BenMeadowcroft.com

RNIB open letter (26th June 2003)

Below is an open letter to Julie Howell of the RNIB concerning the recent redesign of rnib.org.uk.

Dear Julie,
I have written to you specifically as I know you were responsible for the campaign for good web design, I have also cc'd the webteam in on this email as it contains feedback on the new site design.

I feel that I have to write to you to express the disappointment several web designers have with the current RNIB website and the harm it causes to those of us trying to evangelise accessible web sites based around published web standards. Given the costs involved in redesigning a site it is often a difficult task to persuade companies to spend money on a redesign of their sites to make them more accessible to a wider range of people. This task is made even more difficult when business owners can point to a site such as rnib.org.uk and say "The RNIB doesn't follow the 'standards', why should I?"

On my own behalf, and I am sure on behalf of many in the web design community, I would ask you to raise the issue of non compliance with the w3c specifications for both HTML and the web content accessibility guideline 1.0. Failure to comply with these guidelines, or even to attempt to comply with them, is a disappointing state of affairs.

Link to the w3c validator demonstrating the failure to pass validation, even when compensating for a missing doctype and character encoding.

The document also contains a litany of other errors that cause it to fail in many browsers, for example many of the relative links use a '\' instead of a '/', this is an error and breaks the links in many browsers. For example the page http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_relaunch.hcsp demonstrates these errors, for example links to RNIB advertising are provided as both
"/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_rnibadvertising.hcsp"
and
"\xpedio\groups\public\documents\publicwebsite\public_rnibadvertising.hcsp"
the first of which is correctly written, however the second is incorrect and relies on Internet Explorers error correction mechanisms, and fails in other browsers such as Netscape and Mozilla. When this error affects the users ability to get to content such as the "Tips for screenreader users of this site" you see how the usability of the site is severely damaged.

I think that the new design is poorly thought out with respect to accessibility and usability and sends a poor message in the campaign for accessible websites. The RNIB puts shows itself in a poor light when its own website is inaccessible and broken to a large number of users. As a professional web developer I have to state that I am disappointed in your redesign, especially as I cannot even reach many parts of the site due to the errors in coding on the site.

A couple of other points for the web team to implement, there is no default language specified using the lang attribute, this means that aural browsers cannot automatically pick the best voice to read a page in.

There are no summary attributes on the tables.

You are using large amounts of "presentational" HTML that has been depreciated, this is a tactic that focuses on visual users excessively and should be replaced by style sheets which can be targeted to different peoples browsers, visual and aural.

yours sincerely,
Benjamin Meadowcroft
http://www.benmeadowcroft.com/

After sending the letter I discovered the following response by Julie to another web designers post concerning the matter.

I read through the things that have been said so far. Some of the technical points are beyond my understanding (I'm a policy officer rather than a technical expert) but I have many colleagues who do understand that stuff and who will be able to help me appreciate the issues that have been raised.

Julie is mainly concerned with policy matters and is not directly responsible for the redesign, however she is responsible for the RNIBs accessible web site campaign which is why I directed my comments to her. It is understandable that she would not know the minutiae of web development issues that affect accessible design, however one would image that the people who are employed or contracted to develop the website for the RNIB would have a good understanding the web content accessibility guidelines and standards based web authoring. The fact is that the current state of affairs is extremely poor and a blow against the evangelism of accessible web design.

WYSIWYG = Productivity Loss (23rd June 2003)

There will be an anti-WYSIWYG backlash in corporate American when managers finally begin assessing the productivity hit they have taken in their engineering departments by allowing graphic illiterates to diddle fonts and push pixels instead of focusing on content.

From GUI - The Death of WYSIWYG, interesting, just think of all the wasted hours spent by accountants on powerpoint preparations...

Liberal HTML Parsing, Not Big, Not Clever (23rd June 2003)

Revisiting the topic of liberal parsing, which has gathered some publicity recently, it is good to reflect on what the problems invalid HTML causes actually are. Suffice to say that toleration of errors and the associated handling of them that is required leads to the incompatibilities and inconsistencies in error handling between clients, coupled with proprietary extensions. Interspersed amongst my own commentary below are a few quotes gathered from a recent e-mail exchange with Dagfinn R. Parnas, the author of a paper on HTML error correction.

After doing some research on the history of browsers and HTML, I really didn't find it very surprising that the standards compliance was really awful. A wise man once said: "It takes two [...] to lie, one to lie and one to listen". If the early browsers hadn't started with error-correcting behind the backs of the authors, a lot of the incorrect code would have disappeared shortly. But then again the Internet might not have been as diverse as it is now (writing valid html code takes much more skill than writing tag soup). I think the solution would have been a simple smiley face incorporated in the browser or another means of telling the user how standard compliant the site was. Most web designers (both pro and novice) are very dedicated in making the best site they can, and clients would not be to happy about an angry smiley as they want a professional site. By the way, the wise man was Homer J. Simpson.

What are the most common causes of invalid HTML then?

In addition to these basic errors the spectre of browser specific extensions raises its head.

