Below is an open letter to Julie Howell of the RNIB concerning the recent redesign of rnib.org.uk.
Dear Julie,
I have written to you specifically as I know you were responsible for the campaign for good web design, I have also cc’d the webteam in on this email as it contains feedback on the new site design.I feel that I have to write to you to express the disappointment several web designers have with the current RNIB website and the harm it causes to those of us trying to evangelise accessible web sites based around published web standards. Given the costs involved in redesigning a site it is often a difficult task to persuade companies to spend money on a redesign of their sites to make them more accessible to a wider range of people. This task is made even more difficult when business owners can point to a site such as rnib.org.uk and say “The RNIB doesn’t follow the ‘standards’, why should I?”
On my own behalf, and I am sure on behalf of many in the web design community, I would ask you to raise the issue of non compliance with the w3c specifications for both HTML and the web content accessibility guideline 1.0. Failure to comply with these guidelines, or even to attempt to comply with them, is a disappointing state of affairs.
Link to the w3c validator demonstrating the failure to pass validation, even when compensating for a missing doctype and character encoding.
The document also contains a litany of other errors that cause it to fail in many browsers, for example many of the relative links use a ” instead of a ‘/’, this is an error and breaks the links in many browsers. For example the page http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_relaunch.hcsp demonstrates these errors, for example links to RNIB advertising are provided as both
“/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_rnibadvertising.hcsp”
and
“xpediogroupspublicdocumentspublicwebsitepublic_rnibadvertising.hcsp”
the first of which is correctly written, however the second is incorrect and relies on Internet Explorers error correction mechanisms, and fails in other browsers such as Netscape and Mozilla. When this error affects the users ability to get to content such as the “Tips for screenreader users of this site” you see how the usability of the site is severely damaged.I think that the new design is poorly thought out with respect to accessibility and usability and sends a poor message in the campaign for accessible websites. The RNIB puts shows itself in a poor light when its own website is inaccessible and broken to a large number of users. As a professional web developer I have to state that I am disappointed in your redesign, especially as I cannot even reach many parts of the site due to the errors in coding on the site.
A couple of other points for the web team to implement, there is no default language specified using the lang attribute, this means that aural browsers cannot automatically pick the best voice to read a page in.
There are no summary attributes on the tables.
You are using large amounts of “presentational” HTML that has been depreciated, this is a tactic that focuses on visual users excessively and should be replaced by style sheets which can be targeted to different peoples browsers, visual and aural.
yours sincerely,
Benjamin Meadowcroft
http://www.benmeadowcroft.com/
After sending the letter I discovered the following response by Julie to another web designers post concerning the matter.
I read through the things that have been said so far. Some of the technical points are beyond my understanding (I’m a policy officer rather than a technical expert) but I have many colleagues who do understand that stuff and who will be able to help me appreciate the issues that have been raised.
Julie is mainly concerned with policy matters and is not directly responsible for the redesign, however she is responsible for the RNIBs accessible web site campaign which is why I directed my comments to her. It is understandable that she would not know the minutiae of web development issues that affect accessible design, however one would image that the people who are employed or contracted to develop the website for the RNIB would have a good understanding the web content accessibility guidelines and standards based web authoring. The fact is that the current state of affairs is extremely poor and a blow against the evangelism of accessible web design.