Weblogs: Web Standards

@Media 2005: Panel discussion on hot topics

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Updated 12 August 2005: Updated to reflect the list of corrections and omissions Joe Clark sent in. This includes a number of comments I mistakenly attributed to Joe - these have been removed. (All mistakes in my notes below are mine. All mine - Mike)

A panel discussion involving Douglas Bowman, Andy Budd, Joe Clark with Molly Holzschlag as the moderator. What follows is a heavily summarised version of the discussion, not the actual words used. Mistakes below are entirely mine. Hopefully I've captured the gist of the discussion.

What is semantics?

Joe Clark: The choice of markup that corresponds to the purpose, intent, or meaning of the content.
Andy Budd: Its the addition of meaning and structure to a document.
Joe Clark: Structure and semantics are blurry things.
Andy Budd: Semantics is meta information
Douglas Bowman: Semantics is about the practical use of HTML or XHTML. There is a limited range of useful elements, so semantics is about choosing the most appropriate element to describe the content.
Molly Holzschlag: Semantic markup and content are intertwingled. How content is meaningfully described creates additional structure on top of the typical HTML elements. The typical HTML elements being <html>, <head> and <body>.
audience: Semantics is the common sense label on content.
Molly Holzschlag: Using semantic markup makes it easier to work on teams, since it is a consistent approach to markup. With markup conventions it is easy to move between projects within a team. For example seeing a class called mainnav, when consistently used, people know its the container for the main navigation.
audience: XML already encourages the idea of consistent markup, by allowing people to create their own semantics.
Joe Clark: Which needs to be converted back into HTML. The markup language develop for CERN may have been great for describing the structure of information scientists share, but impossible to use correctly to describe the content structure of a newspaper. Marking up a hed can be done using the header elements, but it is impossible to mark up a dek or a lede. Trying to fit existing newspaper concepts - which have been around for centuries - cannot be done because HTML is limited. It may be desirable to use XML, but it has to be fudged into quasi-semantic HTML.
Molly Holzschlag: HTML is obviously limited.
audience: About forms. At what level do we stop nesting fieldsets. When we group fields and group them at different levels it can get quite deep. At what point do we call it a day?
Joe Clark: Break it down into two forms if possible. The W3C didn't get forms right, for example a reader satisfaction survey which measures a range of seven satisfaction from "mostly disappointed" through to "mostly satisfied" cannot be done in HTML because the explicit label - the question - can not be explicitly linked to seven radio buttons. We have to fake it. Address lines are another example, we fake labels for line 1 and line 2 of the address.

How to demonstrate compliance according to WCAG?

Joe Clark

Everyone has their own interpretation, so a majority consensus is preferable. The WCAG2.0 want every guideline to be testable. A machine can test for the presence of an alt attribute, but it cannot tell you anything about the appropriateness of the alternative text. A good approach is to take ten experts, and if 80 to 85% of experts are in agreement, then the page is in compliance. This problem comes up in PDF, and making them accessible with people claiming that they are not accessible. This is bollocks. Accessible PDFs can be done, we just get outvoted by the 'experts' each time.

Molly Holzschlag

What about articulating a new for some level of compliance? How do we encourage fellow developers and designers?

Andy Budd

Do we need to demonstrate conformance?

audience

Yes. By Law. In Germany designers need to demonstrate conformance based on WCAG1.0

Andy Budd

Accessibility and conformance are two different things. Using an accessibility statement is a good idea, stating what level of compliance a site is aiming for, also saying we can't guarantee every page conforms all of the time. If a page is found to be accessible, please contact us and we'll try to fix it. Web designers need to have a good understanding of the levels of conformance so that they are able to defend their decision on which conformance level was selected.

Courts are not black and white. Both sides produce the arguments, and a ruling is made.

Joe Clark

I volunteered to testify. I've volunteered before and been turned down as a witness, although it was for a tribunal, not a court case.

audience

In the public sector it is a UK legal requirement, so by the end of 2005 every public website will have to demonstrate that they are level 2 compliant. If they can't they could lose their funding. The RNIB say one thing, SiteMorse say another.

Joe Clark

Take checkpoint 14.1 about language. Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site's content. Does this mean we have to use a language from Papua New Guinea?

