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Today may be a big day for net neutrality. Today, the Internet Freedom
Preservation Act (S.2917), a net neutrality measure introduced to the Senate by Olympia Snowe (R, Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D, North Dakota) will come up for debate.
The measure has received wide support from net neutrality advocates, including major internet service companies such as Amazon.com, Google, and eBay. The act specifically limits the powers of broadband service providers to make "special deals" with content providers and requires them to provide services on an "equivalent" basis.
This bill is far from becoming any kind of law, however, since it is only the most recent in a series of net neutrality bills to be introduced in the House and the Senate. Specifically, it’s the sixth bill introduced to date. Cnet News provides a great data table naming these bills. In fact, it’s not even the only bill being introduced on net neutrality today. The house will also be given it’s first official look at a different bill introduced by Jim Sensenbrenner (R, Wisconsin) and John Conyers (D, Michigan). This bill would render net neutrality enforceable under antitrust law.
The results are a long ways from coming in, but this should be interesting.
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To Hell with WCAG 2.0 is the response from the author of Building Accessible Websites to the latest production of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative.
Clearly, Joe Clark is not happy. And he’s not the first person to express dissatisfaction with the process and results of WCAG 2.0, either. John Foliot of Web Accessibility Technical Services has frequently expressed displeasure with their new yet fundamentally unchanged interpretation of the accesskey functionality.
In an effort to be all things to all web content, the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand. WCAG 2 backtracks on basics of responsible web development that are well accepted by standardistas.
Joe Clark, "To Hell with WCAG 2.0"
The three fundamental documents involved in the WCAG 2.0 package are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (72 pages), Understanding WCAG 2.0, (165 pages), and Techniques for WCAG 2.0, which clocks in at 221 pages. Altogether, 448 pages of semi-legalese attempting to define the next generation of web pages.
No, these documents are not easy to understand. And they clearly contain a lot of extreme generalities which appear to be attempting to explain accessibility without reference to technologies. As Clark mentions, this separation of technology and theory makes it much more difficult to apply concepts to the practicalities of creating a website.
Joe Clark’s article is a must read towards understanding the politics and complexities of creating an accessible website. Accessibility is not about enslaving your design aesthetic to a set of guidelines - but it is about considering very carefully the needs of your users, testing your work, and making thoughtful decisions.
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Microsoft has long been cursed in my mind as the creator of the worst website creation software in existence - Frontpage. Littered with custom extensions, complex custom scripting, and an interface which makes it extremely easy to make a horrible website, their software has been responsible for some of the worst code I’ve ever had to clean up.
This month, Microsoft has at least unveiled their next generation web editor - Expression Web Designer. Although I never recommend a web editor as a replacement for learning the complexities of code, and no web editing tool available is capable of creating an accessible web site unless the person using the software is knowledgeable, Microsoft’s new product takes some valuable steps forward.
The very first statement on the Expression web site says a lot - it tells us exactly what goals Microsoft is espousing with this new product, and what they now consider to be important when it comes to selling web design products.
Microsoft® Expression® Web Designer gives you all the tools you’ll need to produce high-quality, standards-based Web sites the way you want them. Take advantage of the best of dynamic Web site design, enabling you to design, develop, and maintain exceptional standards-based Web sites.
I should make it clear that I don’t also believe that Microsoft is 100% dedicated to web standards. Internet Explorer 7 is a huge step forward, and I think that’s wonderful. However, when it comes to new web projects and services, Microsoft has not spent any significant effort on accessibility. They are beginning to recognize that accessibility and standards are the way of the future. It may take decades for that knowledge to filter through the entire company, however!
An interview from February of 2006 is posted on the Microsoft site which discusses a number of the commitments that Microsoft has made with this new project. This is, unsurprisingly, a basically glowing interview, but it does emphasize the fact that Expression will completely replace Frontpage, which will be discontinued.
The most exciting features, in my mind, are the built in HTML validation, browser compatibility reporting, and automated accessibility testing against Section 508 guidelines and the WCAG. As imperfect as automated accessibility testing is, it is a vast improvement to have it built in to a web editor. This greatly increases the likelihood that a designer will become aware of this important issue and at LEAST experiment with it.
The free trial should give a lot of web standards people their first chance to test it out and see what’s going to be happening. The trial is good through February of 2007, so there should be plenty of time in there to find any faults.
