Should Designers Care About Standards?

Hi Michelle,

I am a web professional, and I would be more inclined to think that designers need to care about standards.

It's an important consideration for both coding (W3C) and accessibility (WAI) standards.

A perfect example is www.corkcity.ie, a website that only works in IE5 and IE6. This website claims to meet a good standard of accessibility standards. In truth it cannot be accessible when it only works in 1 browser type.

I recently completed an audit of 330 Irish websites regarding web standards, the article can be found at the following:
http://www.pvd.ie/article-web-accessibility-in-ireland-2007.html

I broke my audit into 3 separate studies, one involved 193 websites that were originally included in a similar study in 2002. An additional audit was concerning 48 non-profit organisation websites, many of which support people with disabilities, and a final audit of 87 irish web design businesses, as they should be leading by example.

It's a simple decision that does takes time and effort, but you can't gain customers from a website that only works some of the time.

Steve

Have you seen red cardinal's analysis of the Golden Spider nominees?

Michele

Michelle, I did read it briefly, and these so-called award ceremonies have nothing to do with the quality of a website, and are only based on the 'in crowd' of eircom customers.

I found another Irish award site the other day which is done by o2, and called the ability awards (www.theabilityawards.com).

"The O2 Ability Awards are the first Irish business awards for best practice in the employment and inclusion of people with disabilities."

The inclusion of people with disbilities doesn't seem to extend to producing websites that are accessible to people with disabilities.

Steve

It's Michele NOT Michelle

Michele