The UKs Top 100 Companies: How Compliant are Their Websites? Some are Exceptional, but Too Many Fail Miserably

Top of the league and best site overall was the Daily Mail General Trust (www.dmgt.co.uk). At the bottom of the table, was Diageo (www.diageo.com). The Daily Mail General Trust was also the only site to score 100% for both A / AA accessibility.

LONDON (PRWEB) July 17, 2005 -- [SiteMorse Technologies Limited Over the last year the focus on ensuring that websites are accessible to all has been continually publicised, and by many service providers been seen as their lead sales message. This follows the report late last year from the Disabilities Rights Commission slamming so many sites for having poor levels of compliance. SiteMorse have been reporting on the state of individual sites for over two years now and have seen significant improvements by some -- but top names are still nowhere near good enough.

Overview of findings
Top of the league and best site overall was the Daily Mail General Trust (www.dmgt.co.uk). At the bottom of the table, was Diageo (www.diageo.com). The Daily Mail General Trust was also the only site to score 100% for both A / AA accessibility.

Accessibility Compliance
Results of automated testing against the mandatory requirements of Priority 1 (A) Accessibility: 9 sites scored 100%, 42 sites scored 90%+ and 9 sites achieved a score of less than 1%.

No one at SiteMorse is saying that automated tests are the Holy Grail, simply if you can not pass the automated tests and for instance, have basic descriptions missing on images, how can you hope to achieve compliance? -- regardless of testing methods, manual or automated.

HTML Operating Code Quality (required for browser compatibility)
The site with the lowest number of warnings [HTML standards compliance within the requirements laid down by W3C and IETF was the Daily Mail General Trust (www.dmgt.co.uk) with 1. Diageo (www.diageo.com) had the poorest HTML with over 105,000 failures.

Site Errors
Only one site was error free, LloydsTSB. And for the first time, mail problems have featured in the list of top 10 errors.

Website Performance
30 sites passed all basic speed tests, looking at first page download and simulated as being viewed by users home [56k and ADSL [512k access.

The site with the fastest response time was Barclays (www.barclays.co.uk); British American Tobacco (www.bat.com) had the slowest response time, and was 103 times slower than Barclays.
The site with the fastest download speed was Man Group (www.mangroupplc.com); British American Tobacco (www.bat.com) again had the slowest download speed and was 189 times slower than Man.

SiteMorse offers some basic pointers for those looking to deliver well performing, functioning and compliant websites:

• Ensure that content editors understand the reasons why sites needs to be accessible;
• Do not allow CMS systems to accept images unless tagged;
• Build in basic page reviews;
• Remember that automated tools assist, but they are not the complete answer;
• You must ensure you have pre-release quality assurance procedures in place that test all web templates in both live and off line environment.
• And when contracting for services state specific standards to be achieved (not specifically product based Bobby / SiteMorse) WAI - WCAG P1, etc.;

SiteMorse also stresses that if a site scores 100% in its automated tests, then this indicates that it has not failed the automated tests, however manual testing is also needed to achieve compliance. It seems that many of the organisations highlighted here by SiteMorse have some work to do.

The range of tests [Web Accessibility Initiative WAI that can be completed automatically are limited, 100% compliance with the automated tests does not mean 100% compliance with the requirements.

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