Standards in accessibility

I was at the Chartered Institute for IT this week attending a seminar on “evolving standards in accessibility”. There are 11 million people in the UK with some form of disability so this is an important topic from commercial as well as ethical standpoints.
There were excellent talks from Robert Wemyss at the Royal Mail and Robin Christopherson from AbilityNet who discussed some of the practical issues from the perspectives of businesses and individuals.
Jonathan Hassell from the BBC described the new BS 8878, Shawn Henry from the W3C WAI discussed the revamped <A href=”WAI”>http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref”>WAI content guidelines</a> documentation (so much better than the old material) and Clive Holdsworth from EHRC outlined some useful legal guidelines and training soon to be published by the EHRC.
But while guidelines and standards are excellent in principle, I think there is a real danger if they are followed slavishly. For instance Jonathan Hassell raised the point that for some people high contrast is desirable while for users high contrast impedes readability. So adherence to the WAI guidelines on contrast won’t necessarily improve acessibility for everyone.
Perhaps there aren’t too many instances of this type of conflict but Robin Christopherson made the excellent point that most browsers and operating systems contain plenty of useful accessibility aids and that the first thing to do when addressing accessibility is to make sure these aids are not overwritten (e.g. by specifying font size so that it is impossible to increase it in a browser).
Just maintain the built-in accessibility aids and offer a small tutorial on accessibility options for people who may be unfamilar with them, and perhaps you will have solved accessibility problems for many people.
There are other conflicts. For instance a WAI requirement to use the title tag for a description of what is on a particular page could run counter to the commercial requirements of effective on-page SEO when the intention is to focus particular pages on particular search terms. The solution is probably compromise. Using the initial chacters to contain brand name, primary and secondary keywords and the later characters to contain a longer message describing the content of the page might be the way forward, although of course care will need to be taken that the title content displayed in search results makes sense.
All in all then, my conclusion was that guidelines are really just guidelines; it isn’t always appropriate to follow them all. So a brief requiring that a particular standard is to be followed would be worth interrogating. But if you don’t follow guidelines then there must be a reason for this course of action and you must have some strategy for providing an accessible experience within the environment and audience you are operating.

eAccessibility action plan launches

As a member of the eAccessibility Forum, I was at the launch of the BIS eAccessibility Action Plan (www.BIS.gov.uk/e-accessibility) on Tuesday where both Ed Vaizey and Maria Miller gave compelling speeches on the need for joined up thinking in this area.

The Action Plan outlines a powerful programme of change, focussing on a wide range of areas. There are five work streams:

1. A regulatory work stream that aims to deliver a clear regulatory framework for the public sector, businesses and the voluntary sector to operate in.

2. A consumer technology work stream that will address the problems of affordability and availability of assistive technologies as well as investigate sills and training

3. A website services work stream that will look at ways of ensuring that websites (private and public sectors) are more accessible and better designed

4. An accessible content work stream that will look at issues relating to audio visual content in non web based media as well as ways of making publishing material accessible to the disabled

5. An awareness and promotion work stream that aims to raise awareness of digital accessibility principles

The action plan is very practical: lots of real outputs, not just meetings. If it can be achieved, this programme of work should have a big impact on society and on business.

And accessibility is good business! Nearly one in 5 of the population have some form of disability – and 83% of those have switched from one service to another due to problems with accessibility.

Perhaps even more significantly, around 50% of us have some form of minor physical limitation – poor eyesight, dyslexia, a problem with fine manipulation – and would benefit if websites adhered to the principles of accessibility.

And the opportunities are only going to grow. With an aging population and with more and more people going online regularly, the development of usable and accessible website will be key for any organisation.

And that is why I encourage all my clients to consider accessibility seriously when they are developing new sites and services.

Unfortunately achieving accessibility is getting ever more complex with mobiles, tablets and TVs delivering the web as well as the more familiar PC.

That’s a challenge – the principles of usability for mobiles and smart TVs have yet to be widely agreed. Until they are accessibility is bound to lag on these devices.

But there is no excuse for ignoring accessibility for PC based websites. As a general principal accessible design is good design. But when you realise that accessible design will be positively beneficial for the 50% of the population who have major or minor disabilities it soon becomes clear that getting accessibility right can have a very big impact on the bottom line!