The following is an approximate transcript of the talk – “Outta time, scope, and we fixed that already – Is there a Disconnect” I gave at the 2011 OzeWAI conference in late November 2011. As usual the slide deck is on Slideshare.

I also have a collection of sketch notes from OzeWAI 2011, as I find it easier to sketch the talk than take notes.

…oΦOΦo…

I have been involved with the Australian Web Awards for three years now.  Over those three years I have noticed an alarming trend in the results.   An almost disconnect from the Australian Web Industry in terms of accessibility.

For those that don’t know the Australian Web Awards is a national competition based around best practices, it has been running now for 3 year nationally and 7 years over all.

The core vision for the Australian Web Awards is to promote best practice in design and development for the web in Australia.   It does this by providing a competition designer and developers can benchmark themselves against.

The Australian Web Awards allows entries from anyone that works the web in Australia, from govt, corporate to the freelancer.   The only people that are discouraged from entering are the judges.

It’s an interesting fact that over the years we have found that the big budget sites are in fact at a disadvantage.  It seems the medium to small budget sites appear to win time and time again.

It doesn’t matter the size or complexity either.  If you have a multi-million dollar site verses a $40,000 site, both with the same number of pages and complexity,  the large corporate spend just doesn’t seem to have the focus on quality to get up in the Australian Web Awards.

The Report Cards

The issue comes to light when you look at the average scores for the sites judged against the 5 main judging criteria over the last 3 years.  As can be seen (below) all the areas have increased in quality over the years, the only criteria that has gone backwards is Accessibility.

When I first saw this I considered if it was just a back slash against WCAG2.

But maybe it’s something a little more.

Now let’s remember that the sites that have entered the Australian Web Awards are not just the average run of the mill site.  Often they will have been tweaked and improved, made the best they can be.

These sites from the owners and agencies viewpoint are as perfect as they can be.

And yet they come up wanting.   Overall we, as an industry have failed in accessibility.

You know I didn’t expect this, it blindsided me.  When I received the results from one accessibility judge after another, all telling me the same thing, over and over it was a bit of a shock.

For a while there it did make me question what had happened, if people really didn’t get the accessibility requirements.

Then I looked deeper into the statistics.

The Statistics

Now all the entries stated a level of WCAG compliance with their entry this year, so let’s start there.

About 30% stated they didn’t bother with WCAG2.   Of those that considered WCAG 40% where focused on WCAG1 and about 30% on WCAG2.   Interestingly

Now if we compared the stated level of compliance to the level that we found some interesting stats:

Interestingly if you stated you had ”No Compliance” in fact your site had a 69% chance of being compliant to WCAG2 A
anyway. Which just goes to show that WCAG2 A compliance isn’t that hard to achieve.

As to be expected WCAG 1 A had a high level compliance, as did WCAG2 A.  The surprise was that very little of the sites that said they where AAA where even close to mark.    Which may indicate a lack of compliance understanding.

Top Issues

Over the last three years the same issues have been repeated time and time again.   Despite developers telling me over and over they understand these issues.  It’s very clear that in Australia at least they don’t.

Plus there was a whole collection of five percenters that are still important. These issue I found where often completive on the same site.  So they are worth keeping an eye on them.

• Dyslexic text issues, justification, leading, general spacing.
• Content heavy no chunking
• No transcript, caption or video alternative.
• Click areas that aren’t obvious.
• Can’t stop constant movement – usually a carousel.

It also seems that certain states just don’t get some accessibility issues.

The Gatekeepers

Now Statistics like this can, but are they really telling us what is really going wrong. Why has accessibility slipped from the agenda in Australia?

Now I have worked on the web with private industry from small business to large corporate for the last 15 years.    I regularly chat privately with key decision makers over accessibility and ask for the real reasons accessibility goals are not being met.

Over this time I have found it comes down to a 4 types of key personas or gatekeepers if you will, these are their response:  (ed – please note I’m not going to publish here all the comments I quoted in this section during the talk)

Tran – The Web Agency Developer

• Either we do the correction or the client’s inhouse team does it, at the end of the day a solution has to be found, often its remove the function or content that is the final fix.
• Accessibility is just one aspect of my Job
• I just code; accessibility is the clients issue now
• The CMS stops me from making accessible web sites
• We can’t implement the right accessibility due to our.
• Why isn’t accessibility an issue at developer conferences and on developer blogs if it is important.

Joanne – The Web Agency Project Manager

• Resources are an issue – getting people that really understand accessibility with other good development and design skills is hard
• The National Transition Strategy is just a pain, but it’s also a good instant money maker
• If it’s not in the budget/scope it doesn’t happen!
• The project is already underway (when commenting on inclusive design)
• If the client doesn’t ask, we don’t tell, don’t involve, let it ride.  After all we can charge more later on if it becomes a requirement
• WCAG 2 is just too hard to understand, at least WCAG1 had a simple checklist
• Accessibility is just bullshit, all this work for less than 1% of our audience, I can understand doing this usability stuff but anything else is just not in scope.
• If we don’t have the inhouse skill, we often just fudge it.  Like who is going to check.

