beatnic - just wondering

Make someone’s day!

Tell them they can use the Tab key on their keyboard to move through a web-page.

To those who already know, it seems obvious, taken for granted.

But if you’ve ever watched people filling out boxes on forms on banking websites or when setting up an account on a website using the mouse to move from one input box to the next, you can imagine their relief on learning about the Tab key.

The Tab key “focuses” on links and form elements, such as boxes you need to fill details in, moving from one to the next.

And Shift+Tab does the same thing in reverse.

Of course, this assumes the web-page has been well-designed. You should be able to Tab through the screen in a logical order. This order can be easily specified by the web designer, and is particularly important when it comes to accessibility, so there’s no excuse for not doing it.

According to Bruce Lawson, a web accessibility expert working in the legal sector, Sharepoint fails to meet one of the priority 1 requirements (which must be met), and breaks some priority two requirements (which should be met).

See Bruce Lawson’s personal site : SharePoint and Web Accessibility.

Yesterday about thirty Intranetters (thanks to Andrew for pointing me towards the yahoo group) got together in central London.

It was a really good event - a kind of intranets anonymous. Big thanks to Simon Hill and Rod McLean for their warts’n'all stand-up routines. It certainly seemed quite a cathartic experience for all involved. Intranutters.

This morning a text message arrived from Twitter. I’m tracking the word “intranet” - more on subject-tracking in twitter here. It was none other than Richard Hare, yesterday’s whistle-blower and one of our hosts.

We touched on Sharepoint and accessibility, or rather the lack of it. Maybe we should set up the SHarepoint Accessibility Group - a self-help sub-group of Intranetters.

Some questions from the event…

1. If you could build an intranet from scratch, what would you start with? And what would you tell people it was for?
2. What are the best prizes to offer if you’re running a competition on your global intranet?
3. Management won’t allow blogging because it might encourage cyberbullying. Where do you start?
4. Is there a precedent in UK law (or any other country for that matter) where a company has been taken to court for an intranet not meeting DDA accessibility requirements?

Just wondering…

Today Martin Belam publishes the scores from his excellent series of articles looking at the accessibility of the UK’s main national newspaper websites.

The Times came out on top, even though it makes no use of an on-screen text-resizing widget, nor of accesskeys as shortcuts for keyboard users.

Overall my conclusion has to be that only a couple of newspapers are taking seriously any obligation to make their services accessible. I was particularly concerned by The Sun and the Daily Mail using CAPTCHA technology with no alternative for users with accessibility issues, but the general pattern for most papers was quite poor. Many are putting completely unneccessary barriers in the way of people reaching their content by making simple decisions like using fixed font sizes, and not including ’skip navigation’ links.
[source: currybetdotnet]

The results are worrying but not surprising. And as Martin says, he’s still really only “scratching the surface” in his tests.

Sadly all too few website managers understand their obligations as far as accessibility and the law is concerned. Webcredible have a useful summary here, but in a nutshell you can be sued if you do not make reasonable adjustments to provide equal access to your content to everyone.

The RNIB has approached two large companies with regard to their websites. When they raised the accessibility issues of the websites under the DDA, both companies made the necessary changes, rather than facing the prospect of legal action (in exchange for anonymity).
[source: webcredible]

People really shouldn’t need convincing. I wonder if it would make any difference if they realised that by improving the accessibility of their websites, they will also make them more usable and more “readable”. And when it comes to the big internet search engines, being readable means being findable.