Molly Holzschlag

Section 508 has the same problems.

audience

We must be compliant. Full stop. There is nothing that says who can declare someone compliant.

Joe Clark

We can make a statement that says we are compliant, and dare you to prove otherwise. Back that up with a Here's what we did.

audience

The UK government representative understand this isn't a black and white issue. The legislation has not been tested in court. We were told by a government group that we must be able to demonstrate the steps we took to be accessible.

Joe Clark

How far do you go? JAWS 3 can't read PDFs, if they have problems they can google the URL. Google converts PDFs to HTML.

audience

With the DDA it states we must take reasonable steps to be compliant. There's been no court cases for websites. Other non-web cases showed that the phrase reasonable steps is unclear. We have to demonstrate that we took reasonable steps, such as when an accessibility problem is reported we must look into it and report back, which could be something like We looked into it and estimated it would cost $10 million to fix.

Joe Clark

Most legislation contains an undue hardship clause. San Francisco cable cars are classed as historic landmarks

Douglas Bowman

And they haven't been made accessible, the legislation says that changes cannot be made to historical landmarks which could destroy or change the character of the landmark.

Andy Budd

In the Australian case involving the Olympic Games organising committee, IBM lost on the due hardship argument.

Joe Clark

The onus is on the developer to prove compliance.

audience

Are there any accessible Flash case studies (and PDF ones)?

Joe Clark

I've seen some. Its a black art that's poorly documented. Bob Regan goes to conferences in Japan and 1200 people show up. With PDFs today you can get a tool for $200 that does a better job. Its no longer a valid argument that PDFs are inaccessible. Yes, tools for disabled people are more expensive, that's the capitalist market for you. I'm sorry tools cost more than they should, but its not the web designers fault.

audience

How do we approach making staff aware of accessibility? If developers don't want to know about web standards and accessibility, what can we do, just sack them?

Joe Clark

Can I do the sacking?

Molly Holzschlag

In United Kingdom colleges - as with all trade/skill related education, an instructor has very limited time to train students. What does he teach them? Only about the web standards way? Or just the old style? Its a question of what job needs to be done right now. The real issues are right now - lots of websites are still using old-school techniques. How many people are here from government or learning organisations? One third of the audience.

Andy Budd

The skills listed on job adverts far exceed those students leave college with. Companies are looking for people with skills in Dreamweaver, Photoshop, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP. Business are wanting people with lots of skills, but its impossible to be an expert on all the skills. Photoshop experts for instance have no skills in accessibility.

Joe Clark

A company should allow an employee to take one day every two weeks off just to read the web. This way they can skill up with new skills and techniques.

Douglas Bowman

Kids will be overtaking people who don't want to learn.

audience

With job adverts, we can merely hire people as contractors, if they don't have the necessary skills we can fire them. We must remember that HR people write job adverts, and that's why most of them don't make sense. They ask for more years experience than the life of the technology.

Andy Budd

Lots of people say they know about accessibility, but don't really know. There is a lot of pressure on webdesigners to know everything. I had times of anxiety about having to know everything. We can't all be expert web designers, CSS experts, PHP experts and still be able to rebuild the company server box. There needs to be a strong interest in accessibility and web design.

audience

We're stuck on the old school model [of web design] because of a lack of education on design view. Web designers require a different level of skills. Developers tend to have no training in design, and designers have no interest in touching code. We need to teach design as a concept rather than as a specific medium.

Douglas Bowman

There will always be generalists, people who have a range of skills, but not experts in every one. But more and more positions will be in things like just Information Architecture, just pure design, just pure CSS. It won't be everywhere. There's pressure on small companies to get a more generalist, or at least be able to communicate immediately with developers, instructing them about what in a design is flexible and deciding what is buildable.

Joe Clark

Pure designers with no development skills tend to be in management roles. Like Tibor Kalman of M&Co., who couldn't even draw. They define higher level concepts that they get developers to implement. Its a dystopian science fiction, the elite [the designer] drives the process.

Will there every be one browser?

