Department of Trade and "Inaccessible"

A friend of mine, namely Pete Hobson of www.freesome.com fame, pointed me in the direction of an article about how the UK Government can't even follow their own accessibility guidelines when commisioning agencies to do their websites.

The site in question is the Department of Trade and Industry and with statements from their spokesman such as: "No assistive technologies were tested against the site."

It really makes you wonder why we bother doesn't it?

There isn't much else to say which hasn't been said in the article itself but it certainly makes interesting reading that's for sure!

Check out the article at: www.webstandards.org

Accesskeys and why you should remove them

I've recently removed accesskey technology from the Code Required website and continue not to use them on our latest projects.

Basically accesskeys were touted as a great accessibility tool a little over a year ago and the increased ubiquity of sites using them was immense. However, I'm now of the opinion that so many sites are implementing non-standard accesskey combinations that they are actually a hindrance to accessibility rather than an aid.

For example it was always my intention to use the acceskey key combination "ALT+1" to return to a site homepage; I have since seen various other key combinations such as "ALT+h", "ALT+0" etc etc.

Now far be it from me to stand and preach but I think until an adopted standard for these keys is used they are of little help to a user if they have to learn to use these.

My second, and perhaps even more valid consideration, is that accesskeys may actually override key combinations that users can create themselves in browsers such as Jaws. (OK so Jaws tends to use the INSERT key for most of it's key combinations but you get my point).

Therefore forcing a user to use your predefined key combinations is actually bad usability & comprimises "accessibility" as it were.