The Register reports on the new UK government Illustrated Handbook for Web Management Teams launched last week. Despite some questionable impositions like the mandatory use of frames on homepages and would-you-believe-it the requirement to use HTML 4.01 to ensure compatibility with all browsers, (Have you found a browser yet that won’t happily digest carefully written XHTML?) the framework is generally well meaning and offers reasonable advice.
One suggestion within the document is to save money on usability testing by getting students and family involved. I can see how that is actually a great idea for certain sites that are working to a budget, but if those people aren’t your target audience you can’t make them pretend that they are. In usability testing you need simple, honest reactions. Anything else and you’re kidding yourself.
It’s not the most coherent of documents, not is it technically accurate to the extent it should be, but it would seem it’s heart is in the right place.
Someone else who has her heart in the right place is “Human Centred Design specialist” (I ask you) Nancy Perlman. However, she seems to be making some pretty bizarre comments to El Reg …
... if one were to adhere strictly to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Accessibility Initiative guidelines cited in the document, one would be building an unusable, perhaps even inaccessible, site. Some of the W3C guidelines suggest the use of features that are either inconsistently supported across browsers and assistive technology, such as access keys, or are not found to be entirely helpful by the user group they purport to help, such as tab indexing.
As I say, her heart is in the right place. Pity about her brain.
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