BBC News Rebrand - This Monday

its important to get it right, due to accessibility reasons!

Despite the 'coding issues' and the unnecessary, and oversized generic BBC banner, I do like the BBC News header, and looks promising for the new look to be launched in a few weeks. I see it is more of a development of the 1999 branding meeting the current titles.

I hate how the BBC always do everything in stages - why can't they have an all-in-one big generic relaunch for once?


And I don't reckon much to the new website at all, though I do agree the header looks great.

I just don't think the new branding will be as good as say BBC Arabic is, that look really looks good watching on screen

It matters a great deal for the accessability of the page. Not everyone is using the same browser as you, or even any web browser. All sorts of devices be they mobile phones, internet TVs or even software that screen reads for the blind (like Jaws) could be trying to parse the page.

If it is written to standards it can be designed in such a way that the page formatting gracefully becomes less complex as the page is read by systems that support less and less of the features used (like Javascript, CSS etc.) The data on the page still remains the same, just looks less pretty. Using tables for layout purposes does not degrade gracefully, and will confuse some systems on the logical way to display (or read) the data. They are also completely unnecessary, not a table in use on the bbcworldservice.com homepage.

There is something that feels unfinished about things at the moment, so I'm reserving my judgement until things have settled down for a while. Although I wasn't the only one at work today surprised by the changes happening last night. It must have taken some serious bribes to get a development team in the office at the time of the morning

I think Heathrow Terminal 5 has demonstrated what happens if you try changing lots of things at once and hope for the best.

Not convinced sorry. Surely it should be the minority who should catch up with the majority. If the blind software can't cope with stuff that looks fine on IE or (as I use) Safari, then they should write better blind software!

I'm still sure that there's a lot of snobbery about it, nothing to do with accessibility, just nerds who read html or php or whatever, and have nothing better to do.

At least one person compared the BBC News website launch to T5 today. Hasn't gone down well at all!

Yawn...

People go to the BBC News website for news, not the world's finest graphics and fonts served on a plate.

It is a website... get over it!

I'm afraid I don't agree. It is up to broadcasters and web publishers to follow standards that allow pages to be accessible. It isn't a case of "writing better blind software" - it is a case of coding in a way that delivers good result in both normal browsers and those running for accessible users.

It is like writing software that only works with a mouse and doesn't have keyboard shortcuts (try using a mouse to click on icons when you're blind...) - it just excludes a section of your audience.



The Beeb have historically been quite conservative in their webcoding AIUI - so that older hardware and older browsers (such as those used in third world countries) still display their pages in a reasonable manner - much moreso than other web publishers.

Remember guys this is just part of the relaunch. Things like CSS instead of tables could well be in the plans for the future.

IE 5 is still supported, although to a lesser extent. The standards document is here for anyone interested.