Accessites

I should really have mentioned this earlier, or at least more than in passing, but I'm one of the Team Members of Accessites.

The obvious next question is who are they and what do they do? Well, the mission of Accessites is to showcase and provide awards recognition for good quality well designed sites that not only look good, but are accessible. Both criteria are mandatory.

Each site that is looked at has to pass certain initial criteria before it will even get as far as the grading process. Part of this includes an automated accessibility test. Because we are aware that automated testing cannot test everything, may miss errors and may generate false positives, a site which does not achieve all the automated priority 1 tests may still be accepted into the full grading process, if the failure is appropriately justified.

The full grading process is slightly different. Each site is checked by more than one team member against the publicly available checklist in order to manually test accessibility, check the functions available on the site and assess the site's design strengths. The overall grades are then averaged to give a final score. Note that the initial criteria pay no part in this overall score - only the manual checks count here.

If your site was good enough, you may end up in the showcase with one of the different levels of award - from the 'Notable Universal Design Award' all the way up to the 'Timeless Universal Design Award'. So far I'm not aware of anything scoring better than 'Quality Universal Design' (the second level) but there will be sites up there which are better. If you're the person or team behind one, submit it!.

We know we're not perfect, we know we will make mistakes, and we will admit it when we do. What we are trying to do is to learn and improve. Feel free to contact us if you feel we're getting it wrong.

We're also interested if anyone would like to help...

We're always interested in meeting new people who'd like to be Team Access Members. If you have what it takes, a well-rounded sense of design, and a proper site construction ethic, mixed with a good amount of knowledge and desire, please be sure you make Contact to let us know. Not just anyone will be invited, and openings may be very limited, but if you don't tell us, we will never know.