© Heretic Press and Tim Anderson 2007. Page created 9th Septeber 2007. Last updated 15th October 2007. Related pages comparing .gov sites Survey Design. Australian .gov.au sites. University .edu.au sites. UK .gov.uk sits and USA .gov websites. Survey Results. The Editor's email.
AXA Australia Homepage.
http://www.axa.com.au/
W3C test AXA Australia homepage
Verified File Name:
AXA Australia homepage
Result:
PASS validation, NO ERRORS
Date 19th September 2007
Cynthia Says® - Web Accessibility Report
Verified File Name: AXA Australia homepage
Date: 9 September 2007 PASSED Accessibility Verification S.508 and Priority 1.
Error Score when first tested 9th Sepetember 2007 http://www.axa.com.au/ 3 ERRORS
Page accessibility features http://www.axa.com.au/ 7
The AXA Australia homepage validates after initially failing.
It is a table layout which does not use a single heading tag like <h1> or any <p> paragraph tags to structure the relative importance of content.
Javascript is embedded in the page, but someone using a screen reader with no Javascript will not be able to access that information. There should be an alternative to Javascript a <noscript> element.
This page passes basic accessibility tests for Priority One, but fails higher level test because it fails Rule: 11.2.1 deprecated elements or attributes. The document contains the element: table with the deprecated attribute: align. It also fails checkpoint 13.1 Failure - Anchor Element at Line: 158, by using the same defined link phrases to link to different resources. It also fails Checkpoint 12.4 at Line: 29 by using a form with no label. Checkpoint 4.3 also fails the document for not identifying a primary language of the document.
A redirection should be fixed http://www.axa.com.au/adviser redirected to http://www.axafp.com.au/axa/access.nsf/Content/FAN
Google has beta versions of English translation into many languages including Chinese, simplified and traditional script. The AXA homepage translated into Chinese demonstrates why images are no good at conveying text information. I cannot assess the accuracy of the Google translationss, but even in the Chinese translation, the central graphics remain in English. It would be more accessiblebe if text was seperated from the graphics and then a translation service like Google, you could put a "Translate into Chinese" link (or many other languages) on the homepage!
Creation and modification dates, keywords and links to other pages could be added.
Stylesheets can specifiy absolute font sizes such as points pt used in traditional hard copy publishing, or pixels px which are used as the basic element of computer screens.
Some Internet Explorer users cannot resize content that has been set in pixels and points which are not consistently supported. Both pt and px can be more difficult to scale up to larger text sizes.
Using relative size fonts is recommended in WCAG Checkpoint 3.4. The flexible way to specify fonts is with relative sizes (xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large) em and percentage sizes. Fonts should be specified in percentages or em. The brief definition of an em is the width of a capital M in a particular typeface.
Relative fonts sizing allows the user's browser settings to take precedence. If a user has specified in their browser to increase text size, then that will be the basic size of an em relative to that browser's setting. If a user has specified large text but webpage fonts are set by a stylesheet as 10 points or 10 pixels, then they might not be able to read the page content.
<noscript> element
The <noscript> element is meant to provide an alternative to information available with Javascript. This noscript element seems inadequate:
<noscript>This website requires JavaScript.</noscript>
This is the antithesis of the reason why a noscript element should be provided. What can a blind student using a screen reader like Jaws do? This noscript element should at least provide a list of navigation links that Javascript users can access.
For an example of using the <noscript> to provide alternative content, see the Griffith University homepage which provides a comprehensive <noscript> alternative to Javascript navigation.
The html version used is XHTML 1.0 Strict, which is good, but the embed tag is adding the errors to load the flash file. It is possible to embed a shockwave file into the page with no errors, but you should also use the tag <noembed> to give alternative visual and text information for anyone who cannot use the plugin for Macromedia™ Flash movies.
Bye Bye Embed
The old html 3.2 pre stylesheet solution was to separate links by using tiny spacer.gif files between them. CSS allows you to visually put links next to each other on a page by using a hidden html element to separate links. In this page the html code is <a class="noshow">:</a> . In the stylesheet for the noshow class, the CSS rule declares .noshow{ display:none;}
A browser with stylesheets turned off will display : separating the links.
