> BBC standards for all
- 13 Jul 07, 02:03 PM
Make yourself comfortable, pull your teddy bear close and hang on tight. We’re off on a scary ride through how the BBC applies accessibility standards to their websites.
The World Wide Web Consortium, more commonly known as W3C, has established web standards. The W3C is a collaboration of the great and the good of the international web community. The standards they have created are generally considered to enshrine best practice for building an accessible website.
So why do the BBC make a point of following these standards? I spoke to Nick Holmes, Team Leader of Client Side Development Team, and “Mr Standards” at the BBC, who told me there were a number of good reasons to follow standards.
Firstly, making the BBC websites accessible to all is the right thing to do. Nick says that, “All site owners have a responsibility to make their websites accessible to all, but this is especially true at the BBC when we must look after all license fee payers. It is one of the main reasons I work here.” It is a sentiment you hear a lot, whoever you talk to at the BBC.
Nick also added that an accessible website can improve usability for everyone, whether they have a formal disability or not. Reading from a monitor is harder on the eyes than reading from print. At the end of a long day, a lot of users can appreciate being able to increase font size on a web page, and give their eyes a bit of a rest.
So how is the BBC handling the web 2.0 accessibility bogey man, AJAX?
AJAX is a way of scripting so that what is displayed on a page can be changed without re-loading it in the browser. Which is a bit abstract. Take a look at this BBC Technology story about the complexity of government websites. On the right hand side you will find the ‘most popular stories now’ feature, where you can see a list of the ‘most read’ or ‘most emailed’ stories. The feature depends on AJAX to switch between each list, displaying it on the same place on the page. It is easy to see how it works if you are sighted – but when using a screen reader, you don’t get the visual cue and can miss that the content has changed.
So we know the BBC uses AJAX. How do they make it accessible to all? “It is a technique known as ‘progressive enhancement’”, says Nick. He went on to explain, “Basically, we make sure all content is accessible. If we want to jazz things up to look prettier, using AJAX to do it, we can – so long as it does not limit anyone’s ability to read the content. With a screen reader, the user will get the ‘most read and ‘most emailed’ lists one after another.”
So there you have it. Whilst the BBC continually look at ways to improve their websites, providing more features and improving usability, none of this is done at the expense of accessibility.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
Comments Post your comment
Are you planning on addressing the fact that many of the your websites, and some of your core templates, use tables for layout? I know that historically it was to ensure compatibility with older browsers, but surely nowadays accessibility is more important?
Complain about this post
Hi Paul,
Ajax is specifically about using scripts to send data to, or grab data from the server, not (as you've asserted) doing user interfaces like the "most read"/"most emailed" lists.
Javascript (of which Ajax is a subset) is used to created the tabbed interface for swapping between the lists but, if you have Javascript disabled, you are presented with both lists. This is the right way to write Javascript, the progressive enhancement that you mention in your post.
Complain about this post
Frankie,
Yes, I agree 100%, in fact our standards say that this is no longer allowed.
In the accessibility standards - 12.2. You MUST use style sheets to control layout and presentation.
As I hope you can appreciate it takes some time to turn round a site the size of the BBC, but the BBC homepage (the UK version) is an indication of where we are going with this.
This also doesn't mean that we drop access to content in older browser, simply that in those cases we drop styling and the javascript interaction layer. This still allows users access to our content - see browser standard, javascript and css standard for more.
Complain about this post
Dear Tim,
You're absolutely right, that isn't AJAX in its strict sense, but often items like this get labelled as such for easy of feature explaination.
AJAX strictly is defined as using XML as the trasferred file also, and in the BBC we often use JSON instead.
Either way a good example of BBC AJAX using is the 'BBC Food Recipe finder', where this ansychronous javascript interaction with a JSON response is built in a prgressive enhancement model of 'you still get all the content you just dont get the enhanced search refinement mechanism if you don't have javascript'.
Hope this is a better example. I think it highlights how AJAX can be used to aid accessibility and usability for some, and yet is built in a fashion that does not dammage the experience or deliver less content for others.
Complain about this post