Axlog on BBC accessibility is not too impressed by the Graf report. I think he’s right to be annoyed. I’d have been more pissed-off myself but Zeldman cautions against crowing in the case of the accessible Odeon site designed by Matthew Somerville.
I don’t think, pace Zeldman, that Marketing Departments do ask for accessible websites but then, they don’t ask for PHP-based websites or .NET-based websites; nor do they ask for cookies as a means of simulating client sessions. They don’t do technical and at the moment accessibility issues are still stuck in the world of technical. It’s the developers who are aware of the problem and of the solutions and it has to be their job, until we all get clued-up, to let everyone else know about it.
The question presently is how organisations respond when the problem is pointed out to them. In the case of the Odeon website they’ve done nothing for years. Is that a reasonable response? Of course not.
In the case I’ve been connected with, the redevelopment of the Welsh Assembly website, the Welsh Assembly claimed it would be producing a level AAA website as part of its redesign. As soon as their spokesperson calimed they’d be going for triple-A I guessed they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about and, indeed, the new Assembly website redesign doesn’t comply with the most basic accessibility requirements. They have a legal obligation to produce an accessible site and, as a Government website they have a social and moral duty, too. But they just don’t bother
Axlog points out that the Graf report on BBCi accessiblity was politically motivated. Same goes, in spades, for the Welsh Assembly website too. Civil servants - and to be fair, bureaucrats in general - can be cynical about ticking the right boxes
and they quickly turn poor measures of performance into the job itself.
