The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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If you build it, will they come? Not necessarily. I am referring, of course, to Web sites, given my current Google-eyed predilection. Week after week, I continue to be amazed by the money that is spent by commercial and government organisations on a Web presence, with apparently no thought given to making the site easy to find. Going a step further, many of these sites are not accessible, which might be even more frustrating to a visitor who has managed to reach the site but cannot get in.
In the Link mailing list, there was a recent (23-24 June) discussion about government sites that fail accessibility tests. The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 states at Section 2.2:
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Equal Access is Required by Law
The provision of information and online services through the Worldwide Web is a service covered by the DDA. Equal access for people with a disability in this area is required by the DDA where it can reasonably be provided. This requirement applies to any individual or organisation developing a Worldwide Web page in Australia, or placing or maintaining a Web page on an Australian server. This includes pages developed or maintained for purposes relating to employment; education; provision of services including professional services, banking, insurance or financial services, entertainment or recreation, telecommunications services, public transport services, or government services; sale or rental of real estate; sport; activities of voluntary associations; or administration of Commonwealth laws or programs. All these are areas specifically covered by the DDA.
In addition to these specific areas, provision of any other information or other goods, services or facilities through the Internet is in itself a service, and as such, discrimination in the provision of this service is covered by the DDA. The DDA applies to services whether provided for payment or not.
Bobby
Some participants in that Link message thread visited the "Bobby" tool http://bobby.watchfire.com and fed it with some Federal government sites http://www.fed.gov.au and reported that they failed the W3C accessibility tests. One subscriber took it one step further and wrote a script that tested every site in that list through Bobby. His results are documented at http://snurl.com/22o1, which is a pointer to his diary entry for 23 June. The overwhelming majority of sites failed. Yes, even today I confirmed that the HREOC site seems to fail the Bobby tests.
I accept that meeting accessibility standards is seldom coincidental with an attractive site design. I encourage you to feed a test page to Bobby and take a look at it after you have finally met all requirements. You are allowed to have a site that offers an alternative set of accessible pages, which was my solution to this problem.
Even then, it is very easy to render the page inaccessible each time you make some change to it and are ignorant of the rules. I added a link and used a single word as the link text. Bobby failed the page and offered, "Make sure that all link phrases make sense when read out of context."
Content Management Systems
It seems that Web site design is determined (held hostage?) by the most expensive component, this often being a content management system (CMS) or an e-commerce application. When you are implementing a solution that costs in the six or seven figure region, nobody dares to ask if the resulting site is accessible or search-engine-friendly. Funny, one would hope that such an expensive "solution" did not create a new "problem". If you know of a page that is maintained by such a system, try to find it using a search engine.
Metadata
Some people who pursue accessibility fervently seem to be unaware of the site being invisible to search engines. I am talking about the search engines that most of us use. Are there other kinds? Yes, they are called Subject Gateways and are usually run by government entities. These engines deliver highly relevant results from Web sites whose pages have meta tags that are encoded using a metadata schema such as Dublin Core.
Such tags have the prefix "DC." and they do not use the simpler meta tags we use and - more important - that major search engines use. As a result, many sites that use metadata schemata do not rank high in our searches. Try looking for information about prostate cancer and restrict the search to Australian sites. I found some Victorian government pages built with Lotus Domino and they had multiple Head and Body tags. It's a wonder that they displayed at all. I will watch this with interest.
Reprinted from the September 2003 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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