Nik – The Business Owner / Director

• Accessibility is just a game of he said – she said, its open to option.  We trust our in house developers over the external consultants.
• I’m sympathetic, but this is business, we can’t afford to have any of the accessibility stuff.
• We CAN afford to discount and forget out the disabled community.
• On ageing population:  Baby Boomers are running out of cash anyway, so they are a dead end.
• Show me a real study on the return on investment for a web site with accessibility improvements alone.

Peter – Govt Directors / CEOs / IT Managers

• We are only doing this WCAG/NTS stuff over sufferance; even then we know we are not going to be challenged.
• All we have to do is appear to complete the paperwork.
• I don’t think this accessibility applies to us, if it does it’s just public facing sites.
• No one is disabled here; if they were we would just redeploy them.

So now we have all these viewpoints of the gatekeepers. Now I’m sure you have heard them before, time and time again.

Sure there are some solutions around, you can put in a policy, mentors, decentralise, do audits, train people.  These are great if you have lots of resources and a big budget.  Sadly that is not a world I believe we all live in.

Now the Australian Web Awards has pointed towards a degree of industry disengagement.  The question is the cause just the usual issues, or is there something more.

No Solutions Here

Do I have a solution to all this.

No not really.  Maybe you have one.  That’s what we are here to discuss.

One thing I do have is a direction we may have missed.

Now I was talking about the issue of accessibility with an award winner at the Australian Web Awards a few weeks back.  He gave me a possible solution.

Remember Web Standards

Remember years back….

When there was a push for web standards, at least every conference had 2-3 people talking on web standards.  There were books and articles all over the place on web standards.  There were how to do guides, bug squashing sites, code libraries, how to implement guides and so on .

It was a wonderland of knowledge,

It was this free and cheap resource based that was the core to helping evangelise web standards

This allowed developers to easily setup and take up web standards.

It even allowed those usually closeted developers, who don’t read blogs or attending conference.  The ones locked away in the back rooms in cubical hell.   Yes even they came on board with web standards.

It also allowed educators to understand web standards (to some degree)

Where did Accessibility Go?

But what happened to accessibility along the way.

It’s like Accessibility and Web Standards were brother and sister, happy always together.

Friends forever -  until Web Standards became the popular one, the queen of the ball.   After all she was the one “everyone” was talking about.

The brother “Accessibility” seemed, a little lost, unsure on what really just happened!    Time after time people only wanted to speak with his sister “Web Standards”

We need to bring them back together so they are working with each other and not against one another.  Working groups take note.

But still you know “’Accessibility” he doesn’t really trust his Web Standards sister after all she has all this glitz and glam with html5 and css3, very sexy!

He just has WCAG2…. Sorry it’s a little boring!

Issues Blocking the Path

But it’s not that simple, there are 4 issues that seem to be blocking the path ahead.

False Hope and Stepping Up

I have seen this cycle a few times now – every few years a leading accessibility developer will commit to helping the community – to giving it back.

This is great.  I usually cheer!  It’s a time of celebration.  It’s always great to have someone that is very talented giving it back to the community.

However 12 months later, upon review, I usually find nothing has happened, and it was all hype.

Now I have nothing against the developers concerned.

I can understand completely what has occurred.

This is sad catch 22.

Usually we find, as an industry, we can’t afford to put that new found knowledge on the improvement of accessibility out to the community. It all comes down to dollars and cents.

If you are making a living of this IP, then really you can’t share it.  I really get that, I have been in the same boat.

Or maybe you can share the IP.  There certainly are business models that allow you to give away the baby and sell the bath water.

With this in mind we really need to get more people talking about accessibility, just like we did with web standards.

In any community there is about 5% of the population, at best, that will engage in a cause, and about 1% that who will evangelise it.  Accessibility is no different.

So maybe we need to stop relying on the top experts to provide the solutions to our problems.

To be honest these experts don’t have the answers to this problem that they can share anyway.

But you and your colleagues do.

We have the resources  - Jacqui talked about that this morning.

There is a limit to how much we can do as well. We all have to remember that. So let’s be realistic on the free time we all have.

However if we all just blogged, discussed, presented about some issue every now and again maybe we could inspire one developer to write more accessible code.

It would make a difference.

So I ask you what have you done to help accessibility along in the last 6 months, 12 months, 18 months….  Feeling guilty, good, do something about it!

The CMS Issue.

Have you even had a good look at the Content Management Systems (CMS) that and being sold by most web agencies.

They come in three flavours – Open Source, Off the shelf or the Bespoke – roll your own versions.

Now I haven’t looked at all of them on the market, after all there are 100′s of them, but have worked with a good number of them.   They aren’t that accessible.  Now what hope does anyone have if the base application you are using to produce an accessible web site isn’t following the recommended standards.

Sure with most CMS you can tweak the front end templates and sometimes you get lucky and you can make a site more accessible.

However accessibility is more than the front end of the site.

Have you looked beyond the login prompt to the admin control panels of these CMS.

Almost none of them are WCAG compliant, let alone even looking at ATAG.

Now that’s another hobbyhorse of mine, talk to me later about that one.

We need to get the developers of these applications to understand the accessibility issues.

We need to have them make that empathic link with the disabled – to engage them.

