Have no shoes

6 August 2025 @? not ready yet

I didn’t know it, but I learned through a spam message, and an ad on Facebook, that as of 28 June 2025 new rules are binding regarding WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Official Agencies @?, and commercial companies with over 10 employees can even be fined for non-compliance. @? Fined by whom?. @? On what official grounds? @? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Accessibility_Act https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L0882

So I don’t have to comply, having built the whole website on my own. But I try to comply anyway, because I see why that is important. I mentioned that before, two years ago. Nowadays numerous WCAG checking tools are available on the web. I found the one by Accessibe.com the most informative and easy to use. They gave me a rather good mark from the start, but there was room for improvement. I added role=button in <p> tags I use as buttons for setting colour preferences. And I slightly enhanced the contrast in the entry screen colour scheme. A good tool for checking the contrast between text and background colours is here.

Then my site was tested as compliant. Hurray! However some issues remain:

The two companies that offered me the help I don’t need to become compliant, because I already am, themselves had sites that did not comply! So are they only pretending to have the know-how and expertise, hoping that non-tech-savvy potential clients won’t notice? I recommend to always use the easy checking tools found on the web. No technical knowledge is required to see the difference between compliance and non-compliance.

Or is it an example of the old saying: “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.”?

One WCAG compliance checking tool I found had the obvious requirement to not only be accessible, but to start out with valid website code. Makes sense. W3.org offers a good tool for that, the HTML validator. Few website (sp @?) builders seem to be using that, because I get 100s, sometimes over a 1000 messages when I run the check on famous pages, like @? @?

Admittedly many messages aren’t errors, not even warnings. But some are. There seems to be the widespread misunderstanding about how to close HTML tags like meta and br. Closing them with ‘ />’ is not only unnecessary, but also not recommended because it can create problems. I mentioned this point before.

Years ago I already found the batch version of w3.org’s HTML validator. I corrected many small errors then, but there were quite some left. Recently I spent a couple of days to fix many more, so that most of the HTML5 code of my site is clean now, except some old pages I keep online for historic reasons.

In my opinion, more webbuilders and webmasters should make use of W3.org’s free tools, and create valid, error-free code. Why settle for less?