Segala Wants To Be The VeriSign Of Web Trust
Segala is a specialist in web accessibility, mobile
testing, mobile web testing and certification. Based in Dublin and privately owned,
Segala provides a range of services to help you better understand what problems your
website and mobile applications might have in terms of accessibility. Let's take a look
at their services...
Content Labels and Search Thresher
Segala is at the forefront of promoting Content Labels, which are RDF-based files that contain metadata about trust. Segala developed Search Thresher, a Firefox plug-in for examining Content Labels in search results. It only works on your Google results and only a handful of sites use Content Labels, but Search Thresher is really just a stopgap to demonstrate how Content Labels might actually work if widely adopted. If Content Labels are adopted, Segala hopes to become a major player in verifying these - which would be a very lucrative business. Segala helped to create the original charter and is co-author of the final report with ICRA.
Content Labels are now moving onto a full recommendation track within the W3C, so it is a promising technology. Content Labels will be proposed as a replacement for PICS, a W3C spec which enables labels (metadata) to be associated with Internet content.
Here is a screenshot of Search Thresher in action:
The image above shows how results from Google look with the SearchThresher plug-in
installed. There are only a dozen or so sites out there with content labels at the
moment.
Accessibility Testing
In addition to pushing Content Labels and the issue of trust, Segala also provides a range of accessibility services. For US $690 Segala will carry out a benchmark evaluation report, which involves testing your website across different browsers and platforms. They will then advise you on what adjustments you need to make to your site in order to comply with regulations and policies such as the DDA in the UK and Section 508 in the US. You can also get a full compliance audit from Segala, which will help ensure your site conforms to WCAG.
Segala also tests your mobile applications and mobile websites. They will be able to provide you with a W3C mobileOK Trustmark certificate when they become available later in 2007.
This accessibility testing all revolves around trust. By displaying the Segala-Certified Trustmark on your website, you are giving a clear sign that your site is independently verified for accessibility. According to Segala, browsers and search engines that can detect the trustmark are able to highlight your site in search results - thus improving user trust and potential ranking for your site. However I'm not sure what, if any, major search engines will actually improve your 'site ranking' based on this trustmark - but maybe I'm wrong.
Agencies, developers, usability consultant, and product owners can join Segala's certified partner programme so they can offer their own clients accessibility products and services, including the Segala Accessibility Trustmark.
Conclusion
Web accessibility is an important issue for developers and webmasters to consider. With more and more people accessing the internet through mobiles devices, screen readers and raft of new browsers, websites that are not accessible are losing out on potential users, clients, and customers.
Last year the UN conducted a survey of 100 regularly used websites across 20 different countries, called 'The United Nations Global Audit of Web Accessibility' - a grand title indeed. They set out to determine how accessible these sites were for people with disabilities. Unfortunately the results were not so grand: only 3 websites out of the 100 chosen were confirmed to have the basic standards of accessibility.
From a legal point of view, there is also something to consider for larger companies.
Take for example the National Federation for the Blind, which last year filed a suit against
Target.com, citing several issues - including the fact that the site requires the use
of a mouse to make purchases.
Segala is a profitable company with a healthy balance sheet. They provide a very useful
service for website owners who have not focused their attention on accessibility in the
past, but who want to make up for lost ground. In their drive for Content Label adoption,
Segala wants to be the VeriSign of this business and become an authority on site
certification.
As for any developers out there, I would love to hear your comments on how important you think the issue of web accessibility is?
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Acessibility is critical and not just to developers and webmasters. Senior managers need to understand the basics of accessibility to ensure that their content/services are available to their customers/stakeholders.
I think one of the problems with this issue is it is pigeonholed as being something that the 'tech' people have to worry about. In government, eg, if you build a site with taxpayer funds and then discover that it is not accessible to everyone, you have an issue that is not just a technical one...
Not necessarily major, but an interesting search engine, Google's accessible search, would surely be interested in and rank pages higher if they had such trust marks.
I would agree that the issue of accessibility is not just a technical one. In fact, as a web developer focused on usability and accessibility, I'm always disappointed at how few of my fellow developers care or even know about accessibility issues.
The reason I think Content Labels are such a great idea is that it takes the issue out of the hands of the developers and provides a concrete and tangible point of reference for web site owners and managers. "Is the site accessible or not? Let's get it tested and approved."
I think accessible search engines (like Google's) would certainly be interested and who knows what they'd do with their main engines either? Their ranking algorithms will remain secret and if they think Content Labels provide a useful clue about the reputation and value of a site, why wouldn't they use them?