One Melbourne University, staff member and member of the Web standards Group WSG stated to me that Melbourne University and Griffith university had systems that did not recognise & in
links. Ampersand "&" has to be written as &. The Melbourne University homepage has validated for at least the last year and the Griffith homepage page has also solved the & problem as of 5th May 2007.
Many institutions do not protect their staff very well from spam emails. One clever use of the ASCII character set used in this page is to encode the email addresses which hides them a bit from spambots collecting email addresses.
This code renders in the browser window in English as something like:
mailto:managerBiwsn.edu.au
This example is much better than unprotected email addresses like: mailto:fred@axa.com.au
You can protect email addresses a little further, by adding javascript at the cost of some accessibility, if users have javascript turned off. If you put Javascript in the email you need to add some email contact information in the <noscript> element. This Swinburne page already needs the <noscript> element warning if javascript is turned off.
You can combine both methods to make a difficult mess for most web bots to decipher. An example of using javascript with ASCII codes to hide the email addresses. This verbose javascript combined with ascii characters renders on the screen as a normal email address, but search engines and spambots do not generally follow Javascript, so it is protected, a little from spam email harvesters and even from visual inspection of the page source, by a novice html user.
<a href="#" onclick="JavaScript:window.location='&m'+'ail'+'to:'+'&g&cd&jeh'+'@'+'dmvkti^ghe'+'ss.com'"> Email</a> the administration.
I use a few other methods to combat spam bots collecting emails but they are too unsavory for a bank or financial institution. Endless looping pages and new changing fake emails. You need to hide the URL to such pages so good bots like the Pandora project State Library of Victoria bot, do not fall in, in the css set display to hidden and specify in the page html link rel="nofollow" which the good bots will obey as well as the robots.txt file which should tell bots to keep out. You should monitor server logs for bad bots who access areas they should not. In these example you have to paste the URL into your browser to see the example so that there are no live links to the bogtrap on this page.
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.hereticpress.com/Private/members.foo" title="Endless loop pages emails"
>http://www.hereticpress.com/Private/members.foo</a>
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.hereticpress.com/Private/index.html" title="Junk email addresses"
>http://www.hereticpress.com/Private/index.html</a>
xml:lang="en" error
Financial institutions who have and non English speaking customers should take extra care to ensure that their document language is specified as English.
This AXA homepage does not declare a doctype language tag as en: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
It should read:<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
If you have these language tags correct, pages can be translated into most languages on the fly by Google. Every Heretic Press page has different colours attached to language tags in English from the Stylesheets, however, when the page is translated it only uses the stylesheet specified language colour and ignores all others in the linked CSS. The translated page is visually monotonous in a monochrome colour.
Some translations of this page; German, Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese.
A Glossary of foreign words used in Patrick Hanrahan's novel Nunc looks more visually appealing with many different languages font tags in the page text as well as the en document language tag.
There is no en English language tag and graphics are used to display text information, the AXA homepage cannot be completely translated, even when you provide the language tag en for the translation, an attempt to translate it into German partially fails, as pictures are used to convey English language information the picture tag alt="Get property and financial advice..." remains in English.
Pages with many different languages in the one document can also be translated from Italian French Spanish Russian and German language tags.
AXA have no paragraph or heading tags at all! There is no accessibility statement or an error 404 file not found page.
The validation errors are mainly caused by the ubiquitous & encoding. HTML Character entity errors are common and are often caused by the character for ampersand "&" which has to be written as &.
Pay particular attention to URLs that include &. For example, your document should contain http://www.csu.edu.au?class=guest&name=user, rather than http://www.csu.edu.au?class=guest&name=user.
Two minor errors stop this page passing the highest level accessibility test. A link uses the same text twice, Anchor Element at Line: 127, Column: 23 and the element: img has the deprecated attribute: border which also prevent it passing the Priority three checklists.
