PowerMapper Software Blog

Well, it’s that time of year again. While I consider myself one of life’s formidably organised Christmas present buyers (I started in August) I seem to fall sadly short when it comes to finding the time to write and post my Christmas cards.

I know that to many, card writing seems an outmoded way of sending Christmas greetings, but for many of my ageing relatives, some of whom now live alone, a hand written card arriving in the mail is still much appreciated. Besides, I still enjoy choosing the cards - I fancy I always find something pretty tasteful!

Recently, a close friend paid me a compliment which really cheered me. Her mother has very limited vision - she's been registered blind for as long as I’ve known her. When choosing her card, I’ve always made certain that the design is simple, bold and very colourful. To me that just makes common sense. Surprisingly, few others do, and my friend tells me that her mother always enjoys my card arriving in the mail - it’s one of the few she can see. 

Since accessibility plays a large part in what we do here, I was pleased to know that I was practising what we preached. 

This posting summarizes some detailed research into the state of government accessibility standards around the world, as of September 2011. Usually these evolve fairly slowly, although the recent Jodhan vs. Attorney General of Canada case may change that (governments don't like being successfully sued by their citizens).

This table shows government accessibility standards, and relevant legislation, in 11 countries:

* Irony Alert: the European resolution insists web site documents should be clear and simple, but kicks off with 22 paragraphs of incomprehensible bureaucratic text. Here's an example:

whereas the internet as a part of society is an instrument for society as a whole, so it is fundamental that technologically neutral access to public information is offered for all groups in society...

The key takeaway from this research: adoption of WCAG 2 is progressing steadily and becoming increasingly important:

• The Australian, French and New Zealand governments have already adopted WCAG 2.
• The Jodhan vs. Attorney General of Canada ruling means the Canadian government is required to adopt WCAG 2.
• UK government sites must comply with either WCAG 1 AA or WCAG 2 AA.
• In the US, Section 508 is being refreshed to harmonize with WCAG 2.
• The European Commission is investigating a move to WCAG 2 as a European government standard, but this is complicated by competing national standards in Germany (BITV) and Italy. 

Edit: originally published November 2010, updated November 2011.

Today is World Stroke Day, which aims to raise awareness of the condition. Earlier this week I saw a conference keynote speech by Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovators Dilemma and a Professor at Harvard Business School.

He introduced himself by apologizing for hesitating while speaking because he'd suffered a stroke a few months earlier. In spite of this he was an engaging speaker - much better than the other professional conference speakers. His points came across so well because he's been thinking about them for decades and backed them up with well-researched evidence. His only concession was asking the audience to interject when he couldn't remember a word, but this made the presentation more interactive and memorable.

At the end of the day having something important to say always beats slick presentation.

The latest quarterly PowerMapper and SortSite maintenance releases are now available.

New features include:

• BlackBerry, Firefox 5 and Chrome 12 added to browser compatibility tests
• Autocomplete for forms
• Enhanced spell checking options

These are available to all customers with active support and maintenance contracts via the Update Watch feature in each application.

SortSite OnDemand has just been updated for all subscribers. New features in this release include:

• Mobile browser compatibility checks for BlackBerry
• Added Firefox 5 and Chrome 12 to browser compatibility tests
• Added self-service password recovery
• Added delete scans and delete scan history
• Added scope option to quick scan on home page

• Expand All button in reports was slow on large sites with lots of errors
• Correctly handle pages that specify different charsets in HTTP headers and META tags
• Handle windows-1256 (Arabic) character set correctly in rules
• Fixed false positives and false negatives

This post is a compilation of disability statistics from government agencies and researchers in the US, UK and Canada. The statistics shown have most impact on website use, and help assess the impact of accessibility problems, in terms of numbers of people affected, and likely commercial impact.

Incidence of Key Disabilities

Reading Difficulties		15%-20% of people in the US have reading difficulties, including dyslexia (source: nih.gov). A recent study by Cass Business School showed that around 20% of UK entrepreneurs and 35% of US entrepreneurs are dyslexic (Bill Gates and Richard Branson are textbook examples).
Color Blindness		8% of males in the US suffer from some form of color blindness, compared to 0.5% of females. (source: aao.org). Incidence of color blindness differs between ethnic groups - from 1% in Eskimos to 10% in Caucasian males.
Dexterity Difficulties		7% of working age adults have a severe dexterity difficulty (source: The Wide Range of Abilities and Its Impact on Computer Technology - Microsoft / Forrester). Severe dexterity difficulties mean users are unlikely to use a mouse, and rely on the keyboard instead.
Difficulty Hearing		4%-5% of people in the US, UK and Canada suffer from difficulty hearing (sources: census.gov, Statistics Canada, UK ONS) Incidence increases sharply in over-60s, with more than 20% of over-75s affected.
Difficulty Seeing		3%-4% of people in the US, UK and Canada can't see well enough to read (sources: census.gov, Statistics Canada, UK ONS) Incidence increases with age, with more than 10% of over-70s affected.

