We’re always preaching about diversity and equality in this country, but we continuously fail to take into account the rights of disabled people.

Have you ever seen how a blind person browses the web with a screen reader – it’s incredibly humbling and it’s saddening to know that these people can’t browse South African websites with ease because we fail to adhere to accessibility standards.

And it’s not just disabled people that benefit from accessible websites. There are people with minor visibility issues who cannot see your text, because the contrast ratio between the fonts and the background is too low and does not comply. There are deaf people who don’t know what your video is about, because you failed to provide a text transcript.

W3C standards also help towards this because XHTML and CSS standards, when adhered to, help people who can’t use a mouse to navigate your site using just a keyboard.

Hopefully I can get through to the people browsing your page and they can take an interest in accessibility as well. It’s gotta start somewhere.

I don’t like Internet businesses who don’t create compliant websites. I sometimes wish browsers were not so forgiving.

To be fair though, I often have to take short cuts in my development. I use the target attribute, and I use a web based WYSWYG editor in my CMS that doesn’t generate compliant XHTML code.

About 35% of my dynamic sites and almost 100% of my static sites are totally compliant.

I was impressed by the new design which was launched a couple of months ago (I think) and as I said in the post, being one of the top 10 visited sites in SA, you almost have a responsibility towards developing a site that takes things like standards and semantic markup into account. So kudo’s to you folk for standing up and being counted.

(Ok, I see that on the left I do not show the year, so you are forgiven. Just check the dates of the comments.) No hard feelings?

Do you represent any of the sites?

So you are telling me you are throwing mud at these sites with stats that are older than one year? I would have al least expected you to quote recent stats for that privilege.

I used to work for a internet company, and I can tell you first hand that standards is NOT an issue for them. They simply do not give a shit. In fact I almost got FIRED because I was insisting on implementing standards ( “We told you we would look into your proposal, and the department head does not agree with you and you still went on and spent company time implementing this” )

It’s sad… oh well…

I was gonna argue, but me is too lazy. One word.

context.