Two minor changes. Well done Charles Sturt University. You could still make many improvements though like keyboard shortcuts, more meta tags, add the noscript element, a large text option etc.
HTML and xhtml uses the word "title" in two ways, the first is in the head
<head ><title>Australian university website validity and accessibility tests</title></head>
This <head> title shows up above the browser window. Documents missing this type of title tag could be filed with tens of millions of other untitled documents and be difficult to find without supporting page text content.
Another important potential use for title in the header is to put descriptions of links, stylesheets and meta tags which some screen readers can use from the document head. For example this page has sibling pages in the same directory.
<link rel="Sibling" href="AustWeb.html" title="Aust. Validity and accessibility tests Howard Centrelink Defence Police Bracks." />
<link rel="Sibling" href="UKweb.html" title="UK sites tested The Queen House of Lords No 10 Downing Street Oxford Uni etc." />
<link rel="alternate stylesheet" href="../SSheets/NuncStyle1.css" media="screen" type="text/css"title="Black Gold" />
Adding keywords relevant to the destination link adds credibility to your title elements as potential search engine optimisation features. Google does some testing for keyword relevance to calculate page rank and also to prevent the stuffing of the title tag with content irrelevant to the destination link.
Heretic Press also makes extensive use of title in the body of the document using title=" " which can be inserted in any link or image as title="Any descriptive text" to give users more information on where links go or what they provide.
title is activated by a mouseover, or a keyboard onfocus or a stylesheet onhover event. Some or these title elements are not read by screen reading software, but they can provide a lot more information for keyboard or mouse users browsing a site.
To be useful for users, the title must add some extra information not usually visible and not necessary in the page, extra information for anyone considering following that link, it could be about the page size or a few keywords related to the new content.
It should not just repeat the link text phrase.
Almost all Heretic Press links and pictures provide extra information in the title tag on that link or graphic.
Title is also important for images as Internet Explorer will display the alt text on mouseover if there is no title text. The Firefox and Opera browsers only display the title text on mouseover and do not use the alt tag for this purpose. If you want the alt tag text visible on mouseover, the title tag is also necessary.
Only two Australian Universities used the title tag, both on the left hand side only of their homepage VUT and title was also used by Deakin University. In both cases however title just repeated the same link text adding no new information for someone considering following that link.
Heretic Press uses the longdesc tag to link to long descriptions of images.
<img longdesc="../Access/index.html#heretictic">
this tags links to information on WCAG Priority level logos. This is an addition to the alt which should be a short description of the image or link, you can link to a whole page of text on an image with longdesc.
Another difference to note is that Heretic Press uses a relative directory structure, it is quicker to load a partial URL like index.html than the full file pathway to that file which includes the domain name eg. http://www.yourdomain/index.html.
Relative directories also make the site easier to move to a new domain name and with a few minor modifications, the entire site will run off a CD. If a browser or screen reader gets to any page, the meta tags provide a link to all child and parent pages in that directory, 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.
In your browser menu items, Select View Source or View Page Source to see the extensive set of meta tags, even providing a title element for related pages which some screen readers can read.
<base href="http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustUni.html" /"> is needed as all the URLs in the page are partial pathways. <base href> is needed where documents are structured in directories relative to each other. One advantage of this is that it is easier to create a mirror copy of the site. This also has a security downside, in that your files can be easier to reproduce in the same directory stucture on another site. The Heretic Press relative directory structure is mirrored by the National Library of Australia Pandora archive in the same relative directory structure.
Contact Heretic Press for an accessibility review of your website. We can provide you with an accessible validated template for your homepage. Ask me the author and editor of hereticpress.com for a quote for large projects editing web page code or forcing CMS software, by hook or by crook (inc. html, css and accessibility know-how) to make CMS write valid accessible code. My Freelance html editing rates. Audits will help you identify current accessibility problems and provide guidance for compliance with international standards and best practice.