70.8 and 23.9 percent [of HTML documents] have defined non-standard attributes and non-standard elements respectively.

This heavy use of proprietary markup significantly raises the entry level for new browsers into the marketplace, a new browser entrant cannot rely on published standards but must examine a multitude of vendor sources to understand how to deal with these proprietary elements. By raising the cost of entry in this manner the current browsers help to maintain their market leading position.

As we move towards XML and the well formed paradigm let's leave behind the legacy of invalid HTML and adopt the strictness of well formed and valid XHTML. If you can produce valid XHTML do it, if you can't then stick with HTML and don't pollute XHTML like we did with HTML.

A Web site in Transition to a Web log (or the Opposite) (23rd June 2003)

While checking my referrer logs the other day I came across a web log listing other blogs which discussed web standards or accessibility. What made me smile was the comment alongside the link to my site...

BenMedowcroft.com - a web site in transition to a web log (or the opposite); info on CSS, WebDAV, HTML. source

As well as making me smile it helped me to think about the direction of this site, hopefully a few of my new ideas prompted by this will lead to a better site experience when I implement them.

Anyway while browsing that list I came across a french site on web standards, very nice looking, if only I could remember more of the french I learnt at school, anyway if you speak french then check this site out, openweb.eu.org

Tactics for Template Based Design (19th June 2003)

The recent meeting of the UK usability professionals get together concerning accessibility is covered in isolanis weblog entry about the accessibility meeting. The blog entry also contained a link to Ian Lloyds presentation on the Nationwide Building Society website redesign. This presentation covered many interesting points, one that is applicable to most projects though is the management of templates in a template driven site. First of all though, what happens when you mismanage templates? The quality of the original template can often be compromised by later additions or modifications, these modifications can have ramifications unknown to the new user. Without clear guidelines on how to use the set of templates the wrong template could be used for the wrong type of page.

Misuse of templates can have disastrous effects on the usability of the site, navigation may become inconsistent within subsections of the site, and also the accessibility of the site, someone with no accessibility training may use an HTML table in an inappropriate manner.

To guard against problems like this manifesting themselves there must be a form of management control exercised over the templates, especially in organisations where more than one person maintains them. A useful tool is to define and document the uses and properties of the templates explicitly. Some useful aspects to note are:

1. What each templates is for, and when to use it. (e.g. "this is the subsection homepage template")
2. How the templates were constructed.
3. What you can change on the template.
4. What you should leave alone.
5. Screenshots of how pages should appear in different browsers.

As with most things, it is important to have a level of modularity in your templates to enable pages to be customised to a particular section without damaging the overall site. Make sure though that the extension mechanism is documented and understood, a useful documentation system is an intranet where everyone can easily get access to how to sue the templates.

Remember your set of site templates is where the usability and accessibility testing efforts are focused, don't let the investment in usable and accessible templates be wasted, protect them and promote them.

Attribution and the spreading of a meme (14th June 2003)

This is nothing more than a few observations concerning the significant increase in traffic I have been getting these last few days regarding my post that 99.29% of web sites are obsolete, from the fact that only 0.71% of sites testes were valid HTML.

1. Dagfinn R. Parnas wrote a message about his masters thesis.
2. I read the thesis, found it interesting, tabulated the results and blogged it.
3. Got some normal linkage for a while, no major increases in traffic.
4. Read an interesting W3c article about improving invalid sites.
5. The article states that running a survey to determine how many sites are valid, I comment that this has been done, in the thesis.
6. The time between my posting of that comment and Bill Masons tipping of Zeldman to my blog entry summarising the data leads to the conclusion that Bill read my comment.
7. Number of recorded Hits to the site quadruples (even more than my last Zeldman mention)

So why mention this? Without permalinks and archives this information may not have been spread as easily over the web, the number of referrers is growing rapidly as different sites pick up on this and comment on it. As I have noted when we create a mechanism by which knowledge can be perpetuated we increase the likelihood that this knowledge will be built upon and more widely disseminated. Especially when authors are liberal with their citations. The practice of citing references allows the web of interconnections to grow and knowledge to be more easily located.

Anyway I'll leave you with something a little lighter to look over.

Blogshares Top 100! (11th June 2003)

It finally happened yesterday, I made the blogshares 100 richest players list. When I smelt that making the cut was a possibility my carefully arranged transaction planning went out of the window and I engaged in a quick flurry of buying undervalued blogs. A few minutes later and the value of my new investments rose and I made the top 100, success.

URNs and persistence (6th June 2003)

This is just a short note to state that I am alive and well! Seriously though this is final exam season for me, along with which I have been working hard on my final year project as well as doing some real work and travelling to Spain, again :-) Anyway as the title suggests this post is about URNs and persistence, how so? Well, I've recently written a new article explaining the benefits of URNs, their practical application and how they can help web authors to preserve a measure of persistence in their citations.

I also received a rather interesting package yesterday from Microsoft, the contents of which will have to remain underwraps for a little while longer until I launch the new project I am developing and I can let the cat out of the bag.