Media-Insert Communications

The news from TMP Worldwide is that SiteMorse improves, not just the accessibility of its clients’ website, but it also creates greater efficiencies in time and money while improving the quality and results of their sales’ proposals. Raz Rahim, TMP Worldwide’s Interactive Technical Manager, also says that SiteMorse has also enhance the levels of awareness and knowledge about the importance of website accessibility, monitoring and testing.

Opportunities, gains and efficiencies

“We have saved both time and money. Manual testing is very time-consuming, and automated testing means that we don’t need to worry about what needs to be tested; the knowledge is already there. With manual testing we need to understand from scratch what we need to test, and few understand the results. It is an enhancement to the testing process, because it is programmed into the tool.”

“We usually use manual testing, but…it acquires knowledge of what level 1 or level 3 means. Account managers and clients don’t usually have this acumen. TMP needs to be able to tell a client whether his or her website(s) is or are compliant. This is reported back to the project manager or web producer who has more detailed knowledge about what the levels mean. We use SiteMorse reports to provide more instant feedback than manual testing alone can provide. We usually give the clients an audit, and the SiteMorse report is good enough to summarise the testing.”

So how does SiteMorse compare to other tools? “Well we have another tool”, explains Rahim, “used by our development team, but that is a very expensive product and it does a lot, but the reporting interface is not really for client-facing purposes. With SiteMorse we can give the report to clients and they will understand it. We use SiteMorse for development, auditing and for a sales’ purpose as well.”

With complements: manual and automated testing

TMP achieves its results using automated testing alongside its manual counterpart, and it is important that the two together can help companies to improve their websites quality and accessibility. Rahim comments though that, even though the company has a great deal of knowledge and expertise in the fields of usability and accessibility, TMP’s web team “may sometimes miss some important elements required by clients. SiteMorse therefore raises these issues, and it helps increase the knowledge of our project managers and programmers.”

The firm has also used SiteMorse to develop its own websites: to ensure that they are full compliant to the W3C guidelines, and to provide a benchmark for its own client-related projects. A number of tests, for example, were run on Monster.co.uk, and a number of errors and warnings were reported by SiteMorse.” Rahim says that the report was then sent to his core programming team in the US. The findings allowed that the programming team to analyse the full report, and enabled the programmers to eliminate the reported issues.

SiteMorse, Rahim discloses, could save companies a lot time even in the development stage. Talking about a project for HBOS, he comments: “They wanted the site to be at least Level 1 – which we delivered specifically to their requirements. We built this site a long time ago before we bought into SiteMorse tools. When we ran SiteMorse (after the project launch) we came across minor issues – which SiteMorse alerted us about via the report – and this enabled us to fix the problem almost immediately. If we had had it early it would have saved us a lot of time and money.”

Establishing benchmarks

Client’s website are created and developed according to TMP’s clients individual specifications, and although TMP undertakes a series of audits on behalf of each client, it is left to the client to define and undertake further testing once the project is completed and delivered. The National Health Service, for examples, has its own guidelines on website accessibility, as does local government.

Rahim therefore believes that, with everyone defining their own benchmarks and creating their own and sometimes muddled definitions of website accessibility, the Disability Discrimination Act is not strict or clear enough. Case law may be one thing, but no-one has yet been taken to court in the UK.

He also thinks that there are quite a number of people who do not fully understand the issue. He also claims that as a result of this ambiguity, even TMP cannot “suggest that [it] follows the standard.” However, using SiteMorse has clearly brought him a step much closer to ensuring that his websites are far more accessible than they might otherwise be, and it is helping TMP to save time and money while potentially increasing sales.

By Graham Jarvis
Editor and Media Services Consultant
Email: editor@cimtech.org

4th May 2005.