SiteMorse would fail their own accessibility test
SiteMorse, the self-styled “global leaders in accessibility testing”, have published yet another self-aggrandising article condemning their perceived competition for failing to meet what they consider to be necessary accessibility criteria.
In an article of 7 June, entitled How can everyone else be expected to achieve website accessibility, if the experts can’t?, they claim:
Once again we saw poor performance from a number of the service providers. Following on from the previous report, RedAnt again came top with Fhios bottom, every page on the fhios’s site failed accessibility A and AA tests, the Disability Rights Commission Site had even more images without alt tags, failing both A / AA again (even after their own damning report at the end of last year). The RNIB showed improvement since last time.
Leaving aside for the moment that RedAnt are SiteMorse’s designers, and in actual fact would fail on 17 separate checkpoints were anyone to audit their site properly, this is not the first time that SiteMorse have made wild claims about the lack of accessibility of other organisations in the field. In fact, their whole marketing strategy appears to consist of bad-mouthing their colleagues in the accessibility arena – and they are not making any friends in the process.
How to shoot yourself in the foot
Unfortunately, SiteMorse’s sole means of testing seems to be their woefully inadequate automated tool. Now, it’s all very well getting on your high-horse about poor accessibility when your own house is in order, but I wonder whether SiteMorse would like to explain:
- The 11 validation errors that their ‘article’ contains (Priority 2 fail)
- Acronyms are not expanded, e.g. RNIB (Priority 3 fail)
- The incredibly poor choice of link text (as per checkpoint 13.1, link text should “clearly identify the target of each link” – now ask yourself, does “which had one of the best ever results for a first time site test” really indicate to you that that sentence is actually a link to the GAWDS site? Thought not…) – another Priority 2 fail
- The incorrectly marked-up bulleted lists, where instead of the semantically correct
<ul>element, they have chosen to use an invalid bullet character and line breaks – a third Priority 2 fail for what is really only a very short page
Those who take accessibility seriously will of course know that these errors (particularly the last two) could potentially make using the SiteMorse site harder than it has to be… but of course, those who take accessibility seriously are unlikely to ever need or want to visit the SiteMorse site, as they have proved themselves again to have a hypocritical approach to business, preferring to damn the opposition rather than work with the rest of the accessibility community.
Further reading
- Isolani has a thoughtful article on why, for him, SiteMorse fails due diligence (his previous article, SiteMorse gets nasty, accessibility is the victim is also well worth a read)
- Accessify Forum discusses the last SiteMorse report
- The DRC doubt SiteMorse’s findings in an article on Ability Magazine
Filed under: Accessibility.
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Previously: Today is a black day
Next: Oxton bows out // a replacement forum
Comments
- Richard Conyard
- 1155 days ago
- A Red Ant, or at least my response to this can be found on the accessify forums.
- #1
