need as many examples of good practice as possible, and this site does nothing to help our case.

It could even do us harm: we are keen for our clients to apply for 'See it Right' approval via their paid-for auditing process. If clients now visit the RNIB site to find out more, they'll see that the RNIB themselves haven't gone nearly as far as we're trying to encourage clients to (XHTML, CSS-P or accessible tables at the very least - hell, even ditching the <font> tag would be a start!). I know standards & accessibility are separate issues, but they frequently form part of the same approach to design: delivering sites that are accessible to all (remembering that this includes PDAs etc - always a client-friendly concept), future-proofed and look great.

It would be great to get some feedback on this debate from the RNIB themselves

Matt Lindop - 25th June 2003 10:19 - #

Yes, what have people - especially people who ought to know better - got against validation?

The Government is worse. Currently coming in with a whopping 128 validation errors.

Look at the source for that. It goes wrong from the first two lines on:

xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-tran sitional.dtd" with an HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE

Michael - 25th June 2003 10:37 - #

I have actually e-mailed Julie Howell at RNIB about this directly (linking to my post on Accessify - which also points to Simon's comments and any others that I stumble upon)

I did feel a little guilty about the post - I know Julie quite well and quite often see her at accessibility events - but felt that it needed saying all the same. I am quite relieved that others have also spotted strange markup practices and oddities that really should not be there - call it validation, if you will (no pun intended). RNIB should be setting a perfect example, given their experience in the field, and their See-It-Right campaign that they run (whereby UK sites can get accreditation for making their web sites accessible). By hyping their accessible site, they've raised expectations and the consequence of this is that all that has been said so far is what they've got wrong. Had they just redesigned without announcing beforehand about its improved features ('Better-structured documents will make it easier to read or scan with screen readers' - website manager Margaret O'Donnell) the reporting may have been a lot less critical - it may have flown under the radar.

Ian - 25th June 2003 11:16 - #

I have actually e-mailed Julie Howell at RNIB about this directly (linking to my post on Accessify - which also points to Simon's comments and any others that I stumble upon)

I did feel a little guilty about the post - I know Julie quite well and quite often see her at accessibility events - but felt that it needed saying all the same. I am quite relieved that others have also spotted strange markup practices and oddities that really should not be there - call it validation, if you will (no pun intended). RNIB should be setting a perfect example, given their experience in the field, and their See-It-Right campaign that they run (whereby UK sites can get accreditation for making their web sites accessible). By hyping their accessible site, they've raised expectations and the consequence of this is that all that has been said so far is what they've got wrong. Had they just redesigned without announcing beforehand about its improved features ('Better-structured documents will make it easier to read or scan with screen readers' - website manager Margaret O'Donnell) the reporting may have been a lot less critical - it may have flown under the radar.

Ian - 25th June 2003 11:16 - #

The lack of a well-defined left margin space around the paragraphs is of serious concern and I cannot say it helped text clarity or readability. Overall, one cannot say that I was impressed by the mark-up practices applied to the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) website.

It doesn't help their professional image and fails to consider many of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines; even the tables lacked such simple foundations as column headers, etc.

I shalt not quote from the "See It Right" campaign, although the RNIB website itself goes against some of the recommendations the campaign promotes.

Should not a leading website such as the RNIB practice what it preaches for website design, by setting a sterling example so others may follow in their footsteps...

Robert Wellock - 25th June 2003 15:28 - #

This is a surreal and bizarre situation. The RNIB has recently suffered a major financial crisis, yet it has done a great job of promoting Web site accessibility and related good practices through the seemingly limitless energies of Julie Howell.

It's important to note that, despite her considerable national prominence in the accessibility arena, Julie Howell is not responsible for the RNIB's Web site design, structure and content, and has not been for some years.

When I raised that subject of the serious inadequacies of the RNIB Web site last year, she directed me to members of the Web team. So people shouldn't vent their spleen in her direction just because she's the most visible point of contact. (Indeed, she's probably just as frustrated by the new site's major failings as most of us -- if not more so).

