Indymedia doesn't have loads of paid staff or lots of resources -- it's basically people doing stuff in their spare time when they can find time. As a result the best way to get stuff fixed is to do it yourself or failing that you have to convince others to do it.

I agree the issues of accessibility is very important and, when I have time, I intend to improve the pages for regions other than Sheffield.

This is reply I wrote about this issue a while back on the imc-uk email list:

On Fri 20-Jun-2003 at 01:42:12AM +0100, Manchester Earth First! wrote:
>
> if redesign of new pages still under review, how about making them
> more (disabled) accessible?

It is already a _lot_ more WAI compliant [1] that the old site [2], it's table free for starters and also some of the forms now use <fieldset>, <legend> and <label> elements [3]. I hope that in a few months, when things have calmed down a bit, further improvements to the site should enable it to achieve WAI-AAA and since the site is also an authoring tool we should also aim to comply with ATAG [4].

> just ran a access validation on the UK IMC frontpage, and it didn't
> pass!

This is going to be the case for a while -- even if all the templates are valid (they are not yet, but will be soon) there is no checking of user input and people are not used to writing valid (X)HTML. Adding server side correction of HTML is on the medium term todo list and once this has been implemented it will also enable a migration from HTML 4.01
[5] to XHTML 1.0 [6]. We are not using XHTML at this stage for the above reason -- invalid HTML is preferable to invalid XHTML, because XHTML is XML and invalid XML is _really_ bad!

[1]  http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/

[2]  http://uk.indymedia.org/

[3]  http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html

[4]  http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG10/

[5]  http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/

[6]  http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/