don’t tell me you’re gonna be off selling expensive seats now?

Problem is this is Ireland… Duplicitous… A country where politicians had money ‘resting in their account’ and crying over the evil developers making wealth whilst swigging beer with them at the galway races…

Culture I’m afraid….its not in our nature to pin a badge on someone based on thier work and skill….

We don’t do style or chique….but we sure know how to charge for it! Submit the sites to a real award site online… for the gong…it’d be worth the travel to london or new york.

Excellant work there… I was nominated for one of those in 1997 or 98… I was a novice then and to be honest wondered what all the fuss was about… the answer of course was to make up the numbers so that badges could be stuck on the sites who were gonna win anyway…

Of course nominated for TOP COMMERCIAL in the days of altavista when you could ‘doorway’ your way to bucket loads of visits was pretty simple stuff… and oddly the client site earned more that year through their site than they did through any of their outlets on the high street…

Anyway excellant stuff… keep up the good work, and since I’m finished with my current client site (almost 2 years working on that) I’ll be out there mooching customers in a week or so… no doubt at loggerheads with your good self lol

Mickelodian

Excellent research lads!

Rgds
Richard

Cheers!

Specifically he was talking about public sector categories I think which is so true. I heard lots of ads recently for revenue.ie so I went through the laborious steps of registering. Eventually after receiving two separate codes in the post I managed to log in. I tried to cancel a tax credit I am no longer eligible for. Yeah you guessed it I have to put that in writing and send it to them.

http://www.pvd.ie/article-web-accessibility-in-ireland-2007.html

In addition, I completed 2 further surveys which included:
* An audit of 48 Irish non-profit organisation websites, of which many are focused on supporting the needs of disabled people
* An audit of 87 Irish web design firms and freelance web designers

Everyone is free and welcome to comment. But I do choose who to respond (or link ) to

Rgds

Richard

I have basically abstained from responding to you. But you really seem to be missing the woods for the tress. I haven’t been heckling any entity other than the Golden Spiders. Why? because this awards ceremony is picked up in the mainstream media and the public are being duped into believing that the winners are the best websites in Ireland. If you agree with this then I am quite happy to be ‘anal’.

By all means post any better suggestions for educating the public to what a quality website is.

BTW any reason you don’t give your URL?

Rgds

Richard

I just can’t understand how some fanatical standards (or recommendations, which ever you prefer) supporters get so wound up about these awards. If there is truth in what you say that… “It’s been a generally accepted fact for years by the most talented and experienced commercial Web designers and developers in Ireland that the Golden Spiders do not represent the best of Irish websites” then why all the heckling? who CARES about the damn awards!!

Not, I’m sure, if those who receive the accolades are actually deserving of them. Which I think is the whole point being made.

You’re clutching at straws here Colm. It’s been a generally accepted fact for years by the most talented and experienced commercial Web designers and developers in Ireland that the Golden Spiders do not represent the best of Irish websites. And those of us who are trying to make a living from this industry, which is littered with clueless cowboys, are quite passionate about its integrity. Sorry if you disagree.

Someone above mentioned that meeting standards is assumed in most industries – I wonder if it’s pushed in the same hostile manner?

You’re saying that the reaction is over the top and that you always ‘validate’ your sites. Perhaps you should ask yourself why you bother.

why are you all worked up about the spiders anyways – their competition, their rules right? regardless of claims.

You say you code to standards and that we need them. That was not the point. The point was that the cream of the Irish crop were not.

To that end the WAI advocate real-life testing as part of the development process and any subsequent accessibility testing procedures.

You could fail 3.2 but still be WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 compliant.

Now, I’m not suggesting ignoring standards by any means, I’m a strong advocate of them, but accessibility and standards don’t go need to go hand in hand and it’s very important to take a pragmatic sensible look at accessibility.

Accessibility meauring tools are useful but only when armed with information and real world knowledge.

I was suggesting that you test the W3C’s site http://www.w3.org too, to see how it fared. I don’t think it would pass many of those tests, despite being considered, presumably, very well executed from a code POV. It would be useful to see the results of it, at any rate.

I agree with what you say, but when you have 128 pages to test it is not possible to use considered methods. My preference would be to test each site thoroughly in a text browser such as Lynx.

I can tell you that a number of accessible websites (i.e. as per automated checks) are extremely poor in terms of contextual awareness of HTML elements (e.g. labels containing 2 inputs).

I’m not too sure I understand your opening suggestion. What exactly do you think should be done?

While standards are good this is a very brute force method of testing and doesn’t allow for considered analysis. Many sites that are valid may be poorly marked up and many sites that are invalid may be doing so in a perfectly sensible manner. That issue is even more important in accessibilitity issues, where context is important and automated tool cannot evaluate true accessibility.

Many of the sites in the Golden Spider awards are pretty poor. Most industries have their various token awards that noone takes seriously. The Irish magazine industry has numerious awards ceremonies that are dubious at best.

Personally, I think people shouldjust forget about the Golden Spiders and get on with producing good work.

6 sites out of the entire lot. 6. That is a disgrace and is setting the Irish Internet sector back rather than helping it grow.

I really enjoyed your final analysis piece. That encapsulates everything you were trying to show. It appears that the goldenspiders is clearly not about what they are making it out to be.