Philippine Web Accessibility Group

This year’s “Disabled Friendly Website Awards” were held last July 10 at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) as part of the very first Philippine Web Design Conference spearheaded by the newly formed Philippine Web Designers Organization (PWDO).

The Philippine Web Accessibility Group through its president and MCCID Training Director Jojo Esposa and the National Council on Disability Affairs presented the plaques of appreciation to the following recipients:

1. www.philcecnet.ph – Official Philippine E-center Community Portal of the National Computer Center represented by Ms. Eloisa San Mateo (Government)
2. www.blinding-light.com – Personal Website of Ms.Miko Reznor (Anna Monica Esguerra)
3. www.lilianefoundationphil.org – Official Website of Liliane Foundation Philippines represented by Sis. Agnetia Naval, National Coordinator (Non-government Organization)
4. webstandards.raquedan.com – Web Standards Website of Regnard Raquedan (Personal Website)

They all received a plaque of appreciation courtesy of the NCDA. Incidentally, the official website of Liliane Foundation Philippines was designed by an MCCID alumnus Kerwin Tamanu. He also currently works in that organization.

The Philippine compliance in terms of web accessibility is considered as the strongest in Asia as revealed by the research conducted by the University of Worcester in United Kingdom.

Entitled, “Global e-government Web Accessibility: An Empirical Examination of EU, Asian and African Sites”, the study cited the Philippines as one of the strongest outlooks among Asian countries of promoting disability access. First, the government both signed and ratified the UN Treaty. Second, the federal law section (RA7277) “the Magna Carta for the Disabled Persons,” specifically prohibits discrimination against disabled persons.

Using appropriate tools in analyzing sites based on Web Content Accessibility Guideline 1.0, the researchers used TAW software product. It tests checkpoint levels A (priority 1), AA (priority 2) and AAA (priority 3). For each of these checkpoints TAW provides a detailed report of both automatic and human review issues. Automatic issues are those errors that the software has checked based on the WCAG guidelines.

The research indicates that

All of the countries have signed and/or ratified the UN Treaty on Rights of Disabled. However, compared to the EU countries, in Asia the only country with a strong internal disability law is the Philippines. The Philippines was the Asian country showing the strongest compliance level for WCAG level A, with four of the sixgovernment sites meeting the checkpoint requirements, and only showing eight overall ‘A’ level errors and 426 warnings.
Although most Asian countries showed poor compliance results and weak laws, the Philippines was an exception. Stronger internal laws correlated with higher compliance of Web accessibility design among their government sites.

Evaluation results show that the vast majority of global government sites do not meet WCAG 1.0 checkpoint standards. Some countries, such as the UK, have their own accessibility laws However, even those countries with internal laws, like the UK, have not totally met minimum requirements. The results show that those countries with stronger internal disabilities laws surpass those with weak or non-existent laws in their compliance levels. For example, all the tested EU countries have strong internal disabilities laws, and the results of this study showed that all EU countries outperformed those from Asia and Africa in compliance at all three WCAG priority levels.

The researchers used the Powerpoint presentation of PWAG President Jojo Esposa during one of his lectures at mini-conferences conducted by the Philippine Web Designers Organization (PWDO) with which he was one of the founding members. The presentation can be downloaded under Web Accessibility Presentations of Resources Page.

You may download the complete research paper here in pdf format.

Good news! Finalists for 14 categories in the Best Blog Division of 2nd Philippine Blog Awards are out! Congratulations to PWAG members who are included in the list.

1. BEST BLOG – ENTERTAINMENT
   Screensucked [http://www.screensucked.com] – Regnard Raquedan
2. BEST BLOG – CULTURE & ARTS
   Dalityapi Unpoemed [http://www.dalityapi.com] – Sonny Villafania (PWAG
   Secretary)
3. BEST BLOG – SPORTS
   Big Lakers Fan [http://biglakersfan.blogspot.com/] – Regnard Raquedan
4. BEST BLOG – COMMENTARY
   Filipino Deaf from the Eyes of a Hearing Person [http://deafphilippines.wordpress.com] – Jojo Esposa
5. BEST BLOG DESIGN
   Stellify [http://stellify.net] – Sophia Lucero
6. BLOGGER’S CHOICE AWARDS
   Alfredo B. Palconit Jr. Blog [http://alfredo.palconit.com] – Alfredo Palconit
   Turfsite Manila [http://www.bobreyes.com] – Robert Reyes

They were chosen out of 600 bloggers who participated. Go to their official website at www.philippineblogawards.com.ph to view the complete list.

