Re: Process for Reviewing Websites

http://www.w3.org/2000/04/wareview

I like the review idea.
As suggested, I believe several tools would be appropriate:
    tidy, and some among A-Prompt, WAVE, Bobby.
The means to summarize from those choices is non-trivial.

I see site accessibility analysis as a huge time-consumer.
It is certainly beyond what we few can do, particularly in
teams of volunteers. I believe we will better spend our
time in motivating site designers. I'd rather teach a
webmaster to use the tools to find and fix the site's
problems than show all the problems I can find and
then myself produce a parallel site with the problems fixed.

Limited actions we can take: I expect that most of the
benefit from site analysis, and likely the pattern of
inaccessible usage will come from analyzing just the
top-level page. The marginal insights we will find from
the next 10 (or 100 or 1000 or ...) pages of a site and
want to report will be small. After all, big sites have
budgets to do this sort of assessment and repair. At best
we can sensitize their QA departments to include accessibility
issues in their testing.

I do occasionally send my assessments to particular
webmasters when I believe their important message can be
made more accessible. For me, most pages don't deserve
that attention. I usually get thanked for my efforts.

Way back in 1997 I did two surveys (using early Bobby, when I
could extract and cross-tabulate the results programatically)
of the 40 to 50 members of SGML-Open at the time. The second,
three months later, did not find much improvement, a net loss
as more glitz was added.

A suggested group of sites with influence in any country are
those of the politicians who are interested in
telecommunications, particularly those who can affect any
legislation or policy. Another group are those government
agencies that regulate telecommunications.

Regards/Harvey Bingham

Received on Friday, 28 April 2000 08:14:28 UTC