accessibility and web standards

[min8]

Hi all,

Apologies in advance! Can anyone clarify some few pointers I have? Here goes...

1. Can anyone explain, in a sentence, the difference beteen web accessibility and web standards?

2. Is a site Web Standard compliant if it uses the occasional <br /> tag in its source code? What about the align attribute?

3. Correct me if i'm wrong, but an accessible website does not technically meant a web standard compliant one, no? yes?

4. And finally, can a site that uses tables for layout still be accessibile and Web Standard compliant (with regards to the W3C)?

Sorry about all the questions, and thanks for any replies!

min8

[DaveSW]

1. Can anyone explain, in a sentence, the difference beteen web accessibility and web standards?
Accessibility is the ability of different devices to access the information on your page, wheras standards give 'expected' appearances/behaviours for different elements/properties.

2. Is a site Web Standard compliant if it uses the occasional <br /> tag in its source code? What about the align attribute?
If it doesn't validate it's not standards compliant. http://validator.w3.org - it depends what standard you were validating to.

3. Correct me if i'm wrong, but an accessible website does not technically meant a web standard compliant one, no? yes?
An accessible website would normally be standards compliant because if it's not valid it may be unreadable in certain user agents (browsers).

4. And finally, can a site that uses tables for layout still be accessibile and Web Standard compliant (with regards to the W3C)?
Yes. Charles used to have an example of one of these, but it would have to be properly marked up with th's etc. However some particularly old user agents may ignore tables, so if you really wanted full accessibility then it probably wouldn't be the way to go.

[David Harrison]

Originally posted by min8
1. Can anyone explain, in a sentence, the difference beteen web accessibility and web standards?The standards say "you should code like this and not use any depreciated or proprietary markup" (not really an accurate description but close enough), accessibility is concerned with making sure that as many users as possible can access your site.

Originally posted by min8
2. Is a site Web Standard compliant if it uses the occasional <br /> tag in its source code? What about the align attribute?It all depends what standard your using, <br /> is acceptable in all XHTML versions, align is acceptable for all transitional DTD's (eg. HTML 4.01 Trans, XHTML 1.0 Trans). align is depreciated though and has been dropped from the latest standard of XHTML 1.1.

Originally posted by min8
3. Correct me if i'm wrong, but an accessible website does not technically meant a web standard compliant one, no? yes?I suppose not, but it can't hurt your chances if you have valid mark-up and CSS in the first place can it?

Originally posted by min8
4. And finally, can a site that uses tables for layout still be accessibile and Web Standard compliant (with regards to the W3C)?They can be web-standards compliant sure, but no it can't be accessible. There's no excuse for using tables for layout, the W3C strongly recommends that you don't because some screen readers can't handle side by side text properly. Tables should be used for tabular data only, that is what they are for.

Why do I get the feeling that your web-site uses tables, <br /> and align in it's markup and you want to see whether it's still accessible? If that is the case then maybe you should just post a link to your site and ask what's wrong with it? In any case, I think you have a few things to work on. ;)

Edit: Damn.

[DaveSW]

lol. Now we can disect each other's explanations... :D