[Irl-dean] United Nations Global Audit of Web Accessibility

[Joshue O Connor]

Barry said:

> - They did not rely on pure automated evaluation, which is
>   definitely a plus.

That certainly gives the report more gravitas.

> - They only looked at the home page of each target site - which
>   is a severe limitation.

It is - but looking at the homepage is also a pretty good indication of
what is under the hood, as such. The report should therefore get some
alarm bells ringing (somewhere?) because its implicit (though it would
certainly be better if it was _explicit_) that the rest of the site will
be no better.

> - Not surprisingly, they found, as usual, that the elementary
>   step of providing appropriate alternatives for images is still
>   tripping up many many sites.

And I am always surprised at the lack of structural markup being used in
the wild. Its like developers just don't get HTML and think of it only
as something random to hang divs on.

> - They give some examples of what they think is "good practice"
>   for text alternatives for images (page 9).  I have to say I
>   don't really agree: the examples are all from the UK prime
>   minister's site, and in all three cases which they show I would
>   classify the image as purely visual decoration and give it an
>   empty alt.

LOL yeah one of them just says 'Beverly Hughes', not even ' Here's
Beverly with a big smile'. Its odd that the alt text for a graphic of a
clip board reads 'epetition', so thats totally useless and a null value
would also have sufficed. But the alt text 'Tony Blair at PMQs 18
October 2005' is also pretty useless. It would be much better if it said
Tony Blair gets slapped in face by refugee from Haditha - or similar. I
wonder if they also expanded the abbreviation/initialism 'PMQ' (or just
assume everyone understands it)?

Overall though the report is good, (in that its bad) but how many more
of these reports do we need? I am sure we will all agree that the
situation is bad and getting it together is a Sisyphean task, but will
we also end up with accessibility report blindness?

Josh




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