Standards Compliance: The new black?

Question: When do you use XML?
Answer: When you need a buzz word on your resume

This is a joke that is presented when you visit the excellent W3 Schools and read their "Introduction to XML" tutorial.

"What the hell are you talking about XML for?" is the question I hear you ask. Well it seems that lately you could change the part of the joke that says XML and replace it with the words "standards compliance".

Now I cant claim that this is a new idea or that it hasn't been covered before, but the issue of "badge hunters" and web designers who claim standards compliance as some sort of marketing tool is becoming more evident and is unfairly giving designers who do it for the right reasons a bad name.

A good reflection of this fact is the previous post on this blog. When people in the industry see WAI-AAA compliance plastered all over sites that are obviously not AAA compliant, it makes you begin to question all the sites that claim compliance.

At the moment it seems like everybody wants to claim WAI-AAA compliance even when it is clear to the average web Joe, like myself, that the site is not AAA compliant. A quick look under the hood of such sites confirms the assumption and an even quicker Bobby check will clinch the deal.

A recent post on the Accessify Forum seems to give this argument more weight. I will not identify the actual post as I feel that this would be unfair; a lot of time and effort seems to have been put into the site in question as a lot of the features offered are well thought out and the actual HTML code seems to make quite good semantic sense.

The site states the following:

What's more worrying is that when the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 gets enforced in October 2004, most of these multimedia rich sites in the UK will fall short of the standards expected. Our web site including our clients' web sites will not suffer from these problems!

(Sounds a bit like scare mongering to me, and some bad grammar, but hey on with the show)

Along with the claims it proudly displays the following badges:

• Valid XHTML
• Valid CSS
• WAI-AAA Compliance
• Bobby AAA Compliance
• Bobby Section 508 Compliance

The first problem that this site has is that the doctype declaration is incorrect. The doctype declaration is not recognised by the W3C checker and it falls back to HTML 4.01 Transitional to perform the validation.

The page has 14 error when it validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional and with a doctype override in effect (XHTML 1.0 Transitional as in the broken doctype declaration) it has 394 errors. To be fair to the designer and the site, I think the majority of these problems could be easily fixed.

Still, 394 errors is a lot for a site that claims Valid XHTML and WAI-AAA compliance as a speciality and one of its unique selling points for its services.

Secondly, the page does not meet WAI-AA compliance (according to Cynthia at least) so therefore, by implication, isn't WAI-AAA compliant as suggested.

According to Cynthia it fails on points 11.2 and 10.5 with a warning on a number of different points. I have to admit I haven't checked it thoroughly by hand but if Cynthia can catch the problems then it is quite likely that the page is not WAI compliant.

This leads me onto the third problem. Automated checking tools such as Bobby are being relied on by some designers to "prove" the accessibility of a site. Indeed some designers are designing sites specifically to meet Bobby AAA compliance to collect their badge with no thought to real world accessibility or usability issues.

The main reason, in my eyes, why doubt is cast over the validity of these tools is that this site, even in the current state, passes the Bobby checks for section 508 and is also put forward for Bobby AAA compliance with a few manual checks for the user to perform.

I am not saying that these tools are not useful. I use them every day as a quick and dirty "catch the obvious mistakes" mechanism. The difference is that I realise, as many other designers do, that Bobby is a tool that can be used to their advantage but it needs help with it's assessments that a computer just cannot provide.

Now I am not suggesting for one minute that all the code that I write is 100% as semantic as it could be or that it is all AAA compliant. In fact I believe that no site that I have ever developed meets AAA compliance. There is a whole side debate going on discussing whether or not AAA compliance is attainable in real world web sites but that is best discussed as a separate issue.

The bottom line is that I would rather claim A or AA compliance honestly, if anything at all, than lie to potential customers and myself about the status of a page. If a customer had a particular interest in the matter and wanted their site to show "badges" then I would obviously include them. This is because they are paying the money and it is their site at the end of the day.

Actually in my current job they are not paying my wages as I work for a government funded education centre that creates sites for a nominal fee for small businesses / organisations in the local area.

NOTE: Just to make the point clear, I do not believe that the owner of the site is trying to intentionally mislead people into thinking that it is AAA compliant and I believe that it is an honest mistake through a lack of checking and experience.