This going to be hard – these are usually the developers that are even further away from the mainstream of the web industry.

I know that some developers, for instance in the Java community are just getting to grips with JavaScript.  And have only just discovered about web standards.   Now I don’t consider myself to be on the bleeding edge, but really wasn’t that 10 years back. Hello 2001 calling.

At that rate it’s going to take us another 8 years to get WCAG 2 into these peoples mindset.   Think about it can we afford to wait.

I sometimes get the feeling that some of these developer are just living in the backwoods with a banjos playing.   Nice people, just old habits.

When was the last time you heard of someone talking about accessibility or the hard-core accessibility fixes at a developer conference.

Not a generalist conference, but a hard-core developer conference.     You don’t.  Accessibility is off the agenda.  Why?

Somehow we need to make a case for these CMS developers and firms to come into this century

A good deal of the issue is the code base, which can be from 10 to 15 years old.

This brings a degree of legacy for CMS compliance to WCAG or ATAG.

Mostly for these systems it’s a complete interface rewrite, not something that is undertaken likely.

Now I know there are some in house systems that are still written in Perl. I can understand the developer’s pain.

Same old issue, limited audience, limited resource, no one asks, why bother.

Vendors are not to Blame.

But it’d not all the vendors fault.

My associates in “web agency” land tell me that it’s very rarely that a client will enforce WCAG2 requirements in a contract.   There is a tendency, for the sake of future relations to side step the issue.

So when was the last time you pulled up a vendor on a core CMS accessibility issue?

Do you have a checklist to help an agency understand WCAG 2 requirements?

Do you enforce them, to the level of stopping the project?

It’s amazing I have seen large projects roll forward instead of folding over accessibility issues that were clearly a vendor’s issue, and should have been fixed during implementation.

Now from a vendors view having the first to market ATAG compliance CMS must be worth something  – one would hope.

Watch this space, things are afoot here.  There is hope.  Maybe next year I will have news I can share.

Education is a Factor

This lack of engagement also comes from the way we are training our graduates.  Often when a graduate enters in to “web agency” land they have no or a very limited knowledge of accessibility

Have a look around at the courses offered by Universities and TAFE sector, how many of them offer a unit in accessibility, there is ONE.   Please correct me if I’m wrong.

I know some lecturers do go out or their way to drum in accessibility, spending at least 3-4 weeks on it.

These guys are my Heroes.

Sadly the norm still seems to be one lecture, if that, on accessibility.  Not a lot you can cover in 45 minutes for the entire scope of accessibility.

I wonder sometimes, do the lecturers know that WCAG exists, the University might, but do they, and if they do why are they teaching it old school and not inclusively?

It would help if students were exposed to impairment simulator kit,  Zimmermans vision kit,  the full ageing simulation suit (Nasco or Gert), or at least use a vision or hearing simulator (eg the one from Cambridge University).

Now I know these aren’t perfect, but they do at least give a perception of the issues at hand and can help a person start on the road to a level of empathic understanding or the disability.

One more Problem, the other Gatekeeper

But even if we get all this right, spreading the word, the perfect CMS, the right education.  It just goes like clockwork.

It’s still going to fail – why?

Really it’s very simple, we are not longer in control of the web site.

Yes, that’s right.  We don’t control it.

We are just the “web monkeys” behind the scenes.

It’s the admin assistant that has just been getting the job done updating the website, 9-5 week in week out.

The content publishers – they are in control, not you.

The content publisher – like Cate is the centralised goto person of the office.  Hence she is very multiple skilled.

They are often time poor and are usually handed issues that aren’t theirs from the people around them.

Badly designed interfaces and procedures constantly frustrate them, and they are forced to find quick and effective workarounds.

This person also has a very full outside of work hours; they often consider that they’re doing everyone’s job for them.

The control is with them, the content updaters, the content publishers.  We handed the control over to them years ago, during the CMS revolution.

You know if they don’t feel like putting the semantic structure in the content, or using the right elements on a form, or setting up the PDF link correctly.

Well they won’t, after all they are busy people.

We can have a perfect template, a perfect CMS output, and still can be an accessibility nightmare.

Just like PDF files need to come from a perfect semantic structured source, so too the content in that the CMS uses needs to have a perfect semantic structure

Still this is meaningless as no one will care so long as it looks good from a visual viewpoint.

Empathic Engagement

All the content publishers want to do it get the job done, the simplest way they can. We have to really understand this. To them it’s just work, get it done, pay the bills.  And go home.

Sure you can train these people all you want, have policies a metre thick. But at the end of the day, they have to really understand. They have to have empathic engagement with the disabled community.

Without even a seed of this empathic engagement they are just lost and there will be no professional care, the attention to details that makes a difference.

We need to stop singing with choir and get out there and talk to the disengaged especially the content publishers. They are the new sheriff in town.

When we got started in accessibility it was usually because of personal instance or that we saw or worked with disabled people in action?    See it’s that empathic engagement that made us think about accessibility issues.

We need to capture the emotional journey of the disabled and give it back to the gatekeepers.

In Summary

See we need to distil this empathy that we discovered into bite-sized pieces.

Just the right sized pieces so that people like Cate (the content publisher) can understand how we felt about accessibility and be taken on the same emotional journey.

