The Failed Commitments posting at the W3 points out that maintaining quality is even harder than developing it.

If you want to maintain the quality of sites you have to find a development/publishing/testing process to verify your work without crippling you ability to add and modify content.

If you cannot open notepad, write sematically correct and accessible html to the latest standards as set out by W3C, which is by the way xhtml/css, then go learn your trade correctly.

The fault here is with the ‘Goverment’ run training courses heavily influenced by the likes of microsoft, one of the major culprits in problems created in web-development. Box Model anyone? (and thats just for starters – what a nightmare).

People though it seems are learning and companies like the above mentioned are having to really sort themselves out. Microsoft has just seen a major in house reshuffle over Vista. Not going to help them with macs now Operating on pc based intel hardware.

Major drives in open source browsers such as Firefox have gone a long way to improving standards and microsofts I.E. has been forced to follow suit. They had no choice, people were switching to stand alone browsers that worked and they could help develop.

I’m waiting for some disabled groups to take class actions against these non-compliant/non-accessible sites, it will be most fun to see what happens…

From personal experience I know that a lot of time and effort has gone into raising awareness of Accessibility, Web Standards et all from a grassroots level but the problems come with gaining buy-in at a Senior Management level.

There is simply a lack of knowledge and awareness at this level, particularly of the fundamentals of the web as an information delivery platform. My suggestion would be for Government Senior Management to work with groups such as Wasp to gain the awareness that is needed from an authoritive source, rather than the renegade junior web developer (i.e. Me :-)).

I called them as contacting the webmaster from the site is no easy feat (strike one right there). I waited on hold for 45 minutes or so and ended up after all that having to leave a voice mail message. This was all on my dime, by the way.

As it turned out, they never responded to me or fixed the problem. And what was this big problem? Well, they have some checkboxes and I asked them if they could put the accompanying text inside the label so I could click on the text instead of having to target the little checkbox with my mouse. I asked for too much perhaps.

For a site that is supposed to comply with Section 508 guidelines, the fact they didn’t act on my rather simple request is a real travesty.

The point: Governments [al of them probably] can sure talk-the-talk, but they don’t seem very capable of walking-the-walk.