Molly Holzschlag: I expect there will be high doubts here?
Douglas Bowman: Why would that ever be needed? Will we even have to worry about browsers in 5 years?
Andy Budd: Will there be a browser in 5 years? We may have desktop applications can be running through XUL and XAML.
Douglas Bowman: Apple and WebKit is a good example. Everything is done as a desktop widget, so we don't need Safari any more.
Joe Clark: I've been using Microsoft Word as a browser. Just open standards compliant pages with it.
Molly Holzschlag: So far we're talking about the desktop environment. There'll be may agents accessing content that won't be from a desktop.
audience: Regarding XUL and XAML, what's the level of discussion between WaSP and Microsoft about these standards?
Molly Holzschag: Broadly speaking it is early days yet. Dealing with Microsoft is tough, it has its own agenda, which may be a different agenda tomorrow. What is beneficial for us today, may be hard to convince Microsoft in doing today if it isn't on their agenda. Reading the future is very difficult. Keep watching WaSP, we can't talk too much about it yet.
audience: On to accessibility side of browsers and screenreaders, can we take it they have the latest browser versions?
Molly Holzschlag: The context of a website is based on the audience, otherwise why develop the site? If the audience is still using a particular browser, then it make sense to ensure the website works in that browser.
Joe Clark: I'm tired of people complaining that sites don't work in their version 3 of JAWS. Bruce Maguire continues to use the falsehood about it costing "$,1000+" to upgrade his setup to be able to read PDFs. You can spend $200 and get the next two updates of Window-Eyes or Jaws, which will be able to read PDFs. If new technology is available to correct that problem, users must upgrade. This is a free market economy, I'm sorry that the price of products is high. This is the world we live in, unfortunately. There are free alternatives available. Solaris 10 has the best set, it runs on Intel, has voice recognition, onscreen keyboard, PDF's are readable. People must upgrade.
audience: What about people on disability benefit?
Joe Clark: That is an unfairness based on the disability system. The province of Ontario pays for 75% of the cost of assistive devices.
audience: We can't wait 200 years for disability equality.
Joe Clark: When there are technology fixes available, people must go with the flow. If you are concerned with the cost, have a look at free or cheaper options. Buy a Mac, which has an inbuilt screenreader (on Tiger). It is JAWS' problem when it can't handle a web standards compliant and accessible website.
audience: Something about base line user agents, specified by the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines and referred to in WCAG2.0
Joe Clark: This is the "Time has marched on" argument. Five years ago the base line user agent was Internet Explorer version 4. Today it is Firefox.
audience: The move to webstandards has been painfully slow. Business have been delivering applications over the web for years. We don't have documents, we have applications through browsers. The web standards movement seem to only talk about documents. There is a big gulf between content and applications. There is very little on web applications. The use of web controls - like dotnet - out of the box doesn't generate valid code.
Molly Holzschlag: There are parts of Section 508 that relate to web applications. One client has lots of applications deployed on Netscape 4, its all privately funded. Lots of budget available, but not $10 million to rewrite Netscape 4 applications. At this point web applications are a hot topic, and are an important part of what we are doing. We will run into the same problems - how to we reach out, inspire and inform people already building web applications?
Andy Budd: The answer is with the community. Web enabled applications are a new phenomenon. When we hit problems, we have to look at ways of avoiding or working around the problems. Document it on a website for others to use and build on. A passion for web standards helps.
Joe Clark: This is a show stopper possibility for WCAG2.0. There are not enough application developers. There's no conferences or published guidelines. Its entirely possible that we'll never figure out how to do web applications in an accessible way, or a webstandards way. Its possible that WCAG2.0 will still be inapplicable to web applications when it is released.
Molly Holzschlag: These problems are getting bigger. We have to be prepared.
audience (Patrick Lauke): Was the web ever envisioned as being the frontend of an applications? There's no standards suitable to web-based applications.
Molly Holzschlag: This is the core challenge of everything we do. The original idea of the web is a grand ideal. The original vision of the web was not as a visual application orientated environment. The original vision is still a good one, however we have to figure out how we are going to work with that, which will be the biggest challenge. Embarrassment will be a good motivator, balanced with PR to get the word out on good work.
audience: (To Douglas Bowman): Did the (paper) design influence the markup of the HTML in any way? How separate was structure and presentation?
Douglas Bowman: The design affects how many elements need to be added in. There were definite decisions made in the markup as to what hooks are needed to be able to do the design.

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