Polices help, but reason and understanding is a better approach.

So let’s go talk, engage, educate, present at developer conferences, and most of all promote empathic engagement. Promote understanding.

As a web professional and an avocate for inclusive design (web accessibility) I have often wondered why organisations are so obsessed with using PDF documents on web sites as opposed to HTML based documents.

After all PDF documents don’t do accessibility as well as HTML pages do.

Given the ease of use of most modern CMS you would consider web page creation and editing would be as easy as authoring a word document.

Now I have a good idea why my clients use PDFs over HTML, especially government agencies, but I don’t have the community wide picture.

So I asked Twitter – “Why do you use PDF over HTML?”

I got a bit of a response.  Now this survey and its (200) responses aren’t that scientific, they are multiple tiered and are as expected, full of statistical analysis holes. Still the results do give us a glimpse as to why people use PDFs.

Now there is no primary reason as to why, but more a mesh of several supporting rationals.  They are in order of preference:

1. Preserving the Print Format

   The requirement to have the onscreen visuals appear the same as the print version was clearly the leading reason. Out stripping others by two to one.

   This is really understandable when you are dealing with documents having a complex print layout. It seems CSS print styles just don’t cut it. To the point that sometimes having a different style layout for print, for a web page, can be a bit of negative user experience (however that’s another topic).

   Documents that have been through a visual design process of a print production team seem prone to this requirement. Yes the content is the primary focus here,  but sometimes the way it’s presented can be just as important in communicating the message.

2. Encapsulated Format

   Being able to save and transfer a document across platforms was important as well.

   People are looking for a medium that doesn’t require complex software, that will maintain the layout, images, typeface and all the content as one encapsulated package.

   Try saving a web page for use later, it just fails in so many ways, and a MS-Word document – well that needs MS-Office for the most part.

   PDF is the only one left standing as an encapsulated package, it’s also cheap to read and produce as well.  Issue is it’s not that portable in reality – take the issues displaying or saving a PDF viewed on the web using a mobile device.

3. Easier to Publish

   Easy of publication is another core reason. To creative a PDF is often just a simple process of saving a document.

   This is easy and within an existing business workflow.  So it’s understandable that it appeals to the vast majority of people.

   To publish it to a web site you just create the link in the CMS, and upload the document. Set and forget, no need to worry about the layout working or not.

   Contrast this with the list of issues using a CMS editor to create a web page.

   You usually create the document in MS-Word and have to cut and paste it into the CMS editor, this causes layout issues. Or you have to use some weird keyboard/process gymnastics to get the layout reproduced right or worse have all the formatting disappear and have to reapply the lot.

   Then you have to put the images in separately, scaled down for the web, and allow for those accessibility tags.  After all this there still maybe layout issues with the page design.    It’s just a nightmare.

   Clearly the web publishing process has a long way to go.   Maybe this is an area some of my fellow UX colleagues could look into?

4. Existing Hardcopy Documents

   Duplication of existing hardcopy documents is also another core reason.

   When you have an existing hardcopy document, you really are only duplicating the distribution and availability of the document to a web medium.  You are just presenting the document to a wider audience that those that can collect it from your offices.

   The use of PDF with its layout preservation and encapsulated package is the perfect solution for hardcopy duplication.

   In this case people also stated that they tended to only used PDF for duplication exisiting hardcopy documents.

5. Other Reasons

   The following are minor reasons people stated for use of PDF documents over web pages.

   • Duplicate HTML Content

     A low percentage of people indicated they presented everything as web pages, but also allowed for user driven server side generation of PDF documents as required. Or they just  duplicated all the static PDF information available as web pages. Use of both formats was equally weighted in this case.

   • Providing More Detail

     Others, using the semantic structure of the web, presented summary information on topics at the high level of a site as web pages moving down to specific summaries on mid level web pages and PDFs as the final low level detailed pages.  This is a very typical government model of information communication.

     I suspect while  this may not be prefect, it harks back to having a secondary reasoning for the ease of publication of the detailed information.

   • Interactive Forms

     Despite Adobe pushing PDF forms only a very small number of people even referenced using PDF forms. Sure normal hardcopy form duplication was mentioned. But the use of interactive PDF forms was left to a minority.

   • Low Usage Document

     Just like the use of PDFs for detail pages, documents with a low usage also where seen as more cost effective delivered as PDFs.

   • Web pages not a formal document

     This was a very interesting comment.

     It seems that the very volatile nature of the web page doesn’t make it a highly considered  paper replacement.

     Where as PDF’s, which are just as volatile, maybe because they come from a process close to the formal document are seen as more formal, stable.

     Interesting perception.

   • DRM / Security

     Contray to what publishers and the legal department may tell you;  the use of PDFs to enforce DRM or any type of security is very low on the reasons to use PDFs.   In fact I would presume the usage of security features of  PDF documents is generally low . Which in a way is a good thing – accessibility wise.

This rounds off the reasons to use PDFs over web pages for content delivery.  Still I hope that this continued PDF madness does ease up a little.

However I fear we will not be seeing this real soon, until web publication and print styles become as easy and effective as PDFs.

