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WebAIM issued a report last month analyzing the top one million home pages for accessibility and web designers Eric W Bailey and Ethan Marcotte each take separate, hard looks at it because it is indicating a very sad state. The report noted all kinds of problems, even including throwbacks like using tables for layout with 2,099,665 layout tables detected versus only 113,737 data tables out of 168,000,000 data points. Web designers, old and new, are largely failing in simple matters that were, or should have been, covered in Web Design 101.
Ethan includes in his summary:
Those are just a few items that stuck with me. Actually, “haunted” might be a better word: this is one of the more depressing things I’ve read in some time. Organizations like WebAIM have, alongside countless other non-profits and accessibility advocates, been showing us how we could make the web live up to its promise as a truly universal medium, one that could be accessed by anyone, anywhere, regardless of ability or need. And we failed.
I say we quite deliberately. This is on us: on you, and on me. And, look, I realize it may sting to read that. Hell, my work is constantly done under deadline, the way I work seems to change every
yearmonth, and it can feel hard to find the time to learn more about accessibility. And maybe you feel the same way. But the fact remains that we’ve created a web that’s actively excluding people, and at a vast, terrible scale. We need to meditate on that.
Eric also followed the WebAIM report closely:
Digital accessibility is a niche practice. That’s not a value judgement, it’s just the way things are. Again, it’s hard to fault someone for creating an inaccessible experience if they simply haven’t learned the concept exists.
And yet, seventy percent of websites are non-compliant. It’s a shocking statistic. What if I told you that seventy percent of all bridges were structurally unsound?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @08:51AM (1 child)
What if I told you that seventy percent of all bridges were structurally unsound?
Then you would have lost the plot. "Compliance" is not a relevant metric for most web sites.
More than 50% of all websites are unuseable by people with average ability - but this is a clue to the fact that the content is not relevant to anyone, with or without any abilities whatsoever.
Of course there are websites where accessibility ought to be provided for social reasons - eg government information sites, and sites where accessibility ought to be provided for business reasons, but that is hardly the majority of web sites.
I manage about 12 web sites, and all are for certain specific groups of people that I am familiar with. If they were unhappy with the (poor) accessibility, I would hear about it very quickly.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 15 2019, @10:18AM
A: Your side is associated with negative property X
B: Your side is also associated with negative property X. (Usually worded as "what about the X that your side is associated with")
Neither statement need be false for whataboutary to have occurred.
This example is a simple false analogy, no dialogue is required, and at its core (like its close cousin hasty generalisation) it is a simple delivery mechanism for the illogical:
A: Your thing has bad property X
A: If a different thing had bad property X it would have terrible property Y
*A: Therefore, your thing has terrible property Y. (Sometimes unspoken, leaving the other party to deduce the implication.)
As you say, websites aren't bridges, websites failing to do what they were designed to do has different consequences from bridges failing to do what they were designed to do. There's no equivalence, the analogy is not sound.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves