Website accessibility still misunderstood
18th April 2008 by David North
I’ve just read an excellent article about blind users still struggling with computer obstacles. Now I can only comment from a web perspective but it seems to me people are still missing the point when it comes to accessibility.
Firstly accessibility doesn’t just apply to blind or partially sighted people there are many other groups that it can advantage from the physically disabled right though to dyslexics and even the elderly.
Creating an accessible website is seen as a chore and perceived as difficult to do when the reality is that when developing using web standards and best practices you are nearly there. Adding other accessibility tools to a site may take a little extra time but think about the huge untapped market that you are opening your website up to! There are 8.6 million registered disabled people in the UK alone. An excellent article by WebCredible shows how much an accessibility can increase the reach of a website.
A couple of comments on the original article show how much people just don’t get it:
“When I’m trying to convince the suits how important it is to code our web pages to the W3 standards for accessibility I never get very far arguing that it is the right thing to do for visually-impaired users. It just doesn’t seem to be all that important to them.
I have much better luck when I point out that compliance with these standards helps out the biggest blind user on the Internet; that is to say Google. Search rankings they care about.”
Again the argument that it’s “the right” thing to do doesn’t usually wash when it comes to business but the extra reach from an audience (and potential new customers) and also search engine penetration perspective is a difficult one for “the suits” to ignore.
“Sorry to bust the thread going here but computing has for the most part always been a visual thing and probably will be for a while to come. The last thing needed in this world is more guidelines or legislation telling us how to do things. I sympathize with people with disabilities but when you start suing private business over accessibility issues, the sympathy stops there.”
Why does accessibility stop computing being visual? It doesn’t. Websites that create a text-only version of a website show little or no understanding of what accessibility is about. All these websites do is create a two tier system with a text-only website that doesn’t provide the same user experience as the graphical site. It’s just laziness.
“Its time the disabled learn that their disability is not caused by everyone else on earth. Nor is it the responsibility of others to help them overcome it on demand. The disabled have no more right to demand that others provide for their needs than I, as a diabetic, have a right to demand that sugar no longer be used. The principle is the same.
I adapt at my own expense and effort and you should too. If you can’t, you will have to depend on other’s voluntary charity and not act like a thug and use the gun of government to fulfill your whims.
Its too bad you are disabled but its not my fault nor is it my responsibility to fix. If the government says I must then to hell with government! I am not your slave nor are you mine.”
Again a total misunderstand of what can be done or the advantages of providing access to these groups. No problem - carry on as you are going and other companies will be happy to take the customers that you don’t want to spend your “expense and effort” to attract.
I do apologise if I have taken any of the quotes out context as I can’t personally comment on anything but website accessibility however I do find they cover a lot of arguments I hear about online accessibility.
Web 2.0 causes more of an effort for accessibility. Essentially any AJAX used must have a fall back to ensure everyone can use applications. In some cases this might mean the fall back user interfaces might not be so interactive but they should provide the same functionality as the whizzy scripts. Again there is an argument here to do this for the addition audience and search engine access (large areas of some AJAX sites are just search engine no go zones). However I believe a lot of this lays at the door of AJAX framework providers. When I use an AJAX control why shouldn’t this be built into the control rather than me needing to have two versions of the page? Certainly some are taking this on board but other could take a more inclusive attitude.
I see the rednecks are out in force then.
I was really going to kick off about this because I find this guy’s comments offensive on both a professional and a personal level, but then I realised that - and I don’t mean to be disingenuous here but - in all fairness this guy is not bright enough to grasp the issues with which he’s trying so desparately to grappel.
I’ve actually just typed the first halves of about three sentences trying to get to grips with his argument but I honestly don’t know where to start. It’s wrong on almost every level.
Good luck to the guy though; chapter one on the next re-issue of “How to Win Friends and Influence People”
Surely it depends entirely on the type of website you run.