I have been meaning to get a meetup together for the Perth Web Accessibility community for a while, like about a year.

Well it was good friend and colleague Lisa Herrod in Sydney that inspired me to kick my arse into action. Particualtly after she started  the equivalent Sydney accessibility meetup.

The plan is simple to get people with a distinct interest in web accessibility or practicing web accessibility and inclusive design  professionals to come along to a regular meetup.  Share our knowledge and in general find ways to promote web accessibility and inclusive design within the Perth business and public sectors.

Now if you don’t really have an interested in web accessibility and are just coming along to network or for general marketing, well there are other meetup or regular networking groups you should go to instead.

I would rather you not attend if you have no real interest in accessibility.

This is a very specific meetup group,  I’m giving no quarter that it is a very topic focused group.

If you don’t have a passion for accessibility maybe this is not for you.

When: 7:30am Wednesday 24th November 2010.
Where: Cafe 54, Shop 6, 54 Pier St, Perth
Cost: Price of Breakfast

On the other hand if you do, then see you there.  Please RSVP via meetup

Let’s get some reality on the web accessibility debate.

We all know about WCAG 1, we have all at least had a look at the associated checklists.  If you are lucky you may have glanced at WCAG 2.

We all have been developing and designing our sites with semantic content, in compliance with W3C guidelines, using progressive enhancement for the interactive components, unobtrusive Javascript, and graceful degradation of the pages for legacy browsers.   Maybe used some of the attributes of ARIA. Sure that’s a no brainer.

We know that doing this will solve most of the accessibility issues.

So much so that one would think that the cause for accessibility and universal design was over.  Right?

No – wrong.

We are not Assistive Technology users

If we set aside the fact that we still have people in Australia building non standards based sites with tables for layout and inline javascript.

We as a community (edit – able bodied) in general are just paying lip service to accessibility.  We have become complacent. We are engaging in a mindless tokenistic effort with accessibility.  Do we really care…

Often the real answer is No.  At least now we are being honest.

Think about it when was the last time you included a round of accessibility testing in a quote.   Or for that matter when was the last time you even considered it, or even raised the topic.

To often if the client does bring up accessibility in early discussions, we will just ignore it.  Pretend it isn’t an issue.

Even government agencies, local, state and federally, have been dodging accessibility issues.  I have seen it personally, straight faced lies, or statements of avoidance veiled in bureaucratic misunderstanding.   The mindless ticking off on the WCAG 1 checklist, just to get the KPI achieved, too often by a junior staff member who doesn’t really have any interest in accessibility or the like anyway.

This has to stop.

Yes some of us are doing something, but in reality is it enough.

Are we calling our fellow peers to task when the accessibility on their web site is just not up to scratch?  We used to do this with  web standards.  Why not accessibility?

Maybe we need to remind people that ensuring a web site is accessible in Australia is a legal requirement.

Losing our way.

Still with accessibility we have gone very quiet.  Even silent.  Why?

Simple we have become our clients, we are now just playing the same lip service, tokenism game that our clients are often playing.   Yes in public we (they) will state that we care about accessibility.   But in reality we (edit – as able bodied designers and developers) don’t have to use assistive technology (AT), we don’t have a disability, in general we can see and use the web as it was intended.  We are a million miles from the practical world of using AT.

The old UX catch call is never truer here – we are not the users.   The disparity between us and the people we are really working for, with accessibility, is sometimes just too great for us to even get a idea of what it is like, no matter how many videos of people using assitive technology we see.

Why we are doing nothing.

In a lot of cases we have the tools with the standard issue Web Technology to make the entire web accessible. We have had them for over 4 years now.  Still a lot of sites fail all but a basic Jaws reading test.  Why?

We know why, we just don’t talk about it, it’s the elephant in the room:

• Money

  Money is the primary issue.  It’s always  comes down to money, it costs for testing, it costs for recruiting, it costs to find the best solution.

• No ROI

  From the clients view there is a perception that there is no return on investment.  The AT audience is just too small and they are seen as being just on welfare and not having any disposable income at all.

• Lack of Skills

  There is a lack of skills or documented solutions for all but the common accessibility issues.  Yes lots of people around the world have found solutions to most of the problems.   However if you want to solve it locally you have to reinvent the solution again or call in an overseas or interstate high paid consultant.

• Social Value

  In reality there is no socially inspired public relations value in accessibility.  A business can be seen to get more value out of sponsoring a guide dog than making their web site accessible.

• Why Bother

  Although the Australia Human Rights Commission hasn’t been sitting on it’s hands on these issues. There is a general public and web industry perception that they have. So if the legislator isn’t bothered with enforcing compliance why should anyone else care.

• Lack of Tools

  There is no sure-fire tool that we can automatically measure accessibility of a site.  It takes real testing and a compliance checklist to ensure a site is accessibility to a wide spectrum of the community.   It’s much easier to just lie on the checklist, after all who is going to check.  Yes I have seen this being done time after time.

What can we do.

It’s a sad really.  In a way we shouldn’t have even got to this state.

It’s as if the hard battle for accessibility has only been won on the popularist visually impaired front.  Leaving the cognitive, motor control, hearing and the like issues out in the cold.

Now I don’t have a solution, however this is something I have been thinking about a great deal.

