Jack Russell Terrier UK appears in .dotnet Magazine

The site has been featured in the August edition of .dotnet magazine in their accessibility test feature.

Overall, the site came out very well with only a couple of minor points higlighted. Ironically, the main issue that was highlighted in the article has since been addressed!

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Nomensa's Alastair Campbell tackles www.jack-russell-terrier.co.uk, and stumbles upon a rather uncommon accessibility issue

Jack-russell-terrier.co.uk has been Matt Randle's labour of love for a few years, and it's a well-structured, CSS-based site. There are a few aspects I would highlight, such as flexible layout and the use of headings, but one item caught my eye that isn't widely known.

There are a few checkpoints within the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505)', that state "until user agents... " to provide a limit on how long the guideline should exist. One example is a checkpoint that says: "Until user agents handle empty controls correctly, include default, place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas".

You can see where this has been implemented on the Jack Russell site in the contact form - each input has text added. However, this checkpoint is out of date. It was originally included because a screen reader and browser combination in the 90s didn't notice text areas unless they already had content.

These days, adding content to an input is likely to do more harm than good. For example, when testing a utilities site, a screen reader user accidentally paid £500 instead of £5 because the input already had '00'. Thankfully, he was using dummy data.

So, which of the checkpoints should we ignore? When auditing sites, I will ignore these, because the technologies used now are not affected by the issues:

• 10.5: include non-link, printable characters (surrounded by spaces) between adjacent links.
• 1.5: provide redundant text links for each active region of a client-side image map.
• 10.3: Provide a linear text alternative for all tables that lay out text in parallel, word-wrapped columns.

Unfortunately, most of the automated accessibility checkers still test for these checkpoints, so you sometimes see developers doing strange things such as hiding pipe symbols between navigation links, rather than putting them into a list.

In the case of the Jack Russell site, rather than adding pre-filled text, it would be better to add <label> elements to what are visually the labels, so that each bit of text is tied to its input: <label for="email">Your Email Address *:</label> <input name="email" id="email" type="text"> You can read more on accessible forms at www.webstandards.org/learn/tutorials/accessible-forms

Alastair Campbell is a founding member of Nomensa (www.nomensa.com) and is director of user experience. He has helped British Gas, the AA and DirectGov (to name but a few) assess the levels of accessibility of their websites and implement a successful user experience.

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