Awarding ceremony will be held on September 21, 5:00 pm at 1 Esplanade Mall of Asia. Congratulations again to all the finalists! You are already winners.

After passing their rigid criteria, the PWAG Official Website recently received the Gold Edition of the humble yet noteworthy Talking Hands Awards for 3rd Quarter of 2008 for being a freshly presented teaching site! It also received the Visual Delights Award under the Key Teaching-Learning Element.

Based on the collective judgment of the awards committee, PWAG website merited the award because it teaches web accessibility with great commitment and introducing new terms and concepts augmented with thoughtful and precise narrative. They also added:

All of us have heard in one form or another that the “holy grail” of web design is to merge the artist and technician into one, who presents accessibility and standards compliance into beauty and understanding. (PWAG) accomplishes that task with eye candy etched in a visitors memory. First impressions aside, the resources contained within the website are freshly presented by a large group of young people, much younger than myself, who will make a difference for we who are disabled.

The Talking Hands Award Program started in 1986 to honor the father’s mother of Mr. Denny Lancaster who taught him American Sign Language at an early age and to provide resources as their family searched for information about morphea. As the Internet became popular, the program began giving out the website awards in 1998.International Children’s Library was last year’s Annual Award Honoree while DLSU Official Website received the Gold Edition award in 4th Quarter of 2006.

The award’s singular purpose is to reward web site authors, who through their creative excellence provide a web site which teaches, contains teaching elements in sufficient detail, and otherwise leaves a visitor with something of significant value after returning to their normal daily activities, which will enable them to be better citizens of the world.

In order to pass their criteria, they required to release the exclusive availability of PWAG Resources links to everyone and not just to Yahoogroup members. The site must also reach the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guideline 1.0 Level Double-A and with no validation errors on all HTML and CSS files in order to receive their laudation. PWAG website received a total of 14 nominations which merited the Gold Edition Award.

View the complete nomination comments as well as other judges’ comments under the Awards Community News.

The National Council on Disability Affairs Board recently approved a resolution “Requesting the Commission on ICT/National Computer Center to Deputize the Philippine Web Accessibility Group (PWAG) to Undertake Web Accessibility Assessment of Websites”.

Here is the complete Board Resolution No. 13 Series of 2008:

“Resolution Requesting the Commission on ICT/National Computer Center to Deputize the Philippine Web Accessibility Group (PWAG) to Undertake Web Accessibility Assessment of Websites of Participating Agencies and to Enjoin Member Agencies of NCDA to Comply with Web Accessibility Minimum Requirements”

WHEREAS, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) Article 9 recognizes the importance of persons with disabilities’ accessibility to information and communication (ICT) to enable them to fully enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

WHEREAS, the Philippines is a signatory and has ratified the said instrument on April 15, 2008, and is bound to ensure that the provisions of the Convention are achieved and realized.

WHEREAS, the Philippines has undertaken an “Interregional Seminar and Regional Demonstration Workshop” in 2003 in partnership with the United Nations Department of Economics and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), to promote web accessibility in Southeast Asia, which resulted two outcome documents, the “Manila ICT Design Recommendations” and the “Manila Declaration on Accessible ICT”.

WHEREAS, three workshops series were conducted for 200 web designers and advocates in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao to capacitate them to develop accessible websites to open up GO and NGO programs and services available to PWDs.

WHEREAS, a national interface was held to assess the progress of the 3 regional workshops and to address the low web accessibility compliance of concerned agencies, a MOA was forged between NCWDP now NCDA , and the CICT-NCC tasking the latter to 1) monitor the web accessibility compliance of participating web designers and advocates, 2) include web accessibility in its regular training programs; and 3) create relevant policies promoting web accessibility. Further, a committed core group of trainees organized themselves into an e-advocacy group, which is now known as the “Philippine Web Accessibility Group” (PWAG), to help the government push web accessibility compliance among GOs and NGOs.

WHEREAS, despite the initiatives and the existence of the Convention for PWDs that supports accessible ICT, large amount of information that can be found in government websites remain inaccessible to them, hence there is a need to effectively monitor compliance to web accessibility standards or at least providing reasonable accommodation to ensure access to information by PWDs.

WHEREAS, the Commission on Information and Communication Technology – National Computer Center (CICT-NCC) as the mandated agency on all matters related to ICT is short of skilled technical people to monitor all government agencies compliance to web accessibility.