I’m certain what every we have to do, isn’t going to be one simple solution.  On a side note: don’t look to HMTL5, that’s not going to be the magical panacea.  I except  the answer will be in a multiple pronged approach:

• Kill off Accessibility

  In some ways even considering accessibility as a separate item is the wrong approach. We really need to be considering the ideals of universal design, in which everything is designed for everyone.   Let’s just for a minute forget about accessibility as a separate issue. We need to design and develop for people using AT just like we do for any other usability issue.  This is where  Inclusive Design comes in.

• No more checklists

  Lets be honest the WCAG checklists  don’t work. We don’t have HTML or CSS checklists.   Why should we have accessibility ones.   Checklists are just too open to management and insecure web team members abusing them and warping the real results.  After all who is going to challenge or randomly audit them – senior management, I don’t think so.

• Merge the Guidelines

  Over time it would be idea to merge WCAG in the core of HTML and CSS guidelines such that it is just second nature to the recommended implementation examples with HTML or CSS.   Okay this is a really long term solution considering we are just getting into HTML5.

• Ninja Accessibility

  Being realistic we aren’t going to get all those ideas of the ground tomorrow.  However we can take advantage of the aging baby boomer population in the west.  This generation of older adults, will start to have a lot of leverage and will also start to encounter  a number of minor web accessibility issues.  Via overcoming these issues by stealth, ninja like, one is able to introduce an inclusive design mind set to the client, via an area they can relate to.

• Accessibility Patterns

  This is one that I touched on above.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a centralised library of accessibility solutions, a bit like a UI pattern library like Yahoo User Interface Library or  the Yahoo Design Pattern Library.  That way designers and developers could just look for a solution to a problem or just consider the overall UI recommended in terms of an inclusive design.    Either way it would be a win, win situation.

  Now there are lots of very smart accessibility design practitioners across the world.  I know a good number of them have encountered most of the common issues and then some more.  Some have published these issues and the work arounds as they discover them.  Some have just listed the issue and test results, leaving the solution as a guarded revenue stream.  And others are just too busy to really contribute.

  We need to harness this information and store it somewhere centrally.   As a community resource.   Think about it, think about the differences that developmental patterns and UI design patterns have made to the developmental process. No more reinventing the wheel (or widget) .  They have allowed the adoption of a landscape where good practices are now the norm.

  What we need to do is foster the accessibility community to build accessibility patterns as solutions to common problems.   Such that any designer or developer can drop the solution in place and be confident of the out come.   Yes this does need some altruistic contributions back to the community by accessibility solution specialists.  However just consider the overall result in the longer term.

In a way I have dream that in the next five years we can turn this around and have  accessibility issues approached in the same way we now do for web standards.

However in order to do this we need to start today, and make real changes in what we do.

Are you with me!

You know in accessibility circles we are constantly telling people using drop down CSS menus that when the menus are not visible  we shouldn’t be using display:none to achieve this.   We all know this one, right.  Just to refresh your memory, remember the display:none rule takes an element assigned right out of the picture completely,  for anyone using a screen reader the assigned content will just not “exist”.

This is all well and good.  Well that depends, maybe there is a case for the use of display:none afterall.

Sometimes we forget about the bigger picture, about the people we are building the sites for.  A few weeks ago at the UPA Perth (chapter in formation) meeting, Teressa from the Disability Services Commission demonstrated with her screen reader (JAWS) why the display:none is sometimes a good thing.

The Issue

Normally for a drop down menu you would code it as a unordered list as below, note I have removed the links for clarity:

<ul class="menu">
        <li>Home</li>
        <li>Products
           <ul class="submenu">
               <li>Sexy Product </li>
               <li>Highest Selling Product</li>
               <li>Mega Cool Product</li>
           </ul>
        </li>
        <li>Services</li>
        <li>About</li>
        <li>Contact</li>
</ul>

And you would use CSS menu based techniques (with a little Javascript for legacy browsers) to generally display the lower  menu (assigned the class submenu on the unordered list).  It follows before the menu is activated it would be hidden from view with the use of the following CSS that still makes the submenu content readable to a screen reader.

.submenu {
    position: absolute; 
    left: -10000px;
    top:-10000px;
 }

For those who are not familiar,  this rule pushes the element outside of the normal document flow visually – to the far left and up beyond the normal visual screen.  However it is still on the virtual screen, so it can be read by a screen reader.

It follows then that a screen reader will be able read all the menu items even the lower level ones and hence the user can transverse at their will round such a menu system.   Which is a good outcome, right?

The Downside – Information Overload

However consider not just a simple menu system (above), but say one from a government agency  consisting of  maybe hundreds of items.  Now think about  having to transverse such a menu.  To deal with those hundreds of items being read out.  As Teressa put it -”It’s just information overload”.

Unknowingly we have subjected our users with disabilities to a massive amount of information that even we are not subjected to.   You see even we see the the menus in chunks, bite sized pieces that we can mentally digest as they appear on a mouse or keyboard action.

The Solution

It’s really a simple thing to fix.  We just use display:none to hide all these large lower menu systems as required.  This means that they are no longer visible to the screen reader at all.  Which is exactly what we want.

