TW Blog :: Archives for September 2003

Does RNIB See It Right?

Relates to Web Standards and Accessibility

In follow up to Andrew Sinclair's Accessibility Article I had a quick reccie of the Anglia Railways website, mentioned in the article for its recent receipt of the RNIB See It Right logo.

The W3C Validator failed the home page with 80 errors, many of which were associated with incorrect embedding of Flash objects in the page and entity errors in URL query strings, but also failure to close a few elements. Bobby (an official part of the RNIB audit) was equally less forgiving, picking up on absolute sizing at Level 2. Cynthia was equally unhappy with the use of the deprecated embed element. View the page in Mozilla and there is an immediate problem with the on and return labels. Blow up the text 2 times and the page quickly become difficult to view.

So, what exactly does the RNIB See It Right campaign represent? Perhaps the Anglia Railways site passed the audit a week ago, but has changed since then. Or perhaps a few important accessibility issues are brushed under the table as not relevant to this specific audit - the errors are perhaps not relevant for screen readers and braille browsers? Well clearly, valid and well formed markup is of little importance, with the Audit guidelines page failing to supply a DOCTYPE!

Posted on Friday, Sep 19, 2003 at 13:31:52.