It bothers me that so many web developers don’t understand basic accessibility concepts. HTML is a funny thing in the education world. When I studied computer science it was never discussed, but we were expected to use and understand the basics for several assignments. (The same for XML.) Most of the professional web developers I have worked with have never received formal training in HTML. Graduates with degrees in Information Systems may have had some training, but their emphasis is on business, rather than web development. The end result? Most college graduates don’t know much about HTML unless they’ve studied it on their own.

The problem with self-study is you often don’t know what you don’t know. I’ve worked with competent C programmers who write complex applications which output poor HTML. I’ve worked with contract web developers who can’t get beyond tables for layout or overusing the <span> tag to apply presentation better achieved by simpler, more effective means. I’m meeting this week with a local business owner who built his site using a rather expensive WYSIWYG tool. Unfortunately, his site—and oddly, the site of company who developed the tool—doesn’t work properly on either Firefox or Safari. It’s not his fault; he doesn’t know any better.

Across the internet, and particularly with locally developed sites, the biggest problems I see (in no particular order) are:

• Using POST when you should GET. This drives me batty. Several cities in the area have some great features and tools built into their web sites, like dynamic maps that show schools, fire stations, or local construction efforts. At a local university, the majority of their intranet uses POSTs for nearly every user request. There are two major weaknesses of POST: you remove the user’s option of the back button, and make the page unable to be bookmarked. Both are major user expectations and result in major loss of functionality.
• Lack of <label> tags. There are all sorts of reasons to use them, but few people do. It’s been my experience developers who don’t use them have never been taught, but if taught properly are excited to implement them.
• Failure to test in more than one browser. More than one local site performs poorly when I try to access it with my Mac. I always have my PC to fall back on, but why should I need to? This is often reflected in Javascript drop down menus that are poorly implemented, and make the entire site unnavigable.

If you are a manager hiring web developers or evaluating their output, do you know what to look for? How can you tell what quality code is or isn’t? Do you understand advantages of CSS over table-based layout and spacer gifs? I would ague that most managers don’t—that’s why they hire a web developer in the first place. But managers need to be savvy enough to ensure their web developers know the answers to these questions.

Posted in Management, Programming