Website validity and accessibility tests Aust UK and USA sites

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites for
W3C validity and accessibility features.

Australian university web sites tested
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustUni.html

Australian government web site tested
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustWeb.html

USA sites tested including target
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/USAweb.html

UK sites tested
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/UKweb.html

Results
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/Results.html

Study design
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/WebSurvey.html

Common validation and accessibility errors
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/CommonErrors.html


The Webmaster

Tim

James wrote:

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites for
W3C validity and accessibility features.

Accessibility, my butt. Here's what I get to "access" when I click your
links (FF, Opera, IE6):

"Your permission to access Heretic Press has been revoked by the webmaster.

Your browser may be unidentified or you are downloading too many files
for offline viewing. Someone from your IP address might be trying to
access password protected files?

Contact the manager at hereticpress, if you have been unfairly excluded
from access."

Of course, I *can't* contact the manager at hereticpress, as the Web
site is inaccessible to me.

The Webmaster

Tim

So are you named James or Tim? Or something else?

--
John (my real name)

James wrote:

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites for
W3C validity and accessibility features.

Australian university web sites tested
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustUni.html

Australian government web site tested
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustWeb.html

USA sites tested including target
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/USAweb.html

"Heretic Press" appears in rotating, vibrating text, posing a potential
accessibility problem.

Your results table violates accessibility requirements. You're squeezing
two independent data points into each row--one variable and its result,
and then another variable and its result, implying a non-existent
tabular relationship between them.

Thanks James for the correction, You are right it does have a skip
navigation link and missing alt tags have been added since I last
reviewed this site, sorry my mistake, it has been updated.

If a browser or screen reader gets to any page, the meta tags can
provide a link to other pages, as well as links to important pages like
search, home and the accessibility statement. Getting to any page in a
relative directory which uses title tags in the header allows easy
access to that entire site not just the page found.

Tim.

Harlan Messinger wrote:

James wrote:

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites
for W3C validity and accessibility features.


[snip]

You mention "alt tags". There's no such thing as alt tags (which would
be <alt ...>. There IS an alt attribute, and its value may be called alt
text or alternate text.

Where are there images without alt text?

Where on the US Department of Education site are you expecting there to
be a longdesc attribute but not finding one?

How does accessibility require the existence of one or another META tag,
including, in particular, copyright date?

The US ed.gov site does so have a skip navigation link, pointing to
#skipnav1.

Contact me by email John, not from my website, it is not hard to guess
what the email address is the webmaster at hereticpress.com

I do ban many servers which host spam email collectors or maybe your IP
is close to a range that has abused access in the past, sorry but if I
do not ban some bad bots my site will be reproduced elsewhere.

I could search through server logs for your IP but that is too time
consuming, if you send me your IP I could allow access, but then again
maybe your "butt" does not inspire me to do that.

Tim to my friends James to email harvesting bots.


John Hosking wrote:

James wrote:

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites
for W3C validity and accessibility features.


Accessibility, my butt. Here's what I get to "access" when I click your
links (FF, Opera, IE6):

"Your permission to access Heretic Press has been revoked by the webmaster.

Your browser may be unidentified or you are downloading too many files
for offline viewing. Someone from your IP address might be trying to
access password protected files?

Contact the manager at hereticpress, if you have been unfairly excluded
from access."

Of course, I *can't* contact the manager at hereticpress, as the Web
site is inaccessible to me.


The Webmaster

Tim


So are you named James or Tim? Or something else?

Thanks Harlan, the header "rotating vibrating" graphics are actually
from the stylesheets, there are seven different ones including a text
only option stylesheet number seven has no "vibrating" graphics at all,
a text only viewer does not see them at all, details are in the
accessibility statement.

http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Access/index.html#skipnav

Yes well I could have mucked around for a month of Sundays trying to
line up divs, but a table seemed approriate for tabular data, there is a
quality being tested and a result for that quality, so I believe the
data is tabular in nature.

Tim

Harlan Messinger wrote:

James wrote:

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites
for W3C validity and accessibility features.

Australian university web sites tested
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustUni.html

Australian government web site tested
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustWeb.html

USA sites tested including target
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/USAweb.html


"Heretic Press" appears in rotating, vibrating text, posing a potential
accessibility problem.

Your results table violates accessibility requirements. You're squeezing
two independent data points into each row--one variable and its result,
and then another variable and its result, implying a non-existent
tabular relationship between them.

James wrote:

Thanks James for the correction, You are right it does have a skip
navigation link and missing alt tags have been added since I last
reviewed this site, sorry my mistake, it has been updated.

If a browser or screen reader gets to any page, the meta tags can
provide a link to other pages, as well as links to important pages like
search, home and the accessibility statement. Getting to any page in a
relative directory which uses title tags in the header allows easy
access to that entire site not just the page found.

Almost any website handles navigation explicitly in the body of the
page--and why wouldn't they?

James/Tim wrote:
[top-posting corrected]
Harlan Messinger wrote:

James wrote:

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites
for W3C validity and accessibility features.


Your results table violates accessibility requirements. You're
squeezing two independent data points into each row--one variable and
its result, and then another variable and its result, implying a
non-existent tabular relationship between them.


Yes well I could have mucked around for a month of Sundays trying to
line up divs, but a table seemed approriate for tabular data, there is a
quality being tested and a result for that quality, so I believe the
data is tabular in nature.

The data is tabular in nature. The problem, as I already noted, is that
you have pairs of unrelated data in each row of the table. A table
implies a particular set of relationships in its arrangement of rows an
columns, and your table breaks this. You didn't need to display the data
side by side; in choosing to do so, and in choosing this manner in which
to do it, you broke the meaning of the HTML table. If you're going to
defend this, well, I'm sure plenty of the websites you reviewed have
defenses for the inadequacies that your site lists.

Any browser is not a screen reader like Jaws.

Harlan Messinger wrote:

James wrote:

Thanks James for the correction, You are right it does have a skip
navigation link and missing alt tags have been added since I last
reviewed this site, sorry my mistake, it has been updated.

If a browser or screen reader gets to any page, the meta tags can
provide a link to other pages, as well as links to important pages
like search, home and the accessibility statement. Getting to any page
in a relative directory which uses title tags in the header allows
easy access to that entire site not just the page found.


Almost any website handles navigation explicitly in the body of the
page--and why wouldn't they?

Tim wrote:
[top-posting corrected]

Harlan Messinger wrote:
James wrote:

Thanks James for the correction, You are right it does have a skip
navigation link and missing alt tags have been added since I last
reviewed this site, sorry my mistake, it has been updated.

If a browser or screen reader gets to any page, the meta tags can
provide a link to other pages, as well as links to important pages
like search, home and the accessibility statement. Getting to any
page in a relative directory which uses title tags in the header
allows easy access to that entire site not just the page found.


Almost any website handles navigation explicitly in the body of the
page--and why wouldn't they?

Any browser is not a screen reader like Jaws.

Jaws reads navigation links just as well as any other links. It even

tends to read them early in the page, where they are located, which is
why accessibility calls for the "skip navigation" link for those who
*don't* want to run through the navigation over and over again.

So using Jaws doesn't make having META tags for navigation any less
redundant.