Heretic Press Guide to writing HTML
Contact Heretic Press
2000 research by Tony Barry provided hypertext links to each library website in his study. He found that no Australian University library site passed accessibility testing, 100% of library sites failed ! Alexander (2003) reported that 98% of Australian University sites failed accessibility tests. A 2005 study by John Allthorpp found that only 11% of Australian sites validated as html documents. I reported in 2006 that only 22% of Australian government websites validated, but 59% passed Priority One or Section 508 accessibility testing. In international comparisons of government websites, some UK sites were generally found to have fewer HTML errors and more accessibility features, than Australian sites.
When the research subject is a network of computers, paper seems an inappropriate medium to report the experiment, unless a snapshot is sufficient to make conclusions about other times? A lot of internet research has been presented in a traditional academic manner on paper. A paper based report is not interactive and does not facilitate anyone else trying to replicate the experimental test of each webpage.
Science is partially about the replication of results which I hope will be easier in this study for others to also test with links provided to all the subjects of this study. I also wanted this page to be very different from previous research, an altruistic attempt to make a resource for the research subjects to use for their own benefit, to help them learn more about improving their website's validity, accessibility and (SEO) search engine optimisation.
A credible webpage research project about webpages, should also be a resource for others to verify and replicate your results as easily as possible. A user wanting to scrutinise this research can click buttons to; validate page html, test CSS stylesheets, check links and go to accessibility testing pages. I hope that making links to validators for each University homepage (fairly stable URLs) and taking the screenshots makes it easier for others to verify or question my results, to learn themselves and improve their site's quality and legal compliance over time.
Australian security and financial institutions homepages were selected for study.
1. W3C Validation of the webpage HTML or XHTML
2. W3C Validation of the stylesheet CSS
3. W3C Link checker
4. Cynthia online validator. Some other accessibility checking tools one of the best known is webxact could also be used. Cynthia was chosen as it passes or fails web documents according to the WCAG Priority one, two and three Checklists.
5. WCAG Visual inspection compliance W3C WCAG 1.0 2.0 and 3.0.
6. A Table Checklist includes all measures, but page validation is not counted as an accessibility feature. Pages can fail validation and still pass accessibility tests! Though page validity is not directly related to accessibility, valid code ensures pages can be easily indexed by search engines and that pages will display correctly in any browser. This assessment is intended to go beyond the WCAG accessibility checklists to include other factors that could affect the accessibility of the site for a large non-human audience of search engine robots.
Some of the measures are not directly related to or part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, measures such as header modification dates. Modification dates can however relate to the accessibility of the site for the non human robot audience, a modification date in the header tags can even instruct search engines how often to call
<meta name="revisit-after" content="14 Days" /> and when the indexed cached version of a page needs to be updated. The tabled measures includes the use of head meta tags such as creation and modification dates and links to any other pages like any copyright or accessibility statement if there is one.
The table includes all items evaluated for each banking homepage. Where possible automated tools are used to provided objective results such as the W3C validation tools and the Cynthia accessibility tests. Many items were also checked with a visual inspection of the page code. Some more features measured are not part of WCAG Priority 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0, such as meta tags use, Accessibility Statements and Error 404 pages. There was no inter-rater reliability on evaluating these subjectively measured items, the author made a judgment, for example if a Privacy Statement with some accessibility information would qualify as an accessibility statement.
Generally a score of one was allocated to each feature the page contained that promoted accessibility, except that extra points were added for stylesheet viewing options (max 5) and for achieving a strict document type(2).
Transitional Document types were allocated a score of one.
Strict Document types were allocated a score of two.
Pages passed a large text option if fonts were specified in percentages or em.
Up to five points were allocated for sites with alternative stylesheet layouts.
Five points were only awarded if there were five different stylesheet layout options, not if the site just used five linked styles for different parts of the same page content like VUT or RMIT.
Conversely a site could have dozens of linked styles with minor differences, so the score was limited to five possible points for stylesheets.
<link rel=" "href="../"> Correct if there were links to any other pages in the header.
<meta link rel=" "> Correct if there were Copyright author or creation header details.
title Correct if there were links with any extra title information.
Australian Commonwealth and state laws.
The Heretic Press Accessibility statement and summary of legal obligations not to discriminate in the UK, the USA and the Australian Diability Discrimination Act 1992.