Note: Government statistical agencies produce these numbers from questionnaires, but questions aren't standardised between countries, so figures are not directly comparable from country to country. For example, the questions "do you have difficulty seeing" and "do you have difficulty seeing newsprint" produce different response rates.

Incidence of Disability by Age

Hearing and sight becomes poorer as people get older, but these same people often have large amounts of disposable income and leisure time. This presents particular challenges for web sites selling items which appeal to an older demographic, such as travel and cruises (source: census.gov).

The Design for All Research Group at Middlesex University have produced a report called Declaring conformance on web accessibility asking the question: can website accessibility declarations be trusted?

Sadly the conlusion was no, for both self-declared and thirdy-party certifications, confirming the findings of earlier studies. Using a sample of 100 European government and commercial sites claiming accessibility standards conformance, more than 95% were found to have accessibility issues. The study used our automated tool, SortSite, in conjunction with manual testing performed by the accessibility group at the Shaw Trust (see the report for details on methodology).

The results on accessibility conformance mirror results we see with sites claiming to be valid HTML. About 30% of sites displaying the W3 "Valid HTML" and "Valid XHTML" badges fail validation. Although false validation claims are a smaller proportion than false accessibility claims, it's more surprising since:

• the validation test is completely automated so should be easy to run
• using the W3 "Valid HTML" badge on invalid pages is a breach of the W3's terms of use

In practice ensuring entires sites are accessible and conform to standards is tough to do manually. Even a medium sized site with 10,000 pages takes over 200 days to test manually, assuming an 8 hour working day, and 10 minutes spent testing each page for accessibility and web standards compliance. To underscore this point, the original version of the report was published as an untagged PDF, making it hard to use in a screen reader. A quick run through an accessibility checklist or automated checking tool could have prevented this.

• W3C recommends a maximum of 64 characters for page titles.
• Bing recommends a title between 5 and 65 characters long.
• Yahoo recommends a maximum title length of 67 characters (although this advice is obsolete since Bing now supplies Yahoo's search results) 
• Google don't have any guidance for content publishers, but recommend a maximum title length of approximately 60 characters for Google's own pages.

• Bing - titles up to 70 characters are displayed (previously longer titles were truncated to whole words around 53 characters, but this no longer happens)
• Yahoo - results are now provided by Bing (since mid-2010)
• Google - titles up to 71 characters are displayed, longer titles are truncated to whole words, with the following exceptions:
  
  • Results included from Google patent search - patent title is limited to 71 characters but "Google Patent Search" is added to the end of the 71 character title.
  • The title limit used to be 66 characters, and some old documents remain in the index with titles still truncated at 66 characters

Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Update: Orginally posted April 2010, updated April 2011

We just received this Out of Office reply today, in late February:

Thank you for your inquiry. We are currently Closed for the Christmas holidays and will reply to your enquiry in the new year. A Merry Christmas to all our clients and all the best for 2011

This isn't an isolated example - here's one we got at the end of 2010:

Sorry we are on Holidays and will be back on 23/4/2001

It doesn't look good if your Out of Office reply says you've been on vacation for a decade. It's worse if your Out of Office reply contains an emergency contact email address that doesn't work. None of these examples inspire confidence in the businesses that sent them.

The main problem is a lot of email software makes it hard to see what your auto-reply looks like: you usually don't get an auto-reply if you send yourself an email. Here's how to test it - try sending an email from your personal account to your business account when you turn Out of Office on. Otherwise you might be losing business or alienating customers.

One of the great new features in PowerMapper 5 is the ability to overlay data onto a sitemap. Here's an example using data imported from Google Analytics: 

To overlay data from Google Analytics:

1. Go to the Top Content report for your site in Google Analytics
2. Choose the Export option at the top of the page and choose CSV (this exports only the data shown on screen, which is 10 pages by default, so you may want to increases the number of rows displayed)
3. Save the exported file somewhere on your PC
4. Create a map of your site in PowerMapper Professional
5. Select the Import command from the File menu
6. Choose the file you saved at step 3

Note: not all of the map styles support data overlays - try the Electrum or Isometric map styles first

You're not restricted to Google Analytics - any data that can be exported to a CSV file can be overlaid onto a sitemap. This means you can export from other systems (e.g. Google Webmaster Tools) or make up your own spreadsheets of data you want to visualize. The key requirement is the exported data contains a URL in column 1 - this decides which page a row belongs to. The other columns can contain any numerical data (e.g. Hits, PageRank, Number of Inbound Links, Revenue Per Page)

This is just a flavor of what can be done - if you want a compelling way to visually present site data give the downloadable trial a spin today.