Category: WebStandards

Jim Thatcher’s expert declaration about target.com

Don’t be scared off by the legal looking stuff in the top screen or two of Jim Thatcher’s expert declaration. This is fascinating reading, even though it is a legal document. Once you get into the actual declaration it’s easy reading, too.

Thatcher tells about his background and why he’s qualified as an expert in this case. Then he explains point by point why the target.com site fails to be accessible to a blind user. The site fails on many points that are easily fixed.

Any instructor teaching a class that explained best practices for accesssibility would explain to students how to avoid these failures as core knowledge for the course. To me, it ties in with my question from a couple of days ago: What’s the problem? Why didn’t Target find web builders who regarded accessibility features such as alt text and form labels as intrinsic to any design? A company shouldn’t have to be taken to court to be forced to provide such commonly acknowledged accessibility features. What’s the problem when a major retailer puts up a huge profit-making site intended for millions of shoppers and doesn’t develop the site using basic accessiblity standards? What bit of information is missing from the corporate decision maker’s site-launch-equation that would prevent such blatant mistakes from being made in the first place?

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What’s the problem?

I mentioned a few weeks back that I’m writing a new book. A feature of each chapter is a real world example that demonstrates some aspect of the chapter using valid HTML, valid CSS, and accessible design. In other works, a standards-based site.

I search for the real world examples using the sites that purport to catalog good CSS design examples, but when you run the basic validation tools on these examples, they don’t measure up. If you want a truly good standards-based design you have to go to a designer’s site, not to a regular, run-of-the-mill commercial site that would be visited by normal people who are not web designers. What’s holding back the everyday working business sites? Is it too hard, too steep a learning curve, too much browser incompatibility? After all these years, shouldn’t more average Jane or average Joe web production people be capable of using standards? Surely it isn’t only the 0.01% of the population who are standardistas who attempt to do good work with standards-based design.

Make my day. Tell me about a good example. I’d love to be proven a liar about the lack of good examples.

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WCAG 2.0 still getting plenty of criticism

Complaints about WCAG 2.0 continue to fill the blogosphere. Joe Clark’s position is clear and strong at Whither WAI and WCAG? Le blog personnel de Joe Clark. There are others joining the chorus, but you can get the main points from Joe Clark’s articles. A very complete set of references to articles about WCAG 2.0 can be found at the Web Design Reference site.

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WCAG 2.0 Quick Reference

The W3C did not gain fame as a source of easy reading. The complaints about the WCAG 2.0 draft being really hard to read have been flying through the air for weeks. Now the W3C has issued the WCAG 2.0 Quick Reference. It still seems complex, but perhaps this is a step in the direction of making sense of it all. After a swift glance through it, one of my worries is that the software the average designer uses to create web content makes complying with some of these guidelines difficult.

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Tip: What is semantic markup and why should you care?

The word semantic gets tossed around a lot in connection with web design. A comment from someone made me realize I had overlooked discussing what that means here on Web Teacher. I use the word logical quite often instead, although I am not in a majority by talking about the logic of HTML tags as relating to sematics.

To me, however, HTML is simple because it’s logical. You can learn the majority of what you need to know about HTML in just a few hours. (It’s CSS that mortifies with its learning curve.) If text is meant to be a heading, there is a semantic (or logical) tag to create a heading element: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6. Creating a bit of text that is big and bold and merely looks like a heading in a computer monitor is not the same thing. Why? Because the heading element carries the semantic meaning “this is a heading” as part of the markup. And that meaning attaches to the text no matter where or how the text is accessed: a computer monitor, a screen reader, a handheld, a cell phone, a printer.

Another way to think about it is to realize that HTML tags are self-describing. The tag itself explains the logic or semantics of what it is meant to markup. p describes a paragraph. li describes a list item. cite describes a citation. strong describes strong empahsis. See how that works?

Using the tags to create semantic meaning makes your content usable in any Internet-capable device with the logical organization carried with it.

In the move to separate content from presentation (or meaning from appearance) the first requirement is solidly structured semantic HTML. CSS can do literally anything with appearance, as long as there is a logical structure to the content that will hold up no matter how the content is styled. Without the proper HTML semantic underpinning for your content, no amount of CSS can make your page work in multiple Internet-capable devices.

In the world of semantic content, a table is used to display tabular data, a list is marked up as a list, indented text is only marked up as a blockquote when it actually is quoted material, text that needs emphasis is marked up as an em element, and so on through the logic of every HTML tag.

There is room for discussion about what element is semantically correct as markup for a certain bit of content. The lively discussions on topics about the best semantic markup for certain types of content at Simple Bits/Simple Quiz lead Simple Bits’ Dan Cederholm to write two excellent books about semantic markup: Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. If you want more detail about the topic, pick up one of those books and get the complete story.

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What students and teachers need to know

A conclusion I draw from On Quality Education – The Web Standards Project is that students, college administrators, college instructors, and business people hiring web development personnel need to work together to promote change toward instruction in best practices and web standards.

I'm available for teacher training workshopsThe horror stories about college instructors still teaching table-based layout, frames, and nothing about CSS are too common. Students need to insist on better instruction and let their institutions know about it. Instructors need to insist on training and let their administrators know about it. Hiring managers need to require knowledge of standards and accessibility from all new employees.

I’m available for workshops

I have a wealth of experience in teacher training and teacher workshops. If you want help leading your university staff to better instruction in CSS, web standards, accessibility and best practices, I’d be very happy to help you achieve that goal.

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Web Standards Group Interviews Notre Dame Web Group

An interesting interview by Holly Marie Koltz at the WaSP site: Notre Dame Web Group – The Web Standards Project “The University of Notre Dame Web Group, formed through the Office of Public Affairs is responsible for the production of websites which embrace standards and accessibility at the university-though the work they do does not stop there. The group undertakes work on several strategic fronts, including work experience with student interns and taking part in the CMS procurement process. WaSP EduTF had the fortunate opportunity to interview Steve Smith about what is making a difference at the University of Notre Dame.”

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