I was very impressed to read WordPress’s accessibility out of the box. There are a few issues to iron out before AAA is reached but that’s pretty good going I think you’ll agree! So if you are looking for a blogging engine or a simple CMS go for WordPress.

I’m a strong proponent of web accessibility standards and happened to stumble across the Guild of Accessible Web Designers during my travels around the wibbly web.

Their mission statement is “Promoting a vision of the future that assumes accessible web design to be, relevant, obtainable, and not at odds with successful business practice or good visual and usable design.”

A noble aim but their website isn’t exactly inspiring design wise. As they are trying to dispel the false belief that an accessible website can’t be pleasing to the eye you might have thought they’d spend a little more time on their website design? There are even formatting issues in Internet Explorer 7.

It does however look like members know their stuff and I’m pleased to see membership is selective - you must prove your accessibility expertise before joining.

I posted not long ago on Blogging Brum about a potential new business directory for Birmingham I heard about. It’s now gone live and I hate to say it but I was rather underwhelmed by the online launch.

I’ve had a few comment exchanges with Jamie Morden who is Digital Media Manager for MyBrumTV and he asked for my opinion on the site. Well as I’m always bleating on about the social media phenomenon and I believe the MyBrumTV launch is very closely linked to this I thought why not write a blog critique of the site and allow Jamie a right to reply.

There are two aspects to the critique as I see it. Firstly the actual site, what it achieves and how it achieves it and secondly with regard to the online launch and methods used here.

The website itself it a pleasant design and is pretty simple to navigate. However the filmstrip style menu is going to be outgrown very quickly if this directory takes off – I can’t see people scrolling along 100’s of companies or categories. I’d love to see some kind of AJAX style navigation here to allow you traverse the directories quickly and easily (obviously with some non-AJAX fallback to ensure accessibility isn’t compromised). I feel it just needs some more excitement about it that draws you into the site. The introduction movie on the homepage I really don’t feel is going to be watched by people – if they are coming to a business directory they are just going to search. It’s the same thing for most homepage text people are looking for something specific and therefore don’t read what they just see as promotional blurb.

This brings me onto a search feature which is currently not available. As there aren’t a huge amount of companies online now I can perhaps understand why they haven’t rolled this out as yet but it will be essential in the future.

The company listings rely nearly entirely on the videos produced and although this is MyBrumTV’s selling point I don’t agree that videos should replace other textual content rather it should complement it.

Certainly the video can be used to sell a service but it you can’t impart all the important information about a product or service through a 5 minute video – I believe it’s more of a glossy finish – the final hard sell.

A contact form for each company listing is provided which is good however I’d group contact us (address and telephone) and more information (the actual online contact form) under the same tab “Contact us” as really the form is another way of contacting the company. I was expecting a text description or FAQs under the “More information” tab. I’m not sure how the comments tab is going to work as currently there is no way of posting comments yourself – obviously a function to follow.

Video quality I’ve found to be very good (although this certainly isn’t my speciality) and I’ve had no problem with streaming issues etc. From a brochure perspective I believe they do their job.
Code quality on the MyBrumTV isn’t bad although there are still areas to tighten up with the site currently failing a XHTML validator.

My main issue with the website is the lack of content. I’m talking here about text content which is of the upmost importance to the visitor and essential for accessibility. I don’t think you can assume visitors are going to play every video for every company listing in a category. Therefore the copy should work alongside to give the visitor a taster and entice them to watch the video. As the website is a business directory and therefore going to rely heavily on the World’s most important blind user - Google - this really is a trick they are missing. To this end, in addition to accompanying text copy, I believe the alternative content for the video is essential – each movie has a script so why not provide this in the alternative description for the flash?

Search engine optimisation is virtually nonexistent on the website save some hidden keyword spamming at the bottom of the page – tut tut. I really think a review is needed here as this is only going to get you penalised by Google! The most important element on the page (the page title) is consistently “MyBrumTV” throughout the website not describing the page content at all. The lack of content on the site is going to cause the search engines to see virtually blank pages everywhere.