One of the key issues i face day in day out is the continuing uphill struggle to convince clients of the importance of accessibility, and time and again i am greeted with looks of surprise, even derision at the very idea that the experiential flash website they really want us to produce requires an alternative version to adhere to accessibilty guidelines, and also a moral one. Recently we've tracked the visitors on our site and which versions they use and there are a significant number of users who actually prefer a text only alternative, no surprises there though.
Trust marks are a great idea in principle, and something i have been attemnting to peddle to clients for a wile, whetting their appetites if you will for what's to come! however, that's becoming an even more difficult option to sell, the simple problem is that clients just do not take seriously the need for accessible solutions to a brief, and, those who do, feel that they have simply ticked the 'moral box when they do. There is a way to go yet and a change of attitude is a difficult one to push to clients in terms of accessiblity. We are proud of the achievements we have made though with persuading some of our clients to consider the accessible routes, and continue to build on this foundation.
As an agency we have as a 'best of pracitise' chosen to ensure all of our sites are at least w3c level II compliant.
I'm not a developer but a web and Social Media consultant and I strongly urge all my clients to think about accessibility in their websites.
Apart from social responsibilities and legal obligations, a site which is more accessible is more accessible to search engines too and this is a Good Thing!
I would say that in the future accessibility will play a larger part in Google's algorithm. If you think about it, logically, it is a natural extension of what Google is trying to provide within its results i.e. greater trust, more relevance, etc. I guess their current stumbling block is that to make this part of their algorithm more prominent means that they have to jump ahead of the current web environment in general. All credit to Segala for taking this subject further with their efforts.
Accessibility is an important issue, so is child protection (my issue) and a raft of others.
Services like del.icio.us, digg etc are excellent ways of promoting what is popular. Tags help people with similar active vocabularies and interests find what each other is looking at and so on. What content labels, a.k.a Description Resources, can do is to help identify the higher quality resources online. For example, they an identify websites that, in the opinion of educational experts, are good sources of information for study; websites that, in the opinion of medical practitioners, offer sound advice and so on.
The new Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group, which I chair, will, I hope, make a real difference in this regard.
As well as Segala and my own organisation, POWDER includes representatives from Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Opera software, Fundación ONCE and a number of academic institutes. We have a lot to do but we're already well on the way and should have early drafts of the future recommendations in public within the next couple of months.
As for search, well, I'm giving a Tech Talk on this subject at Google next week and we already have a Google customised search engine in beta that derives data from ICRA labels.
If content labels/Description Resources are robust, easy to use, easy to process and found to be useful by end users, I think it's a safe bet that search engines, portals and borwsers will make use of the data. We're working on it!
My company (Customer Respect Group) reviews approximately 1000 corporate websites a year primarily in the USA and produces the highly visable Customer Respect Index. I say this for context only.
In the past 12 months we have monitored a tremendous increase in interest regarding accessibility from website owners. This is driven partly by litigation concern (mentioned above) and corporate citizenship but mostly for potential increases in business. As a result, we have added an Accessibility element to our index and in order to provide expertise, we worked with Segala, who we felt had the most pragmatic and comprehensive approach.
We expect to release an Accessibility Index Report within the next few months when we will report on the fortune 100 companies. We expect this to be widely read in the corporate environment and raise the level of awareness in the trade and business press.
There is no doubt that accessibility will be an integral part of website development and planning duing the next 12 months. We have seen the subject on the agenda in every presentation we have asked to do this year.
We at Webmirer take all possible steps to make sure that any website we make is at least level double A compliant. We have seen a lot of increase in interest by companies who want to make their website accessible.
Many people have specifically spoken to us to find out the benefits of accessible websites. They are amazed not only to find out the effects but side effects of accessible websites such as usability features, faster download speeds, enhanced search engine findability and ease in website update.
As more companies are looking to harness the effects of web accessibility, there are many developers who see this as an opportunity for easy money making. They reverse engineer a website to pass through the automative testing which is not very difficult if you are a good programmer.
But it still has tables, javascript menus which completely disappear if you have javascript turned off and devilishly lack in usability features. Lets face the fact i.e Accessible website == Usable Website.
The trustmark provided by Segala is very important in the sense that it is not just a logo sitting on your website when your website was tested but a live certificate which has been granted to you after manual testing. Most underrated feature of the certificate is its ability to report a misuse which I personally feel is great. The trustmark clearly demonstrates that a company has looked at its customers needs and generates a confidence in the users of its website.
With search engines learning the power of accessible websites very quickly, and giving higher rankings to accessible websites, it is time we start using it too our advantage.