I guess the moral of this story is to be careful what you claim and what you claim to be able to deliver to your customers. Think before you "badge up" your site and ask yourself the question "Why am I including the badge at all?"

Or as the Mexican bandit put it in Blazing Saddles (1974): Badges? We don't need no stinking badges

I would also like to point peoples attention to a well written and interesting article on this subject by Andy Clarke - Accessibility: Panning for Gold over at Stuff and Nonsense

UPDATE: The site in question seems to have taken on board the advice that I gave on the forum and I am convinced that the owner of the site is making all efforts that they can to make the site comply with web standards and take on board accessibility issues.

Web Standards A Design Mistake?

After an interesting discussion over at the Accessify forums Provoked by a recent article posted on webpagesthatsuck.com I though I would share the findings and my thoughts on the matter.

Basically webpagesthatsuck.com suggested in their article that a:

Mystical belief in the power of Web Standards, Usability, and table less CSS

was one of the biggest design mistakes of 2004.

The article goes on to further suggest that "usability guru" Jared Spool "put everything into perspective" by suggesting that:

I learned quickly that business executives didn't care about usability testing or information design. Explaining the importance of these areas didn't get us any more work. Instead, when we're in front of executives, we quickly learned to talk about only five things:

1. How do we increase revenue?
2. How do we reduce expenses?
3. How do we bring in more customers?
4. How do we get more business out of each existing customer?
5. How do we increase shareholder value?

Notice that the words 'design', 'usability', or 'navigation' never appear in these questions. We found, early on, that the less we talked about usability or design, the bigger our projects got. Today, I'm writing a proposal for a $470,000 project where the word 'usability' isn't mentioned once in the proposal.

When we work with teams, we teach them to follow the money and look for the pain. Somewhere in your organization, someone is feeling pain because they aren't getting the answers they want to one of the questions above.

On the Accessify forum Tommy Olsson, of autisticcuckoo.net fame, came up with a good response to each of the 5 points raised by Jared Spool. I whole heartedly agree with all his answers and couldn't write it better myself (so I didn't), Hopefully Mr.Olsson will not mind this post being reproduced here on this lowly blog.

1. How do we increase revenue?

By attracting more customers (see #3) and reducing expenses (see #2).

2. How do we reduce expenses?

By using semantic markup and CSS, rather than presentational markup and tables, to accomplish these things:

• faster development (no browser-specific hacking)
• efficient maintenance (all standards, easy to understand)
• less disk space and bandwidth

3. How do we bring in more customers?

By making the web site accessible to as many people as possible, including those with disabilities and those with modern devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. When people get welcomed into such a site, rather than being met with "Please upgrade to Internet Explorer 4 [upgd_err4.jpg 286KB]" they are more likely to recommend it to their friends, too.

4. How do we get more business out of each existing customer?

By building a usable and accessible site that makes it easy for the customer to find what he or she is looking for. Strategic links on the product order page could lead to additional purchases.

5. How do we increase shareholder value?

Who cares about those speculating whelps in suits anyway? Smile
I think focusing on #1 to #4 will automatically take care of #5.

This reads like just another 'I've spent years learning to do nested tables and font tags in my WYSIWYG editor, and I don't want to learn anything new because it looks too hard' posts to me.

The house analogy doesn't work. Houses are a perfect example of the use of standards. You use standard measurements for your doorways and kitchen cabinets, so that you can buy new doors and kitchen stuff at any store, rather than having to have each one custom made.

People do care about how well-built a house is, because they don't want it to fall down while they live in it. Comparing web standards to hammers is just silly. The hammer is equivalent to the choice of a WYSIWYG CMS or text editor, not to the technique used to build the house itself.

I posted this entry because although some others take the view Tommy highlighted, I have never heard anyone saying people that do follow web standards and employ accessibility techniques are in some way making a mistake.

Granted there are the people that think it is too much hassle for them to learn a new approach, and that's fine by me, but why label following web standards and accessibility guidelines one of the biggest design mistakes of 2004?

Anyone who suggests that it is "design mistake" would instantly make me question the validity of anything else they say.

Put it this way, If its good enough for Jeffery Zeldman then its good enough for me.