.submenu {
     display:none;
 }

To supplement this what we should be doing is using progressional enhancement of the navigational system.  At the very least we should be  having the relevant  sub menus presented on the parent page or related sibling pages as a separate menu list.   This way anyone with disabilities or the like using just the top level menu buttons will still be able to navigate around the site.

So when we have way too much information on the CSS menu, maybe it’s time to consider an  alternative and remove it from the sight of the screen readers altogether. Forcing the navigation of the site by the regular page by page chunks of the menu navigation.

As you would expect this all comes down to testing with real people, people with the disabilities that you are finding solutions for.  You see sometimes with all the good intentions we think we are doing the right thing, but it turns out to be otherwise.

So what instances of disability best practice have you found to be a hinderance to people with a disability?

The Australian Web Industry Association is doing it again.  Putting on one of those must go to educational web events.  This one goes under the moniker of Ideas 5.

They are having an evening of discussions with leading Australian accessibility experts Roger Hudson and Andrew Downie.   Roger will be giving the low down on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2 (WCAG 2), while Andrew will be presenting some practical advice on PDF Accessibility.   There is also the usual round of networking with your web industry peers and a cash bar.

When: Wednesday 22nd April, from 7:00pm

Where: The Melbourne Hotel, 942 Hay Street, Perth

Cost: $40 for AWIA Members

Now if you are fully up to date, you will know that WCAG 2 has been ratified by the W3C, but it yet to be adopted here in Australia.  However I can say that it is very close to happening.   So this event would be an ideal time to get your brain space around the new accessibility guidelines.

Okay I know there is lot of PDF use out there as a cheap web publishing means, so it would also be a good idea to also come along and see first hand what type of issues that our bad PDF documents are causing accessibility wise on the web.   So you get two must see events for one!  Cool, eh.

Now what you waiting for go on, go get a ticket, yes right now. I hope to see you at Ideas5 to learn all about WCAG 2, PDF Accessibility and to have a drink or two.

In a few weeks there is going to be the biggest web event of the Western Australian calendar year. Not just the Edge of the Web conference, there is also Webjam, four workshops and the WA Web Awards all in one roller coaster week.

One of the keynote speakers and workshop presenter at the Edge of the Web conference is Derek Featherstone. Derek is particularly renown for his straight forward and often enlightening approach to accessibility.

The other day I took the opportunity to discuss with Derek his motivation, the future of accessibility and his forthcoming workshop.

MWNB:

You were recently in Australia for Web Directions South 2008, last month, and previous to that in 2006, and 2005. And now in a few weeks you are making the trip back down to Australia for the Edge of the Web. So what is it really about Australia that makes it so attractive, or are you just returning to get more triathlon tips?

DF:

Since my first trip down under in 2005, I’ve just wanted more and more! The timing always seems perfect – just as we’re starting to turn cold here at home (Ottawa, Canada) – I get to sneak away for a while to the beautiful weather. And, now that I’ve been there for several trips, it really does feel like another home. I’m always welcomed by wonderful people that are really switched on to accessibility, user experience and the web in general. For me, it was a no-brainer to accept the invitation to EOTW.

MWNB:

Recently, in Australia at least, there has been a lot of promotion and discussion on accessibility. To the point that in many circles the case for considering accessibility appears to have been won, allowing web designers and developers alike to relax their guard. This is turn has allowed the government and corporate sector to fall back on believing that accessibility issues are no longer important at all. Given Australia’s soft legislative approach to accessibility how does one get it back on the corporate agenda.

DF:

The case for considering accessibility appears to have been won

I’m not sure this is the case at all. I mean, we all say we consider it, but what do we actually do about it. Yes, I’ll admit that in many cases, the battle for “old school” accessibility may have been won, and there are scores of people that put that into practice every single day. But — we need to keep plugging away to move things beyond consideration into action. And – as we continue to innovate on the web, so too, we must with accessibility.

Getting it back on the corporate agenda might be somewhat difficult – I suspect a lot of people think they’re already doing accessibility really well. However, if we simply ask them if their innovations in accessibility are keeping up with the rest of the innovations they are pushing, I think a lot of people will answer that it hasn’t.

MWNB:

Within web application development circles there is a slow
movement off the corporate intranet of RIA systems into the web space. Traditionally this has been seen as a bad thing in terms of accessibility, as Flash and Silverlight have always been seen as the
evil ugly sister in terms of accessibility. But of late there seems to be a change in this perception in terms of accessibility. So is RIA the future over HTML?

DF:

Ah, to have a crystal ball

For certain contexts, both now and in the forseeable future, HTML of some sort is a perfectly capable format. For documents, certainly, and even simple web applications, what we have now works, and works quite well.

It can easily be argued that more interactive technologies such as Flash and Silverlight hold much promise and can be much more usable than the most static and traditional HTML format. E-learning and data visualization experiments are prime examples of how these technologies can be used to help communicate our messages in an engaging and interactive way to everyone.

There are loads of great examples of how these technologies come together to create interactive narratives at (the aptly named) http://www.interactivenarratives.org. The site was founded by Andrew DeVigal, who currently serves as the multimedia editor of The New York Times. The work he has done there is brilliant in terms of how it
engages the person viewing the site. What if we could take that same approach to web applications and create an immersive means to interact with data and with each other?