In almost all cases in Australia, the minimum website standard is WCAG Priority One level.
WCAG 1.0 Specifications. W3C Recommendation 5-May-1999
Draft WCAG 2.0 Working Draft only 27 April 2006. Criticism abounds
WCAG 2.0 Judy Brewer
Privacy Laws
Defamation actions
American 2006. Target being sued by National Federation of the Blind.
Sydney Olympics case notes
Target sued in America
"Web site isn't a place of public accommodation covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act because it isn't a "place".
Internet not a place
Disability discrimination Australian Act
Sydney Olympics case
"In considering a disability discrimination complaint about Worldwide Web accessibility, HREOC would take into consideration the extent to which the best available advice on accessibility had been obtained and followed."
UK legal firm
Sydney Website sued
Tom's quote 15.5 days x $1,900 per day $29,450.00
Heretic Press editing rates validated and accessible HTML $185 Australian dollars an hour.
Maguire v Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games in 2000 clearly demonstrated that the Australian Disability Discrimination Act 1992 applies in the online world.
John Allthorpp's 2005 Study of Australian sites (not Universities)
John Allthorpp's study methodology also seemed to be looking for negatives, but unlike Alexander's studies, it did consider page html code and included W3C validity testing. It subtracted points for missing features; validity, accessibility, CSS, the use of tables and poor fonts. John also tested Australian government websites, australia.gov.au, Centrelink and vic.gov.au. After a good start with his first page for one of the biggest companies in Australia, "The Big Australian" BHP Biliton, John reported that, "From then on it was almost literally downhill"
John found that about 11% of sites validated. In my first study of Australian government websites, a small sample of 22, it was double that, 22% of the Australian government websites tested passed W3C validity tests.
Screen Readers Users Who Work With Screen Readers
University of Minnesota A huge list of resources
Web Testing Tools Web Accessibility Initiatiave list of tools
Draft WCAG version 2.0 A draft copy of new guidelines which may change. If you want to learn about accessibility, all the information you need is on the internet in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
WSG The Web Standards Group. The WSG offered no feedback on the contents of this report, except that it is written in a "critical" manner and that the University sector and WANAU aim to attempt change through encouragement rather than criticism.
WANAU An organisation promoting training courses for $495 a head. WANAU has not responded to this research, and does not seem to accept what I intended as constructive criticism.
Webstandards A grassroots coalition fighting for standards.
WebAim Utah State University and The Center for Persons with disabilities.
Universal Access Middlesex University international accessibility research project.
The Group of Eight The Group of Eight represents Australia's leading universities.
University rankings World rankings of Australian Universities.
Australian university libraries Fail usability tests for the visually disabled.
UN Report United Nations global audit of web accessibility 97% failed.
50 US sites "Neither the mandate nor the motivation"
Andy King eGovernment Site Credibility
EU Web accessibility and technical standards conformance in four EU states.
University website Usability and meeting the needs of educational Web site users.
Web Page Accessibility: Research Studies.
Web Accessibility Survey Site Jim Ellison A study of 50 US sites.
David Hark's resource links General Web Accessibility Resources.
If you do not like the coloured text on a black background, you can view this page in six other styles. Allow a few seconds for the page to reformat itself using a different stylesheet. 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5 : 6 : 7:
I would prefer that you do not waste trees and paper printing this page, but if you wish, select stylesheet 7. It will take a few seconds to reformat this large page for printing. Each University review has a page break before the H2 heading tag, so you should be able to just print the pages of interest to you.
doctypes The important document type declaration DTD
A Correct Javascript Declaration <script type="text/javascript"> </script>
For non-Javascript users noscript
File pathways and Relative Directories
win-1252 Character encoding sets
Relative v Absolute font sizes em and %. pt and px
embed Embedding media files
Email Protecting email addresses
xml:lang="en" Language definitions
& The ubiquitious ampersand error
longdesc Long descriptions of images
content="Thu, 26 Apr 2007" International dating
links Making adjacent links accessible
title elements for rollover, onfocus or hover.