At work, the site I edit does require accessibility for just about everyone who can physically use a computer, but the websites I run in my spare time hold content which probably is of no interest to and is not aimed at disabled users.
I would severely object to someone forcing me to make my hobby websites comply with an accessibility law (although they come very close, simply by complying with W3C standards) but because of the type of site it is, my full time job website must comply and I don’t mind that.
Even one small change we made to the website at work had floods of emails from ‘able’ users complaining because the site didn’t work as it used to any more (which was in a non-compliant fashion, simply because that was how it had been designed before I got my hands on it).
You just can’t please everyone!
Thanks for your views Jenny.
I don’t believe it does matter the type of website you run at all. It’s a common misconception that the content on a website might not be of any interest to disabled users as if disabled users don’t have the same interests as anyone else online.
Also an accessible website doesn’t just help disabled users, it opens the site up for dyslexics, the elderly or could just make the website easier for all users to use. To quote a colleague of mine “websites are developed by 20 year old developers with perfect vision” - you don’t need to be partially sighted to find a long article on a website with 10px text not the most comfortable to read. Also accessible websites tend to have better usability and are search engine friendly which can only be an advantage.
I’m not a strong believer myself in online regulation as I don’t think it works in most cases. The DDA in the UK says companies must take “reasonable steps” to make sure a website is made accessible to disabilities but what these reasonable steps are is not defined (and won’t be unless a test case goes to court). This is why I try to push the advantages of having an accessible website rather than shouting about people breaking the law.
I’d be interested to know more details about the issue you had that lead to complaints (perhaps via email if you’d prefer) maybe I can help out in some way. The idea of accessible websites is not to take away functions that are already there but simply to fashion them in a way that everyone can use them (or where this can’t be done provide a credible alternative). Certainly trying to upgrade an existing non-compliant website can be more of a challenge than looking at a website as a whole so I feel your pain here.
Using the tools available in this case I believe you can please everyone. I’m happy to provide you with excellent websites that do just this.
You make a good point regarding the advantages for elderly users. The Web Accessibility Initiative is currently investigating to what extent current accessibility guidelines help elderly users and if there are any gaps. Many existing sets of guidelines for content aimed at elderly users don’t reference the work done by the Web Accessibility Initiative. See Overview of ‘Web Accessibility for Older Users: A Literature Review’ (for background) and Web Accessibility for Older Users: A Literature Review.
Hi Christophe. Thanks for the links which are of great interest to me. Certainly it’s an area that most people don’t immediately associate with accessibility. People generally only think of the visually impaired.
In the future it’s only going to become more of an issue as more people that are computer literate will fall into the elderly category. This will mean the “silver surfer” community will grow quite considerably and this can’t be ignored by business.
There is another solutions for AJAX and Web 2.0 accessibility, called WAI-ARIA. It works in Firefox 3 and is part of the Dojo toolkit. Other browsers (IE, WebKit and Opera) are implementing it as well. Basically, WAI-ARIA allows web pages to provide additional attributes on elements describing the meaning of dynamic effects, and that information is passed to screen readers. Screen readers already support WAI-ARIA widgets (such as dynamic sliders, tree views or progress meters) and are gaining support for WAI-ARIA live region semantics.
FAQ:
Mozilla WAI-ARIA FAQs
Best Practices:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/
AJAX live region accessibility article:
http://ejohn.org/blog/ajax-accessibility/
Spread the word — at least when the topic of AJAX & Web 2.0 accessibility come up, so should WAI-ARIA.
Going forward, we will have innovative web applications and still have accessibility. At the moment fallbacks are still required for users with browsers that don’t yet support it.
Hi Aaron. Thanks for the links - I have heard about WAI-ARIA but I haven’t seen any implementations of it. Partly I think this is because of the lack of browser support at the moment and partly because I heard that most of the accessibility tools e.g. screen readers aren’t keeping up with the standards? Maybe you know if this is the case or not - I can’t seem to find a definative answer?