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Our First Blog on W3C and Accessibility for Inverclyde |
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Sunday, 20 January 2008 |
Many website designers put the W3C and AAA logos on their website. Yet having looked at them, in some cases it is just the frontpage that is truly accessible and W3C compliant. Why? Because most websites in todays world run off scripts and databases. This means web pages are generated by the server. The coding has to be very clever to make sure the web page that the server produces creates W3C and AAA code.
Things like forums and galleries are very rarely fully compliant due to their involved scripts. Online shops too face a hard time getting no compliancy errors.
This leaves designers between a rock and a hard place. They want to be able to create pages for every budget, but to make sure the design is complaint extra work and checks need to be put into place. This makes the design and development more involved and more expensive.
This affects Media-Slave as well since we strive to help the new businesses with affordable websites and web hosting especially in Inverclyde, Greenock and Glasgow where we are based in Scotland. The Inverclyde area lacks websites, and the few websites that exist are not well coded. In the past we have created non-compliant websites as well to try and keep costs down. Now Media-Slave only produces W3C complaint websites with all basic accessibility boxes ticked. We are also systematically revisiting and upgrading websites we have produced in the past free of charge.
Designing for accessibility also benefits your websites search engine ranking. In theory optimising a website to be accessible to most people also makes the site more easily indexed by search engines. Search engines ‘see’ a website remarkably similar to how a screen reader would see a website.
Even some of the biggest websites are not compliant. Here are some examples:
http://www.google.com
Even the classic entry page of Google which is extremely basic in design comes up with 45+ W3C Errors
http://www.yahoo.com
249+ W3C errors and 19 warnings
http://www.msn.com
Only one error but they did have pop-ups (go figure)
http://www.microsoft.com
33 Errors
(This was the case for all three above mentioned websites at time of writing this article)
These are some of the biggest players on the web and have huge development budgets. Just goes to show that creating websites that tick all the boxes isn’t easy, or maybe it means some just don’t care.
Check your favourite websites for accessibilty compliance yourself with this web tool:
Accessibility Checker
Check your favourite websites for W3C compliance yourself with this web tool:
validator.w3.org
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