It’s three years since Wrox Press went bankrupt and I got caught with redundancy for the first time, having survived four previous rounds of downsizing in various organisations. It got me thinking about the common signs of sickness I’ve seen in each company before it slides into corporate intensive care.
Continue reading Signs of a sick organisation
We’ve all seen it:
The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. -Tim Berners-Lee
Worthy, but dulled by constant repetition. Every client, every developer has a Pavlovian reaction to the quote, which causes their eyelids to droop and their thoughts to turn to that cutie in Accounts with the tight jeans.
There’s a newer quote from March 2006:
Another important area of professionalism is accessibility awareness. Everyone should be accommodated, especially when around 20 per cent of the population have special requirements. In fact, Microsoft said recently that nearly 50 per cent of people need to make some sort of adjustment to their system to interact with it. Having turned 50, I’m very aware of receiving email with very small fonts – people don’t want to use their spectacles to look at a Web page! -British Computer Society
but it’s frankly a bit long-winded. No Zing! or Kapow! Not snappy enough to get people’s attention back from the snogalicious accountant.
Patrick Lauke and I were discussing the lack of good Timbo quotes for accessibility presentations in the pub after the launch of PAS 78, and he came up with a Tim Berners-Lee Quote’o’matic. I helped research some of the quotes. Just hit F5 until you find the quote that will leave the Chairperson of the Board gasping in eagerness to make the site accessible.
Feel free to use it to spice up your accessibility presentations, or for trumping inaccessible developers at parties to impress your friends and confound your enemies.
After all, was it not Tim Berners-Lee who said,
Let a thousand Powerpoints™ bloom … Yeah, just save them all in My Documents as presentation.ppt; people can open them if they want to know what’s in them.
Actually, no, it certainly wasn’t.
As well as my notes quoting the DRC’s legal bloke saying they would be getting more shirty and would/ could cite the PAS in court, here’s a couple of opinions from third party lawyer types:
Alex Newson, a UK lawyer at Freeth Cartwright, writes
- PAS 78 is the latest addition to the ‘best practice’ concept.
- Following best practice is the best way of complying with the DDA
- PAS 78 is not a technical standard like WAI, it’s about the process of making and maintaining accessible websites
- Following WAI Level 2 (at least) remains the ‘minimum’ website owners and designers should be looking to achieve
Struan Robertson, editor of outlaw.com (a Pinsent Masons site), comments:
The DRC’s endorsement of PAS 78 is significant and it could be used in court to illustrate whether a business has complied with the Disability Discrimination Act. A failure to follow it could be damaging to an organisation’s case; but compliance would be evidence of steps being taken to fulfil the legal duty.
The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) is an independent body established in April 2000 by Act of Parliament to stop discrimination and promote equality of opportunity for disabled people.
In April 2004, it conducted a formal investigation into the state of web accessibility in the UK, discovering that 81 percent of sites failed to uphold the simplest WCAG recommendations (level A). As a direct result of this rather shocking finding, the DRC then commissioned the British Standards Institute (BSI) to produce Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 78, which “outlines good practice in commissioning websites that are accessible to and usable by disabled people.”
This specification was initially authored by Julie Howell, a respected accessibility campaigner who works for the Royal National Institute for the Blind, in conjunction with representatives of the BBC, UK Cabinet Office, IBM, the University Professionals Association and Tesco.com. It was then reviewed by a large team of stakeholders (including me).
The PAS is intended to help people who commission web design, rather than developers themselves. It is written as a document that commissioners can understand and can discuss with web design project managers. Reference is made to WAI guidelines, usability testing,
Continue reading PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites
Been busy busy busy this week, but still enjoyed:
Fucking brilliant. And should probably be illegal to have that much design talent. So carefully designed, yet looks spontaneous and unfussy.
On TV this week. Gripping, and the guy who played Hitler was amazing. Regardless of the central subject matter, should be shown to anyone who advocates armed conflict as a solution to anything.
Noise. Breathy vocals mixed low. Mellow tunes almost submerged by chainsaw guitars. They’ve picked up the torch from My Bloody Valentine and taken it somewhere else – round to Cindytalk and Loops’ houses. It’s on almost continual repeat on my Zen mp3 player. And – staggeringly – they’re from Norway, the dullest place in the Universe.