Cheryl D. Wise has written what is probably the first serious review of Expression Web Designer. She doesn’t go in depth, but will be posting additional reviews, articles, and tutorials to go with the software over the next few weeks.
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One of the original reasons I started this blog was to track information about the ongoing accessibility lawsuit against Target Corporation. Recently, ComputerWorld published an extensive article discussing the lawsuit and surrounding issues. The article contains a number of interesting points, including a great quote on Ajax and Accessibility from Jeff Bishop, a blind application systems analyst at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
"It’s very, very, very scary. Before, so what? You had a missing [alternative-text]tag, but at least you knew there was an image. You could click on it, and maybe you could figure out what it was. Now, you don’t even know where to click. You don’t know how to interact."
Although the article doesn’t deal directly with the Target lawsuit, it does discuss the possible consequences if the lawsuit is successful. ZDnet.com also discusses this question in a lengthy article by David Berlind.
There’s clearly a slowly growing awareness of the potential of the Target lawsuit to radically shift the view of website accessibility in the United States. It’s already become law in the United Kingdom - it may become an economic necessity in the US!
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SiteMorse, for those of you who may not know, is a high-profile accessibility testing company based in the United Kingdom. They are well-known for the practice of releasing their "Rankings League Tables," which list the tested accessibility of government, banking, and other websites each month.
Their particularly product is entirely automated - and has, therefore, been attacked quite heavily in the world of accessibility auditors and consultants.
At the moment, there is a very interesting conversation going on at
Accessify Forum which is primarily a question and answer session between Grant Broome, a well-reputed accessibility consultant working with CDSM Interactive Solutions and Jon Ribbens, a director of the company which develops the SiteMorse product.
I will disclose, to start, the fact that I was already in the anti-SiteMorse camp before reading this interview. However, to date the Q & A session has done little to change my views. It’s my feeling that Jon has done little but attempt to avoid Grant’s question. With repeated accusations about vagueness and the irrelevance of Grant’s questions and points, Jon has done little to impress me with his company’s dedication to accessibility issues.
The core issue is whether automated testing can possibly fully address the accessibility of a website. I and many other accessibility consultants believe, quite strongly, that it’s simply not possible to judge a website entirely based on automated judgements. An automated tool can be helpful for resolving specific issues - but should NEVER be substituted for a human appraisal of accessibility.
Regardless, this conversation has already been quite interesting, and is worth following.
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Today I’ve taken the step of incorporating my previous hand-made news updates into this blog. All previous posts have been incorporated unedited, to keep with the blogging philosophy. Now that I’ve made that change, I’ll be using this as a news and article announcement area on my website, and intend to make more regular updates, as time permits.
Target is being sued because their website is not accessible to blind internet users. The lawsuit is being brought forward by the National Federation of the Blind and one of its members, Bruce Sexton, a student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Target’s website is unquestionably NOT accessible. In fact, at the time the lawsuit was brought forward, there were portions of the site which could only be accessed with the use of a mouse. This was a very extreme - usually, even an inaccessible site will not have managed to make it entirely impossible to access something without a mouse. In addition to this egregious mistake, (and it IS a mistake), the site also failed to provide alt texts for images and inaccessible image maps for some navigation.
The NFB states that "[they] tried to convince Target that it should make its website accessible through negoations", but that the negotiations were ineffective. Their first complaint was submitted to Target in May of 2005, and the site remains unchanged.
There are a number of articles available discussing this issue - but one I would particularly recommend is a summary at DailyTech. Not because the summary itself is stellar - but the comments posted to the article are very revealing.
Personally, I couldn’t read them all - it was too infuriating. There are many people out there who have no concern for the rights of disabled individuals, and no respect for the mission of accessibility. There are others who are clearly ignorant of what it means to make a site accessible. One comment reads:
There are plenty of aspects of computers that blind people can’t take advantage of. This isn’t because of a flaw with computers, it’s because of a flaw in the person’s ability to see. Does that mean we have to dumb down the computer experience to the point at which a blind person can use it? Or does it simply mean that we do what we can to allow them to take advantage of some aspect of the experience?
No! No, we do NOT have to dumb down the computer experience! In fact, there is no need whatsoever to create a site which isn’t beautiful, exciting, and communicative. Accessibility has to do with providing alternatives and incorporating meaningful information into your document. Blind is not equal to stupid. A colleague of mine through GAWDS has established a site to showcase beautiful accessible web design - Accessites.org. If you doubt that accessibility can mean beautiful, check it out.
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