The HiFi Design with CSS session generated a fair amount of shock and awe at this year’s SXSW conference. The CSS Zen Garden continues to raise awareness of the amazing possibilities that web standards present. Accessibility advocates are awed by the beauty of standards based design and simultaneously shocked that so many leading designers are citing accessibility as one of their primary goals. Suddenly accessibility is cool (and beautiful too). It’s every accessibility advocate’s dream come true, except some of us seem to be sleeping in.
Jeff Coburn at Curb Cut Learning is getting the sense that the non-profit/educational community is falling behind the corporate world when it comes to accessible web design. I would add local government to his list of laggards.
While there are now numerous examples of major corporate websites adopting web standards, there’s nothing to keep the public/non-profit sector from following suit. Web Standards are for everyone. With a bit of education, advocacy, and training, non-profits can easily reap the benefits of standards in the same way the corporate sector is.
It seems quite obvious that corporations are not adopting web standards because of some innate sense of social responsibility. Businesses are attracted to standards because of the many cost related benefits they offer. Standards offer lower cost of maintenance, ease of implementation, and better cross-platform support. It just so happens that increased accessibility is a byproduct of using the most recent technology.
Non-profits and government agencies should realize they can lower their costs and improve the quality of their websites by embracing standards and by rejecting authoring tools that mangle code. In most parts of the world non-commercial agencies are under increased pressure to do more with less. What better way to economize than to make a commitment to standards?
Has your educational, non-profit, or government agency made a commitment to standards and accessibility? If so, leave a comment telling us about your experience. And by all means, link to your site.
I’ll go first, with a site that I know very little about. The University of Flordia faired very well during this year’s “Accessibility Shootout”. It’s quite a nice site that is primarily standards based, but also makes great use of Flash in a non-obtrusive way. This site is really very well done.
University of Florida
We’ve made a committment to standards & accessibility, mostly because of my own persistence 🙂 at Pierce College in Washington. (forgive the flash navigation, it’s a legacy piece.)
I guess I’ve been lucky; I picked up the standards/accessibilty bug of my own accord, and I’ve had good support from my boss and most of my internal clients.
Here’s what I see as the two biggest problems facing educational sites: fewer resources and distributed site development.
Colleges and universities, generally, have far smaller Web development staffs than your average corporation. Our school serves something on the order of 30,000 individuals (10k FTE, IIRC) every year, and I’m our Web staff, along with a part-time assistant: for design, development, maintenance, and strategy. So when you have a tiny staff trying to fill the needs of a large community, there often isn’t time to climb the learning curve of standards & accessibility. (The same is true to some extent for non-profits; before this, I worked for a local non-profit — the Web piece of my job was about 1/4.) That, and even when you have time to learn, it’s hard to find time to put that into practice, esp. at first when you’re converting big chunks of Web.
This factor combines with the very nature of the educational enterprise — in a lot of schools, many people are creating and maintaining Web sites, few of them with any depth of training. (It can be like the Wild West!) Some schools are turning to CMS’s to rein in their development and to provide a common foundation; unfortunately, it can be hard to find a CMS that provides standards & accessibility compliance out of the box.
One positive thing that I’ve noticed lately is that the University Web Developers list seems to be getting a lot more traffic from people looking to go the standards/accessibility/CSS route.
I wish I knew whether going to the more “modern” mode of development had saved us any bandwidth — we started going there several years ago (mid-2001), and I wasn’t keeping good stats reports then. I will say that it eases some tasks, more with sub-sites than the megalith which is the site’s core. (I was able to covert our school’s lit mag site to colors matching the new cover in about an hour…and that included picking the colors out of the cover that I wanted. The only bit that isn’t done is changing the tab borders.)
okay, so that was a long response…I suppose it’s something that’s been eating at my mind for a while.
(oh, nice site, too. I found you by way of the CSS Vault, and I’ll definitely be adding this to my aggregator.)