We have already seen government websites becoming accessible and even companies are waking up to this fact. It is time now that we started to help "all" to reap the benefits of the web and start bridging the "digital divide" by doing solid efforts and not by reverse engineering.
ilikecake Limited offer the Segala Trust Mark to its clients
(My corporate interest declaration out of the way ;))
The biggest benefit I see in the service is for clients who know that they require an accessible website but don’t know what is involved in it. We all know that there are plenty of developers out there who claim their websites are accessible but which are not. In many cases this is not vindictive but done in innocence as most website developers especially those coming out of college have little or no training in what is actually involved in creating an accessible website.
The service offered by Segala is an independent check of the developer so that the IT administrator in a company or civil servant can be sure of their websites accessibility outside of the developer’s claims. They also have the reassurance that the website is checked several times through the year as part of the fee.
It is recommended in this country (Ireland) by the National Disability Authority that when IT managers or civil servant commissioning an accessible website that a proportion of the budget is used to audit the level of accessibility of the website.
Until we live in a world where there is no need to suspect W3C or DDA claims at the bottom of a website the Segala trust mark will have a market.
As to the question of
‚ÄúAs for any developers out there, I would love to hear your comments on how important you think the issue of web accessibility is?‚Ä?
Accessibility should not be considered important as in one of those things you defiantly should put in your site but rather essential as you should not have a website unless it is accessible.
Brendan has a good point - how many times have we clicked on those "conformance" links, only to discover the site doesnt in fact conform to the standards it claims to. Part of the reason for resistance against these guidelines and labelling is a misconception of method of implementation and control. The rights and wrongs of legal enforcement are not relevant to web accessibility as a whole - governments have long used law to implement change in a lazy fashion. The advantages of WCAG conformance are better quality coded sites, and better SEO.
Segala are proving a useful service, as requirements such as web accessibility audits and content labelling are best handled by a professional third-party. Do we trust a vendor who says his product is quality, or an independant third-party who has tested the product for quality rating? Rhetorical question. Segala's trustmark will act as a guarantee of quality, rather than ineffectual links to online validator tools (some of which are inaccurate). The trustmark is given, based of result of extensive MANUAL testing - and ongoing monitoring enures a site is kept compliant. I would say that was useful service for any website - and the costs are not too prohibitive either.
Denying access to people with disabilities is ethically and socially wrong. As a web designer and developer, it is my responsibility to ensure that all my sites comply to the WAI Guidelines Level AA checkpoints. Massive adoption of web accessibility is not going to happen overnight but I have noticed that businesses are starting to become aware of its importance and benefits. I buidl awareness whenever I can and most of the time, businesses are not aware of what web accessibility is, let alone the requirements to make their website accessible.
I think that the best way to increase the adoption of inclusive design is through education and by talking to businesses about the commercial benefits of web accessibility.
The Segala digital Trustmark could be the holy Grail of web accessibility. Imagine if, based on this digital trustmark, all the people with disabilities could finally search the WWW like we do in Google and find the websites that are accessible as quickly as we do when we carry out our own search.
I too get annoyed when I see websites that dispaly a logo stating that their site is accessible (which often is not!). What is that logo for? Disabled users? Nah, so what's the point. A content label such as the Segala Trustmark is for users. If massively adopted this could relieve the pain of the millions of disabled users out there for whom finding an accessible site is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
"Segala wants to be the VeriSign of this business and become an authority on site certification"
David,
Thats a bold claim and will take some doing.
I see very little awareness of accessibility outside the techie/web-design/those-in-the-know arena. Totally agree with nearly all the comments above.
Just don't see it happening any time soon.
PICS was a failure and don't see a new variation having an better chance. Sure its 'better', more refined etc.. but its a big catch-22
My 2c
Lal
Lally - I agree, it will take time.
Content Labels is now moving onto a W3C full recommendation track and will be proposed as a replacement for PICS - for reasons given by you. This will mean that our method of labelling content will become a ratified standard.
Amongst the many benefits of Content Labels over PICS is the ability to make assertions about specific URIs, i.e. you're not restricted by having to make assertions about an entire domain.
Conformance to the W3C Mobile Web Initiative trustmark (mobileOK) will come in the form of a Content Label. I know this because Segala is co-author of the specification with Google and ICRA.
The new .xxx domain will mandate all registered sites to use a Content Label.
Our partner network is one way of getting more sites labelled. We empower partners to better sell and deliver accessibility to their clients. Partners are finding it much easier to sell accessibility with our marketing collateral and they find it easier to deliver accessibility services using our documentation, tools and support.
Keep the debate going! :)
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