Underlined links a navigation aid. The Monash University homepage.
tabIndex was used at only one University Chinese page Canberra University.
color and bgcolor should be in the stylesheet rules, not the page html.
tabIndex
One very good place to use tabindex is in forms, it allows the keyboard to give focus to any form elements and can be used to select form textfields and buttons.
For example in this search page, a tabIndex gives an easy keyboard selection of the text entry field and the Search submit button. Removing the tabIndex makes keyboard browsing completely miss the form fields and buttons.
How many Australian banking sites use validated html or xhtml?
Many University sites which failed to validate had similar small errors like the ampersand error, but there were also some potentially more serious html errors such as incorrect or missing; document type declarations, language definitions and generally an inaccessible use of Javascript incorrectly declared without any alternative noscript being given.
64% of Australian financial institutions websites passed Priority One Level accessibility testing and five sites passed the highest level Priority Three level testing; Monash University, the University of South Australia, The University of Queensland, The University of Canberra and Griffith University was exceptional in giving students many different options to view their pages. Only 36% of sites failed basic accessibility testing and they tended to have a similar small range of common accessibility problems.
Australian sites were also tested against the American standard US Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, so comparisons could easily be made with Ivy League schools in America who are generally of a low standard, of the few I tested only Massachusetts Institute of Technology validated and was accessible. Harvard, Princeston and Yale all have significant validation errors or accessibility problems. UK university sites seem to be better, Oxford has a strict doctype, no errors and passes all Priority level 3 accessibility tests. Cambridge also validates and passes Priority One accessibility testing. It would be interesting to have more international comparisons of Australian university sites... including NZ and larger samples of university sites from the UK, USA and Canada. Having reviewed a few sites in other countries, I would be surprised if Australian university sites were not on average the best in the world? A hypothesis I would like to test: Australian University sites will have fewer validation errors and more accessibility features than university sites in other countries. Australia's Griffith University and Monash University homepages are much better than any USA "ivy" league schools I tested and have more accessibility features than the best UK university site I tested, Oxford University.
One observation I noticed in this study is that Australian banks are not very responsive or quick to change page code just like the Australian government has been. After reviewing .gov sites over the last year, I concluded that they almost never change, they stay as they are with same html errors and missing accessibility features. The peak government body responsible AGIMO seems to be promoting the status quo of low standards with statements like "we lead by example", but I found that UK sites have fewer coding errors and more accessibility features than Australian or USA government sites.
I hope that this page is more specific and rigorous in the research methodology than previous research, testing each site many times with automated tools and inspection of the page html code pointing out what W3C validation errors were in which university homepages and offering coding suggestions. I intended it as a guide for each university to try and improve their document validity which can impact on search engine indexing SEO for pages, as well as evaluating accessibility. I hoped that this study will be a practical learning guide as well as a tool with live links to promote higher standards in document production. I am encouraged by sites which failed validation when I first tested them, that now validate which demonstrates that one single sampling is not enough to make accurate conclusions.
A working draft of WCAG 2.0 has been around for the last year, but it has not been well received and seems to be languishing at a draft stage. There is till plenty of time to submit comments on the draft before it becomes the official standard. Joe Clack has written a detailed review. To Hell with WCAG 2.0.
Draft WCAG 2.0 Working Draft only 27 April 2006. Criticism of it is savage but it will eventually with some edits become the standard, an interview with Judy Brewer on WCAG 2.0
If there is any interest in funding it, (maybe I will have to do it unfunded) I would like to construct new pages comparing a good sample of UK and USA universities with the Australian sites. I would also like to split this Australian university page up into more manageable sized pages for each state and go into more detail than is possible on one gigantic webpage.
I would like to expand the business argument for valid accessible code by collecting information on:
1.) Google page ranking
2.) Ranking for a few keywords like courses,degrees,masters,etc.
3.) Is there any correlation between the percentage of foreign fee paying students compared to language tags validity or W3C validation error rates?
