TW Blog :: Archives for October 2008

Tourism Award for Inaccessible Websites

Relates to Accessibility

Congratulations to classic.co.uk for winning the coveted title of Cornish Tourism Website 2008. It's second significant award of the year having already swooped up Best Website at the Cornwall Business Awards.

Commiseration to both awarding bodies for showing total disregard for the Disability and Discrimination Act and Web Accessibility. Buzz words, maybe, at the turn of the millennium, but now integral to any web developer's tool kit.

From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its servicesCode of Practice Section 4.7 (p39)

The booking system on the champion website is device-dependent - it is driven by Javascript - rendering this service totally useless to several web demographics. The site has had 9 years to rectify this!

Still, no criticism of the website in question or it's development team, since I am sure the project is driven by business requirements which so often force accessibility out. The criticism is solely of the awarding bodies for failing to recognise the importance of accessibility which in turn can be misguiding to the future crop of web developers that hope to learn and develop their trade from such critically acclaimed websites.

I would urge the judges of these awarding bodies to take a good look at Accessites.org criteria for the Art of Accessibility and consider more than just business logic and financial success when appraising websites.

I have just read an e-mail from one of the developers on the classic.co.uk website in response to my original post informing me that they are in the process of actually rewriting the site: In rewriting the site we are taking the opportunity to address many of the issues you have pointed out. This is good news although I did point out (as stated above) my post was at no time a criticism of the website itself and it's builders. However, I am not really sure what this says about the Cornwall Tourism Awards and Cornwall Business Awards if the winning site feels its own current incarnation is far from satisfactory. Perhaps the judges were missing something!? Enough said on the subject…

Posted on Saturday, Oct 18, 2008 at 10:35:32.