July 2005 |
net-guide - the 1st anniversary |
| July marks the first anniversary of the launch
of net-guide. For those of you unfamiliar with net-guide, it
is an accessible search engine and directory. What makes net-guide
unique is that all the websites in the database are checked
for accessibility, and given a rating. |
| When we came up with net-guide, we thought it
was a good idea. However, its success over the last twelve months
has really exceeded all expectation. We’ve included a
quick synopsis of the last year to show you what we mean. |
July 2004 |
| The website was launched and website owners invited
to submit their websites. |
November 2004 |
| Having been submitted to the Royal National Institute
of the Blind (RNIB) for assessment, net-guide received “See
it Right” accreditation for the level of accessibility
it provides. This month also saw net-guide short-listed for
the National Library of the Blind’s prestigious Visionary
Design Award. |
January 2005 |
| Tom Brake MP tabled an Early Day Motion in the
House of Commons to commend net-progress on the work they did
in making net-guide and promoting the issue of website accessibility.
More than fifty MPs signed the Early Day Motion. |
June 2005 |
| net-progress are short-listed for
the RNIB’s “Simply the Best” Award for their
work on net-guide. |
| So that’s it for the
first year, and its been some ride. Most importantly, we know
from the feedback we get that the users like it. In the time
since launch, it has become the number one accessible search
engine (according to Alexa ranking). And we would be lying if
we didn’t say we weren’t proud of what we have done
with net-guide. We plan to develop it further this year, and
have some exciting ideas about how to do so. We always welcome
feedback on net-guide, so if anyone also has ideas on how to
improve it, or on how you think we should develop it, we would
be happy to hear from you. Email us directly on from our contact
page. |
| |
PAS 78 update – Guide to good practice in commissioning
accessible websites |
| Since we last wrote here about PAS 78, the thrust
of the document has changed somewhat. It is now intended to
provide guidelines for commissioning accessible websites. |
| As part of the Review Panel, we’ve been
lucky enough to see the draft document. Feedback on the draft
has now been submitted and it is expected that the PAS will
be formally published in the autumn. |
| Our feeling is that you’ll
probably never need to read another document on commissioning
an accessible website again. PAS 78 looks to be pretty comprehensive.
We’ll be looking forward to the official release. |
| |
Ability Magazine |
| The Summer 2005 issue contains interesting
articles on speech recognition, sign language avatars and ATM
machines. It also features the first Site Inspection feature
written by net-progress. The article looks at websites in the
travel sector. |
| We have a limited number of hard
copies available to send out. If you are interested in a free
copy, please email us via our contact page. Don’t forget
to include your snail mail address! |
| |
Site Inspection – plane, train and
automobile |
| To mark our appearance in Ability
Magazine, this month our Site Inspection continues the holiday
theme and looks at the websites of British Airways, Virgin Trains
and Avis Car Hire. |
| |
| British Airways |
Quality: 76
Presence: 55
Accessibility: 71
Overall: 69 |
| The quality of the British Airways
website is very good. The website is relatively error-free,
although it was penalised for using pop-up windows without warning
the user. Whilst the navigation is heavily reliant on JavaScript
to work, alternatives are provided. Presence is above average.
Although search engine performance is patchy for generic search
terms, the website has a high level of incoming links. The website
clearly has some issues regarding accessibility, most notably
concerning checking flight and ticket availability but to the
credit of British Airways, they have a statement recognising
this and details of what they are doing to addressing them. |
| |
| Virgin Trains |
Quality: 50
Presence: 66
Accessibility: 63
Overall: 58 |
| The quality of the Virgin Trains
website is average. The biggest issue affecting this is page
size. More than 85% of the pages are slow, and whilst a majority
are only a small amount over the size limit, the cumulative
effect may cause website abandonment. The website has an excellent
presence, performing well in the search engines and in terms
of incoming links. One notable issue here, however, is that
on one of the search engines tested, the Virgin website was
outperformed by a “hate site”, which could clearly
impact upon traffic levels and brand reputation. As with British
Airways, Virgin have an accessibility statement that recognises
there are issues to be resolved. These principally regard key
functionality like searching for train times, which is JavaScript
dependent. Unfortunately, the statement adds that Virgin hope
to have made those changes by October 2004. That they haven’t,
and that the statement has not been updated, fails to send the
positive message that they intended to. |
| |
| Avis |
Quality: 42
Presence: 54
Accessibility: 52
Overall: 47 |
| The Avis website has a below average
quality rating. There is no one thing in particular effecting
quality, although there is a fairly high proportion of deep
pages that can cause problems for visitors orientating themselves
on the website. Unusually, there is no link to a privacy policy
on the home page. The website also uses frames, which affects
search engine performance. For example, the top result in Google
for the word “avis” is in fact a pop up page that
has no navigation. Presence is fairly good, with a fair performance
in the search engines, however search engine saturation is surprisingly
low. Home page Accessibility also leaves something to be desired,
with key functionality being JavaScript dependent, and also
a high number of images missing alt tags. |
| |
| That’s all for this month’s net-update.
If there’s a specific issue you’d like to see covered
next month, please let us know. |
| Ends |
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