How to make a real Web site

On October 8, as part of GTEC Week, I addressed the session entitled “Web Accessibility: People, Knowledge, and Technology.” Over the previous day and a half, I had also participated in the National Forum on Web Accessibility, convened by Industry Canada.

The following presentation made the case that Web accessibility is an outcome of Web standards.

Web accessibility, Web standards

Web accessibility relies on standards.

What do we mean by “standards”?

• Valid HTML and CSS
  • Meets the grammatical requirements
  • Means browsers always know what you meant, or at least have a reasonable idea
  • Browsers all have bugs in interpreting valid HTML and especially CSS
  • But the starting point here is valid code with tweaks for bugs later instead of writing code for one browser ignoring every other browser
  • Arguably the best part about standards compliance is how much money it saves. Your page sizes usually go down a good 40% with a compliant redesign. I know one case where the homepage decreased from 67K to 7K. And obviously your bandwidth bill will decrease
  • If you’re not using valid HTML, then you haven’t created a Web page. You may have created something else, but it isn’t a Web page
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG
  • They’re the published guidelines for Web accessibility
  • WCAG is old
    • A new WCAG 2.0 is due next year
    • Your help is urgently needed to improve WCAG
  • Priority 1 guidelines are easy to meet
  • Priority 2 requires valid code; Common Look and Feel guidelines require Priority 2, hence Federal sites require valid code

Web pages vs. Windows pages

• Typical Web developers use a Windows machine with exactly one browser: A single version of Internet Explorer for Windows
• Those developers test their sites on the machines they use, with their single browser
• Since “most people” use the developers’ configuration, they figure the job is done
• Almost no developers understand valid code. They write HTML that works on their particular browser
• But people with disabilities aren’t “most people,” and there are more browsers and devices in the world than simply Internet Explorer on Windows
• Essentially, any developer who develops and tests only on Windows is making Windows pages, not Web pages
• This holds equally true for the federal government

Standards & citizenship

• Everyone at this conference knows that government has a legal and ethical obligation to serve all its citizens through accessibility
• But there is an equivalent obligation to provide online information in formats any citizen can read
• This means using nonproprietary standards, and using them properly
• The fact that government staff all use exactly one platform and almost exactly one browser, and all their clients and private-sector friends do, is reason in itself to go out of our way to require and enforce standards compliance
• If we entrust government data, which is by definition owned by its citizens, to proprietary formats that could be made obsolete or could be altered tomorrow, then we’re not serving citizens, we’re serving the owners of those formats
• But nonproprietary formats like HTML that can be read on a range of devices, including adaptive technology, make that all citizens with Internet connections have genuinely equivalent access to the information they already own

Development maturity

• It’s time to stop making Web sites like it’s 1995
• There’s something wrong with accessible Web development when the leaders in the standards-compliance field are individual Weblog authors creating sites with a budget of zero and very limited readership
• As public-sector developers, it’s time to accept that standards-compliant development was always the right way and is now the only supportable way, for reasons that include accessibility
• A mature development method, then, looks like this:
  1. Write to spec
  2. Validate
  3. Correct for bugs
  4. Test widely

In this way, you have the greatest possible chance of creating a Web site that works for everyone, disabled or not, irrespective of whatever device or technology they choose to use. I call that good government.