I understand completely that the work on this website is ongoing and it’s not the finished article. Jamie himself said the site is launching in phases with the main launch in September so please don’t take this as a hatchet job on the website just some suggestions how I feel it could improve.

I’d also like to just mention the launch of the site as I believe this can be vital to building an initial visitor base.

I certainly can’t comment with regard to offline promotion of the MyBrumTV website other than the free newspaper that dropped through my door that alerted me to its existence (I don’t read much traditional press at all). However as this is an online project I was surprised to find that there is virtually nothing happening online at all.

Perhaps this initial launch of MyBrumTV is a beta version to be tested and built on? In which case I could perhaps understand the muted buzz online. However it’s not promoted as such and in any case I really think even websites in beta should try to promote themselves in some way to attract visitors to beta test or start laying the groundwork.

A good example of this Odadeo which is currently in private beta (ask for an invitation) – an excellent idea of a social media site for Dads! Even though in private beta the wheels are already moving with regard to making people aware of the site.

The MyBrumTV website certainly has many sources open to promote itself and improve its offer. Being a local website means it can lean on local community to promote it – it’s the only reason I posted about it in the first place. Having this local community means it makes it easier to promote to this restricted location. Also it’s going to take time to get the site visible online in the meantime why not lean on existing applications available such as YouTube?

Directories are ten a penny online so they need to distinguish themselves online be it with functions not available elsewhere (not sure videos are enough alone) or by attracting a website community.

I’m sure there are other things in the pipeline – Jamie mentions social networking in a way that suggests the site will feature social features in some way. However if this is the case why launch with a site that doesn’t have any of the more flashy features? Web users are fickle so if they don’t find anything on a site that excites them getting them to come back is more difficult than getting them in the first place.

Maybe I’m wrong and the slow burn is the effect they are after but I would try to create as much of a bang for the launch for a site like this…it’s been more of a pop. It feels premature if I’m honest.

Don’t get me wrong I really think if done well a local community business directory could work well (I’m not aware of any that do this well) especially with Google’s move to more and more local results.

At the end of the day there has to be a big carrot to get people to navigate away from their Google homepage to an alternative way of searching for businesses.

Perhaps another sign of a disjointed online and offline approach here is that there is no mention of how to get a business into the directory on the website. Obviously all approaches to businesses has been offline so far.

It’s an online project so why not embrace the many varied online tools to make your life easier and you website more popular? In addition online promotion is so much cheaper than offline – it’s a no brainer really.

There has been news lately about Microsoft and GMail Captchas being broken and with figures of 60-80% success rates by spambots is certainly looks like the current method of blocking automated access is going to need a replacement soon.

Now this security image technology has long been the bane of visually impaired users with captchas effectively denying access to large areas of the web. It’s just a small part of the whole accessibility debate.

A new service called IMAGINATION adds another level to the captcha idea and is being touted as captcha 2. IMAGINATION uses a picture of a distorted image and radio button list of options describing the image, these options are also in an image. This would require the recognition of the image and then the text options available which makes things a lot harder for the spambot and unfortunately still keeps the visually impaired out.

I wish I could come up with a solution to this issue but the honest truth is I can’t. Even the odd site that provides an alternative audio captcha isn’t a perfect solution and as voice recognition software is very mature I’m sure that this could be an alternative way in for the spambots.

The only option I can see that satisfies both blocking automated processes and follows accessibility guidelines is the kind of question and response architecture. In it’s simplest form this could be “What is the colour of the sky?” - most users of course will be able to answer “Blue” and be let through. However this does leave the door open to bots being able to lean on the power of the net to answer the questions.

So where to go from here? Well this entire problem stems from the anonymity of the net so the obvious solution is to provide an independently authenticated identification system that could be used in a similar fashion to OpenID.

Being identified on the net solves a wide range of issues being talked about at the moment but are people willing to lose their anonymity though?