Accessibility reviews of UK sites

Here is a brief review of some UK sites, as of January/February 2004.
Accessibility levels were checked using Bobby.
HTML validity was checked using the W3C validator.
The overall pattern is that sites aim for WAI level A, with good but not quite valid HTML. UK Government accessibility guidelines are ignored.
Sites reviewed: Office of the E-envoy, Number 10, Mayor of London, Amazon.co.uk.

Office of the E-envoy

Accessibility

WAI level? - A, fairly close to AA
Compliance to Government's own accessibility guidelines? - No

Could easily get closer to AA if it had correct form labelling and avoided identical link phrases leading to different pages.

Has skip navigation. Does not appear to provide accesskeys (required according to government guidelines, and WAI Triple-A standard, though there's some debate over how useful they are.)

HTML

Valid HTML? - Not quite, but very close.

A very high standard. There is just one accidental XHTML tag in the HTML code, and one mistake in form labelling. A fine piece of work.

The site briefly went down while it was being assessed.

Rating

8/10
Very good indeed

Number 10

Accessibility

WAI level? - A, fairly close to AA
Compliance to Government's own accessibility guidelines? - No

Could easily get closer to AA if it had correct form labelling and avoided identical link phrases leading to different pages (similar faults to the Office of the E-envoy).

Has accesskeys, and skip navigation. Uses spacer gifs extensively, which UK government guidelines discourage/ban.

HTML

Valid HTML? - No
(This is a requirement for WAI Double-A, and UK government guidelines)

The biggest mistake is that the code is XHTML but declared in the document type declaration as HTML.

Uses "common" non-W3C tags, for example Topmargin and Bordercolor. Also uses the W3C deprecated (discouraged) <td> height attribute.

The code overall is fairly good, let down by common non-W3C tags and through being XHTML declared as HTML.

Rating

6/10
Great that it reaches WAI level A standard, but with a little work it could be a lot better.

Mayor of London

Accessibility

WAI level? - almost AA, and close to AAA
Compliance to Government's own accessibility guidelines? - nearly.

The Bobby validator fails the site on AA standard on two counts. One is use of fixed width table elements, but actually the WAI Double-A standard discourages these but does not ban them outright (Bobby and WAI differ on this). The other is mouse-specific JavaScript, but in this case the script elements are pure eye-candy so can be discounted as trivial.

Has accesskeys and skipnavigation. Fails to specify natural language (WAI triple-A and UK government guidelines requirement). A shame, because this is so easy to do.

HTML

Valid HTML? - No
(This is a requirement for WAI Double-A, and UK government guidelines)

Does not specify a character set. That's an error, especially because there are some non iso-8859-1 characters in there. Otherwise, there's the common (and lightweight) mistake in the use of align="middle" (this should be "center", middle is for valign). A few quote marks are missing and one table height is specified (W3C deprecates table heights). But in general this is good HTML, except for the lack of a character set.

Rating

8/10
Excellent accessibility, but two significant errors at the start - lack of language and character set information.

Amazon UK

Accessibility

WAI level - A (just)
Government guidelines do not apply

There are no accessibility features in the regular version with graphics. Even image alt tags are rarely used. There are image maps with no alternative link text, and gifs used where text would do.

But there is a text version of the page (this is allowed under WAI rules) that shows none of the faults above, except for one arrow icon without an alt tag - a trivial fault.

Natural language is not specified
No skipnav or accesskeys

HTML

Valid HTML? - No

No character set specified.

The code shows the classic mix of sloppy valign=center and align=middle, but this isn't a big deal. Also some "common" non-W3C attributes, like valign for an imagemap, height for a TD tag. More questionable - <LI> tags with no introductory <UL>. It's what might be described as commercial code, that generally works but makes little attempt to meet formal rules.

Rating

4/10
The lowest level of WAI conformance possible, but at least it does make the effort to reach level A.

For a decent review of more Government sites, read the Accessify.com article, Accessibility of UK government web sites investigated.

This Tinhat page is valid XHTML to WAI Double-A standard.