Regarding Content Management Software, I would request a refund on any CMS which introduces html errors which cannot be corrected. Request a refund on any CMS which has accessibility traps. You are all academic institutions, not accounting or marketing firms, thinking of the Bond University flash file in the homepage or the lack of basic marketing by some others who have missing titles and keywords but pay Google for advertising when they should first fix serious errors in their invalid html homepage code. A valid accessible page promotes and increases the students's standing with pride at their academic excellence.
There are search engine optimisation SEO reasons to validate your pages and make them accessible, you might have a potential increase in O/S student numbers! General contractual obligations to your students as well should be a concern and even more specific legal obligations, your university will only have some legal confidence you are providing an accessible website to at least Priority One level to not be discriminating against a blind student under the 1992 Australian Act.
How can some CMS systems be brought down by an ampersand. What is the CMS Fitness for purpose legally, the obligation of the software maker? It seems that most CMS software can when pushed, produce validated accessible pages, the RMIT example of Teratext™ seems to be an example of software not properly configured to write webpages based on evidence of the same keywords being in many RMIT pages no mater what the specific page content is. CMS systems can generally write validated, accessible web pages. Ask for a refund, if the CMS falls apart at the first ampersand and it cannot be edited to write valid code. Make CMS write an & as &.
The percentage who passed Priority One was 64%, much higher than I expected from Alexander's research which reported that 98% failed accessibility tests. How do the other 34% sleep soundly with their CMS at night?
eGovernment Site Credibility: Comparing Speed, Accessibility, Typos, and Validity eGovernment Site Credibility
University of Minnesota A huge list of resources
Web Testing Tools Web Accessibility Initiatiave list of tools
Draft WCAG version 2.0 A draft copy of new guidelines which may change. If you want to learn about accessibility, all the information you need is on the internet in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
WSG The Web Standards Group. The WSG offered no feedback on the contents of this report, except that it is written in a "critical" manner and that the University sector and WANAU aim to attempt change through encouragement rather than criticism.
Peter Firminger the list moderator stated that the WSG did not need people like me who did more damage than good. Suspension
WANAU An organisation promoting training courses for $495 a head. WANAU has not responded to my research, and does not seem to accept what I intended as constructive criticism.
Webstandards A grassroots coalition fighting for standards.
WebAim Utah State University and The Center for Persons with disabilities.
Universal Access Middlesex University international accessibility research project.
The Group of Eight The Group of Eight represents Australia's leading universities.
University rankings World rankings of Australian Universities.
Australian university libraries They fail the standard usability tests for use by the visually disabled.
UN Report United Nations global audit of web accessibility 97% failed.
50 US sites "Neither the mandate nor the motivation"
EU assessment of Web accessibility and technical standards conformance in four EU states.
University website Usability and meeting the needs of educational Web site users.
Web Page Accessibility: Research Studies.
Web Accessibility Survey Site Jim Ellison A study of 50 US sites.
David Hark's resource links General Web Accessibility Resources.
AGIMO 2005 Metadata Standards
metadata
HREOC old guide from 1999
HREOC paper 1999
Guide to Minimum Website Standards
AGIMO Guide
Human Rights Equal Opportunity Commission
HREOC Australian National Audit
Australian Macromedia Report Includes State laws
Guide Aust Accessibility
Victorian government report
Victorian Government report
AGIMO guidelines
Guidelines
Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes
Disability Act
Australian Government Metadata Standards
metadata standards
Australian Government Information Management Office
AGMIO
Guidelines for Federal and ACT Government Websites
Federal and ACT guidelines
Australian Federal and State Accessibility law
Australian Standards Overview
Whole of Victorian Government Website Standards: Overview
Victorian Standards Overview
Victorian Government IT Policy and Programs
Content Guidelines
Web development Server side usability
Usability and Templates
Australian Government Information Management Office
Aust Govt Info Management Office
Discrimination and disability Act 2002
Disability Discrimination Act
Australian W3C Office newsletter
Australian W3C Office
Multimedia Victoria Government Accessibility Statements
Multimedia Victoria
© : Timothy John Anderson and Heretic Press 2007.
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