Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.62.0603181025040.8764@ppepc70.ph.gla.a c.uk> from
Alan J. Flavell contained the following:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

I respectfully suggest that you haven't got the faintest idea of how the
real world operates.

I repeat, the company I'm doing some work for is stacked out with work.
It is the visual look of their stuff that is selling their services.
e.g. www.curshaws.com

I've given up on website design, I'm concentrating on scripting now.
While any graphics student with a copy of Dreamweaver can undercut you,
there simply is no point.
--
Geoff Berrow 0110001001101100010000000110
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On Sat, 18 Mar 2006 11:10:02 +0000, Geoff Berrow put finger to
keyboard and typed:

I think, though, that this illustrates one of the biggest differences
between using a website to sell a service and selling a website. Most
web design companies are doing the latter, and aren't really concerned
about how well the site actually performs at the former. That's for
the design agency's customer to worry about, and if they don't care
about accessibility or searchability then there's no reason for their
contractors to do so either.

What tends to happen in reality is that an organisation will
commission a website based on their own ideas of what they want it to
do and how they expect to benefit from it. And the free market ensures
that there are plenty of suppliers out there ready to give them what
they want - however off the wall those ideas and expectations are.
But, typically, after they've got the site and the novelty of having a
great, eye-pleasing design has worn off, the site owner starts to
wonder why it doesn't seem to be doing as well in attracting customers
as they expected. So they start to look for reasons why their
award-winning site is getting so few visitors and even fewer
customers, and usually that's when someone points out that it doesn't
show up in Google for the most common keywords. That's why there's
such a huge market in "search engine optimisation" retro-fitted to
existing sites, often employing dubious techniques and almost always
inflating their costs. And then someone else points out the benefits
of accessibility (and the disbenefits of shutting out paying
customers), and the site owner spends even more money on accessibility
reports and redesigns. And everyone who works in the website industry
- whether site designers, SEO organisations or accessibility
consultants - gets their slice of the pie, and the only losers are the
original clients. And the primary reason they are the losers is
because of their own ignorance of the web in the first place, leading
them to create inappropriate specifications for the first set of
designers.

The only way this will change is if the people paying the piper start
to realise the importance of acessibility in website design. And that
isn't going to happen until they start to see the commercial value in
it - money is the bottom line for clients, not abstract (to them)
concepts of standards compliance.

But the good news is that some site operators are beginning to pick up
on this. In a different context, someone has already mentioned the
discussion to be found on accessifyforum.com at
<http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=4798&start=0>, but if
anyone hasn't already seen it then I'd suggest that you take a look at
the quoted bullet points in the first article. If one big company can
do it, and get such a clear financial and administrative gain, then so
can anyone.

Mark
--
Visit: http://www.CorporateContact.info - phone and email contacts for Amazon, Paypal, eBay and lots of other hard-to-contact organisations
Listen: http://www.goodge.co.uk/files/dweeb.mp3 - you'll love it!

Message-ID: <5snn12tnp9uic1o35aak36o1gjr7m9q7a7@4ax.com> from Stevie D
contained the following:

I don't think that's a smart way of converting someone to your cause ,
Steve.

Would the professional web developers here care to share their
portfolios? C'mon Steve let's see your stuff.
--
Geoff Berrow 0110001001101100010000000110
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On Sat, 18 Mar 2006, Geoff Berrow wrote:

You mean that I'm unaware that 95% of everything is crap? Oh, I
surely /am/ aware of it.

There was a time (call it HTML/3.2, if you like) when I thought
TimBL's original plan had completely lost the race, and the WWW was
due to become just another way to access DTP.

In the meantime, I've seen real improvements towards the original
principles (of making the same information content available in a wide
diversity of situations). Some designers who have started to adopt
strict-ish HTML for content, and CSS for presentation, on the basis of
its benefits in terms of site maintenance overheads, are already
producing more-accessible web sites without really intending it.

Sure, there's a long way to go yet; and, as I learned here recently,
it seems that parts of our education system are teaching the misguided
web techniques of a decade ago, rather than the sound principles which
came earlier - lost ground temporarily - and have now fortunately
regained the upper hand in informed circles. But the moves seem to be
in the right direction, even if there's still a vast market for
snake-oil. I'm hopeful, even if it's taking longer than one might
have hoped. No, I'm not aiming to take it up as a business, either,
but that doesn't mean I can't have an opinion.