RESOLVED, AS IT IS HEREBY RESOLVED, upon the recommendation of the Sub-Committee on ICT and Executive Committee, the Board requests the Commission on Information and Communication Technology-National Computer Center to deputize the “Philippine Web Accessibility Group” (PWAG) to undertake web accessibility assessment of websites of participating agencies.

RESOLVED, FURTHER, to enjoin member agencies of NCDA to comply with web accessibility minimum requirements.

Let copy of this Resolution be furnished to the concerned member agencies of the Council.

Certified by:

      MATEO A. LEE, JR
      Deputy Executive Director
      Officer-In-Charge

Good news! Our fellow member, PWAG’s Internal Auditor and multi-awarded web designer Arielle Cruz has recently developed the first ever PWAG’s Online Web Accessibility Evaluator. He did it in less than two weeks. This is still in beta stage so expect some minor glitches in the results.

What this evaluator is does NOT:

1. It does NOT validate a document against any Document Type Definition.
2. It does NOT check the document for X/HTML well-formedness.
3. It does NOT validate a document against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) versions 1 and 2 checkpoints.
4. It does NOT check the entire site, only individual pages.
5. It does NOT check other PWAG’s recommendations requiring manual or subjective evaluation (i.e language easy to understand, descriptive links, etc.)

What this evaluator does:

This evaluator only checks your webpage based on PWAG’s Web Design Accessibility Recommendation (soon to be the Philippine standard). It specifically checks on the following:

Under PWAG’s Maturity Stage 1 –

1. Access Instruction Page (most likely Accessibility Statement or simply Accessibility link)
2. Using “Click here” or “More” links
3. Using ALT text on images
4. Using PDF files without equivalent HTML
5. Use of Flash animation

Under PWAG’s Maturity Stage 2 –

1. ALT text does not exceed 80 characters
2. HOME link
3. SiteMap link and page
4. Skip to content link
5. LABEL tag on forms
6. Relative FONT sizes
7. SEARCH form

Green color means passed while red means failed. The evaluator is still incomplete. So we encourage web developers who are familiar with Javascript to download the script and make some necessary improvements.

Please proceed to PWAG Online Evaluator Page, enter your URI and see the result, or go to the original link from the developer.

This is another milestone for PWAG. We are truly proud of having this evaluator. It will now be easy for us to validate sites. Magpa-evaluate na po kayo! 🙂

The PWAG Official Website is now one of the Top 25 Websites worldwide ranked by Google that focus on Web Accessibility category.

The ranking was based on Google’s popular PageRank System. PWAG is ranked number 25 among the list of 167 websites listed under the Computers->Internet->Web Design and Development->Accessibility Sub-category above Accessify Resources, Royal National Institute for the Blind Resources and W3C Sites. PWAG’s PageRank is 5.

View the Google Directory List at: http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Accessibility/.

Meanwhile, the Accessibleweb Yahoogroup now has 165 members, more than double since last year. This increase is a welcome achievement despite the mild campaigning made by PWAG members. Last year, the group members aggressively invited web designers and persons with disabilities to join the e-group.

The group was even included as one of the new and actively discussed topics in the Philweavers.net forum under the Web Design Category entitled, “Care about PWAG?“. The topic began last June 21 and the thread starter is not even a current PWAG egroup member. Philweavers is a community of Filipino web designers and developers. They currently have 1799 forum members.

July 9, 2015 Update:

Google Directories are no longer existing. It was shut down in 2011. You can see the directory listing in dmoz.org website.

 

PWAG website now has 29 individual web pages including nine new entries inside the Resources page of all the important items discussed in Accessibleweb Yahoogroup.

Before, a person must be a member of PWAG egroup first in order to access the contents. But now they are freely accessible to anyone on the Internet. This is also an easier way to access important posts which were already buried beneath the nearly 2,000 messages since September 2006.

The contents were written and shared by our PWAG Accessible Web Designer gurus. This is our own humble way of promoting web
accessibility to everyone. The articles belong to General Web Design and Accessibility, Web Accessibility Tips, Best Practices, Issues and News Items on Disabilities, Analysis of Philippine Laws Pertaining to Disabilities and Utilities: Web Accessibility Tools Groups. Please go to the Resources page and click on the link titles. Also, all the pages already appeared on Google so they can now be searched.

Minor changes on the aesthetics side like background color and accessibility links were made. Our site may not be as
beautifully crafted as Alistapart. But we are slowly going into that direction as a place where you can get useful resources about web accessibility.