Yes. I’d still like that crystal ball, please.

MWNB:

Over the last two years the relevancy of the W3C and all it’s
forcoming guidelines has been drawn into question, time and time again. Of note in this area in terms of accessibility are the upcoming WCAG 2 and WAI-ARIA, are you confident these two are going
to make any impact at all.

DF:

Yes, actually, I am.

WCAG 2 takes a big step forward to provide guidance for making things accessible that aren’t necessarily HTML. It will help with creating accessible PDFs, Silverlight, Flash, and other technologies that are yet to come. For that reason alone, I’m excited about WCAG 2 — its technology agnostic approach will help developers meet accessibility needs.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) has been in the works for some time, and we’re finally seeing support in mainstream browsers and assistive technologies. I’ll be perfectly honest – we needed it to be ready about three years ago, so when it finally does come about, it’ll be most welcome. It is a missing piece to the puzzle of accessible RIAs right now, so I’m very happy to see continued progress on that front.

MWNB:

While you are in Australia next month you are presenting a workshop at the Edge of the Web. Hat tip by the way for your Web Directions Workshop. Is this workshop going to be the usual cold theory of accessibility 101 that we have seen trotted out by various accessibility consultants over the years or will it be different and have that “Featherstone” magic.

DF:

I’m ecstatic you enjoyed the full-day version in Sydney at Web Directions South — the workshop I’m doing at EOTW will be the same core content in a half-day. Our goal is to share experiences, ideas and solutions with designers and developers so that they can walk away with concepts and techniques that help them question their practices and those of their teams. Definitely not Accessibility 101, and hopefully magic!

MWNB:

Thanks Derek and I’ll see you at the Edge of the Web.

So if you are interested in accessibility or just feel you need to learn a little more on this critical subject, I would be getting along to Derek’s keynote Journey to the Edge of the Web and workshop Real World Accessibility for Ajax and Web Apps on the Edge of the Web.

Well the ISO standard ISO 13407 – the International Standard for Human Centred Design (gets a new number too! – ISO 9241-210) is being side shuffled it seems. Now it’s a standard for User Experience. Is this a good thing?

What is User Experience, really! Well for me it’s all the aspect of the front end user interaction, the emotional response to use the page, the effective usefulness, the accessibility, the audience’s perception of credibility of the site and the directive of the user towards the site’s goal. Usability (ISO 9241-11: Guidance on Usability) on the other hand is just an narrow aspect of this entire user experience

Seems that Tom Stewart agrees with me on the definitions and to top this off the ISO people feel that the standard is more about the experience than the ease of use. Fair call.

So we are basically cranking the entire process with an User Experience focus. I suppose the aim here is that business overall, not just the big players, will adopt the general aspect of UX and make it the core of their developmental and design process. One only hopes, I don’t see it happening around here too quick, but that’s another post, eh.

For some people this will just be a semantics over the term being used. So by Monday morning I expect all you usability consultants to fully up to speed with being UX consultants .

The other day I was floored and humbled as I regularly am during a session of usability testing for a site prototype. Up to this point the testing and functionality determination had gone well. Then someone put a massive road block in the way. There it was sticking up out of the ground blocking all findability of the core information on a site. Well maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it did make me think; which is good.

The Persona

Part of the root of the problem was the demographic of the main user segment’s persona. They where mainly low technology users, with extremely low computer use, but still significant use when required for certain tasks. This computer use was often their own time. Their work was very linear in nature with little room for any abstracted cognitive reasoning.

The Problem

Now we all assume you know how to use a select list (like below). You click on the arrow and select an item or tab, open and select.

But consider when the user doesn’t go near the select list, or will only use the default highlighted select. To them the out of sight items are hidden, invisible. They just can’t visually make the leap that the select list is in fact a number of selection items.

Hence all select lists, search or browse filters are deemed void.

The Solution

It’s really simple to fix, we thought, this one is just a matter of education, people will nut it out. But then the first time user is lost, what then. So out churned the solutions:

• We tried check boxes. They where partly successful, but if the checked state was presented as a “cross” then the user did a reverse selection to what they really desired.
• Next we tried a open, multiple line selection box, this worked when you could see the items they required. Otherwise it failed.
• Finally we ended up with a simple list of links (see below) to represent the items concerned. With this the users had not problem and progressed as expected.

The key here was the user demographic, and that you should assume nothing. So what show stoppers like this have you come against and how did you get around them?

Jordan Brock kindly videoed the two talks presented by Lisa and Rachel, encoded and uploaded them to Vimeo.

Rachel Cook, despite being 8 month pregnant, amused us all with tales of Silicon Valley and web 2.0 startups.

Ideas 4 – Rachel Cook at Ideas4 on Vimeo.

Where as Lisa Herrod on her birthday trekked all the way from the East Coast to present on holistic usability and accessibility with Usability More Than Skin Deep, Proving that checklist help but real people should be part of the equation.

Ideas 4 – Lisa Herrod at Ideas4 on Vimeo.

Thanks go to both Rachel and Lisa. You really made for an awesome evening.