In message <d3qn1256u7tmkjbat4gb249qevbphcfjv1@4ax.com>, Geoff Berrow
<blthecat@ckdog.co.uk> writes
Does their professional indemnity pay out, when their clients sue them,
after being sued under the DDA, for having such an inaccessible site?

Frankly, Geoff, I'd be ashamed to admit it, if that site was one of
mine.
--
Andy Mabbett

Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards: <http://www.no2id.net/>

Stevie D <stevie@sjd117.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
Leaving aside all the other debate about accesskeys, the only text
browser I saw (I think it was an elinks version) with accesskey
support did it so *badly* [1] that it was a definite hinderance. Most
ignore them completely.

--
Chris

Geoff Berrow <blthecat@ckdog.co.uk> writes:
It doesn't, but having done a number of layouts in both CSS and table
methods, I think CSS is generally quicker [1] (especially now, when it's
only IE 6 of the commonly-used browsers that supports it badly, but
I'd have said the same two years ago) at getting the same results.

Certainly the last couple of CSS layouts I've done have been:
- design, looking in Galeon (Mozilla-based) as I go.
- check in recent Opera and Konqueror, no changes needed
- open IE 6, and start tweaking the IE-specific stylesheet
- decide whether the problems in IE 5 (Win or Mac) are worth caring about
(usually nothing severe enough left after the IE6 styles are applied)
- hide the entire stylesheet from IE 4 and NS 4.

IE 7 seems to need even less tweaking, which is good.

[1] I used to lose track of row and colspans all over the place when
doing table-based layouts, several years ago.

--
Chris

Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.62.0603181236220.8764@ppepc70.ph.gla.a c.uk> from
Alan J. Flavell contained the following:


That's not what I meant. You need to do the job of a web developer and
liaise with real clients. The real clients will have the same views as
d. As businessmen and women they will be well aware of the law of
diminishing returns. You can argue til you are blue in the face that
they should go for an accessible designer, but while 95% of the sites
they look at are not accessible, the chances are that they will go for
the designer who comes up with the most aesthetically suitable site
/visually/. I'm not saying this is right or proper. It just is.


You're an optimist. www.microsoft.com is transitional. So is
www.intel.com/ and that one doesn't even validate. Try convincing a
businessperson that these companies are wrong.

I believe that, as far as possible, businesses want their web pages to
look like their printed documents. And I don't think CSS positioning
comes anywhere near in terms of ease of use or cross browser
compatibility to give them that.

Furthermore, it's not going to be come popular until it's easy and it
won't be easy while people still have to hand craft code to achieve the
desired results. And that means that authoring packages like Front Page
must be able to produce accessible and standards compliant sites.

Dream on.

You underegg the pudding. The eductation/at least/ five years out of
date and is still based on the prediction that 'software tools' are the
way to go and will be the answer to everything (can you say Front Page,
Outlook, Outlook Express...). The number of ICT teachers who could teach
it is vanishingly small, and is not likely to get any bigger.

It's a valuable opinion and I'm glad you have it. I even agree with
most of it. But I'm a pragmatist.



--
Geoff Berrow 0110001001101100010000000110
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Message-ID: <j3tn12hf42hr7j0n1mapfin5tbvp8flgtc@news.markshous e.net>
from Mark Goodge contained the following:

Indeed. The people I'm working for have already indicated that they'd
like to seek my advice on accessibility. What is really required is
some real teeth to the legislation. This would have a number of
effects. It would provide a huge boost to those companies already
offering accessible design, it would discourage the script kiddies that
give web design a bad name from plying their trade. It may even make
software developers come up with a product that will create accessible
sites by default[1].

The other thing I'd do is come down hard on exam boards, teachers and
lecturers who are still teaching web design as an extension of DTP.

[1]Though I'm not hopeful about this. See my response to Alan
--
Geoff Berrow 0110001001101100010000000110
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Message-ID: <tc9o12lmbahtpq41jr687pmnnvn15dcjl6@4ax.com> from Geoff
Berrow contained the following:

mangled sentence.

The education system is /at least/ five years out of date


--
Geoff Berrow 0110001001101100010000000110
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