I strongly agree with Matt Lindop's point (see above) that such sloppy work by a prominent advocacy organisation can actually be harmful. Like many consultants and agencies, I "sell" Web site consultancy services -- embracing usability/user-centred design, accessibility and W3C standards-compliant approaches -- to both private- and public-sector clients on the basis that a decently accessible, standards-compliant Web site is good for users and thus good for business: commercially, strategically, technically, legally and (or course) ethically. But if the RNIB doesn't seem to need to bother "doing things properly", why should our skeptical cash-strapped clients?

A further irony is that consultancy represents an important revenue stream (income) for the RNIB -- witness the link to its "Accessible Website Consultancy" services (site audits etc.), together with the fees for evaluating and granting the "See it Right" accessibility logo, the investment in the creation of the "See it Right" brochures, the "Websites that Work" video and other highly effective materials advocating and clarifying best-practice techniques.

The irony here is that they can't possible expect to win lucrative consultancy work helping clients to get things right while failing to incorporate some of the most basic techniques and approaches let alone recognised best-practices.

Personally I feel let down by an organisation whose previous good work I myself have helped to promote. Physician, heal thyself!

Dennis Kessler - 25th June 2003 15:54 - #

The code bloat and tag soup has clearly resulted from at least one inexperienced developer using Dreamweaver inconsistently and seemingly with only a thin knowledge of CSS (certainly no evidence of the desirability of separating content from presentation as per W3C standards).

Indeed, the fact that they've left the standard Macromedia javascript for driving image rollovers that DW inserts automatically in the header -- despite the fact that the site doesn't seem to contain any image rollovers -- would be laughable if the overall problem and result wasn't so serious.

Dennis Kessler - 25th June 2003 16:05 - #

I agree with Dennis - Julie should not be the target of any negative comments (I hope that wasn't how it appeared). I merely e-mailed her so that she heard from me directly rather than through the grapevine. I am sure that she is embarassed by the response to the site launch, and I know that she is not directly involved with it. Julie has become many people's first point of contact because of the great advocacy work she's done so far, hence the name gets quoted readily.

Must a real pain - being the spokesperson for the whole web accessibility thing and for this to happen!

PS - apologies for the double post earlier - database had connection wobblies

Ian Lloyd - 25th June 2003 16:09 - #

You think 128 validation errors is bad? I've started a page - called 'ValiDAQ' - of the most error-strewn sites. So far, Argos are leading the way with 834 errors (as currently validated), once you provide a doctype and charset.

Current project is automating the page generation from perl-scripted data grabs.

ValiDAQ

Tim - 14th August 2003 16:34 - #

Erm... the RNIB site was designed to be accessible, not to subscribe to pie-in-the-sky W3C "standards" that are not actually present in the RW. Most folks with a visual impairment just need large text. None of the CSS re-designs I've seen have resized as well as the table-based RNIB original. This is not a problem with the RNIB here, it's a problem with WAI guidelines, the W3C and their increasingly irrelevant pronouncements. The simple truth is it's possible to make a highly accessible site ignoring large portions of WAI guidelines. The W3C is at fault, not the RNIB. There's no other industry in the world where folks aim to deliver products that don't work in the RW but may work at some indeterminant point in the (geek-hubris driven) ideal future.

mattur - 26th August 2003 02:20 - #

I arrived here after a frustrating half hour negotiating broken links throughout the RNIB site (now I know why - the \ instead of /!!!!). I feel really let down by RNIB because I've spent months getting one corporate client to go for RNIB accreditation, only to find the RNIB site itself falls way below its own standards!

Re Mattur's comments - accessibility is nothing to do with 'just needing large text'. Any browser will do that for you. W3C standards-compliance is vital. Unless markup is correct, layout is linear, tables are summarised/captioned and not nested, all deprecated code is removed, the CSS is correct etc etc, a site cannot hope to accommodate assistive devices (or any other future browsers and devices come to that).

I just hope the RNIB web team gets its act together soon, otherwise I'm going to be red-faced for a while in front of my clients! Ho hum. In the meantime I'll just carry on building W3C-compliant sites and using other sources for Accessibility advice.

Shame.

David Lang - 24th September 2003 16:25 - #

I have a little problem with seeing this page using Opera. When I open it online itâ??s displayed in a strange way but when I save it to disk, everythingâ??s fine. I wonder why. Rick http://dalloway-school.com

Rick - 2nd June 2004 16:33 - #