In the UK in the late 80’s British Telecom carried out one of the single biggest acts of design vandalism when they systematically removed the famous red telephone boxes designed by Gilbert Scott et al.
The justification for this was that they were not accessible to people in wheelchairs. This argument was impossible for people to counter and yet hid the truth – there were other ways of making phone boxes accessible that would not have required a complete change.
People argue, quite rightly, for web accessibility, but what are the results?
If you pass some of the top web sites’ front pages to the W3C validator:
Yahoo – does not validate
Ebay – does not validate
Amazon – does not validate
Google – does not validate.
These have all been around for a while, however. What about the newer breed of online services?
Flickr – does not validate
Digg – does not validate
Del.icio.us – does not validate
Are all these companies wrong, or is there something wrong with current accessibility standards?
In the next part I’ll look at the current state of HTML and argue for a different approach.