Defining judging criteria for the 2010 eircom Spider Awards
Thursday, 22 July 2010
We're once again involved on the judging panel for the eircom Spiders (the new name for the Golden Spiders). Our job is to assess all the entries against good practice standards in web design and inclusion. Having done it last year but found it to be a nightmare, we feel in better shape to do it more efficiently this time, so here's hoping.
The major problem last year was defining minimum standards for accessibility and coding that were reflective of best practice, objectively measurable and not likely to rule out too many entries. For instance, we originally had one of the accessibility criteria as "text must be resizable in IE6" but 70% of the first batch of entries failed, so that was a non-runner. Similarly, 80% of entries had invalid HTML so we couldn't set the bar that high, but putting together a good definition of 'valid enough' proved difficult (suggestions on what to include would be welcome).
Added to that, there is the question of whether the criteria should be the same for all entries. For example, a Government social welfare website really ought to be 100% accessible. But an online interactive advertisement for a beer? Perhaps we can relax the rules a bit on that one. So, you see, it's not as straightforward as it might seem and it took quite a while last year to work through all these issues and come up with a judging scheme that was sensible, workable and defensible.
We have some new, better ideas this year, that will help us improve on all those criteria. We'll write an article after the judging about what worked for us and what didn't and how entries for web awards like the eircom Spiders fare against these sorts of criteria.