The Android Market occasionally does something similar. It shows apps that aren’t available in my country and I always wonder how hard is it to put a if ($country != US) { hide = 1 } statement into the code.

It’s frustrating because I invest some time in reading about the app and decide to commit to purchase, only to be met with a message telling me – as you put it – “haha you can’t have this”.

I think whether UX people are flexible or not depends on the organization and the culture of the organization.

By the way, you have a very nice name for your blog (it’s an oxymoron – manwithnoblog?)

Even EE has it’s issues, the content author still has to provide a semantic document structure for the content in the editable areas. This is where all CMS fail. Have a glance over ATAG, and you will see that in many ways CMS are really not being build with the right degree of “smarts” in them.

Yeah I agree the Cates of the world will need a slow feed of education, over time we can win this one. At least I hope we can.

You are absolutely correct that a large number of web content authors have control, and that CMSs are frequently to blame. (One reason I love ExpressionEngine is because you can lock things down to a very large degree, though I realise EE isn’t the right tool for every job of course.)

I think web developers who care about these things, while having the passion don’t always have the skills to educate the Cates of the world, and more importantly the managers who make the CMS decisions, in a way the real world requires. Sometimes organisations are so entrenched in their own mire that a bulldozer approach, or even a simply enthusiastic one, will meet with walls of resistance. It can take subtlety and time, which means it’s never going to be an easy thing to resolve.

But all the more reason we should be aware of it and supporting each other in order to improve the current state of affairs.

Thanks for the comments. The upgrading of Section 508 will help with US based vendors, however they still for instance have a requirement to meet the local legislation where they are enforcing their software licence, for example in the UK and Australia. So any shying away from WCAG2 compliance is just legal bullet dodging.

Only way to make people aware of the issue in a educational basis is let them experience the issues. Use cheap immersive techniques. A lot of the issues in schools I have found comes down the educators lack of knowledge on the technical aspects of the web to start with. Fix this first and some compliance will follow.

A checklist to help web design firms about WCAG2. Often government agencies have a better understanding of WCAG2 than the design firm they are working with. It’s about sharing the knowledge and helping educate not penalise the firm. A simple list of issues or possible danger design and development areas on their site, could make life a lot easier for all.

Can you be more precise about «a checklist to help an agency understand WCAG 2 requirements»? Can you provide a short example or a sample of such a checklist?

In a mid and long terme perspective, do you think the upgrade of Section 508 towards Levels of conformance A and AA of WCAG 2.0 will have a positive effect on vendors for improving their tools (CMS and so one…)? The second version of the new version of Section 508 is currently under public review in the USA (public review ending by March 7th).

I totally agree with your comment «Often when a graduate enters in to “web agency” land they have no or a very limited knowledge of accessibility». What could be a national and general strategy in improving the awareness on Web accessibility at either public and private schools? Any idea about the three first steps to get started with?

Thanks in advance.

Yves Hudon
Québec, Canada

1. Shithouse
2. Prefer not to say
3. Superb

Just go back to basics is what I want surveyors to do – 1-10 in marketing 101 is I have no idea what to do with the data but our charter states that we must constantly get 9 or 10 out of 10 and if we don’t we must find out why so without understanding what we are asking the respondents to do!

Bet you marketing at your insurance company has paid an external consultant heaps to come up with this “clever questioning” workflow.

Drag and drop is definitely OTT for something like this. And if we compare what a respondent needs to do we have to ask ‘what were they thinking?’:

Normal questionnaire:

1. read the question and identify response needed
2. click on radio button representing best response
3. move to next question

This drag and drop version:

1. get to question and wonder what to do.
2. read the question and figure out response
3. click on card
4. hold down mouse button drag card to drop area of choice
5. let go of mouse button to drop card
   repeat 2-5 for next card

A simple read + respond would have been far quicker and more efficient, but in this case, we have doubled the effort to getting the responses.