Anyone who’s looked for it will know that useful accessibility information is scattered across many places online, sometimes hidden in paid-access academic journals or white papers. Even academic researchers find the availability of scientific accessibility data frustrating.

W3C WAI of course provides some excellent resources, but its level and scope of publication activity is necessarily limited by funding and policy constraints. Organisations like WebAIM and The Paciello Group also provide authoritative collections of resources but they too are constrained in what they can produce. So the very fact that there are diverse reliable sources of accessibility information means we need a way of joining them all together – a way that’s not Google. I suspect most readers will have come across articles that – well – aren’t quite so helpful about promoting best practice in accessibility. So in connecting the good stuff, how do we also limit the chances of myths and inaccuracies being perpetuated?

A11yBOK and eAccess+ Hub

The ongoing Accessibility Body of Knowledge (a11yBOK for short) discussions that gained publicity after CSUN 2012 have led to an early proof of concept web site (a11ybuzz), with a supporting discussion forum on what the resource should contain and how it should be organised and progressed. Some thoughtful contributions have emerged from Karl Groves and Olivier Nourry in particular, and the effort seems to be building up quite some momentum.

At the same time, the eAccess+ network has been working on a similar idea –the eAccess+ Hub. eAccess+ is a network of 25 organisations active in promoting e-accessibility, funded by the European Commission to raise e- accessibility awareness and activity across EU member states. Production of a central accessibility resource for different stakeholder groups is one of the network’s expected deliverables under the terms of its funding. The Hub started life as a wiki, and at the time of writing we acknowledge has evolved without much control over writing style or information architecture. So the eAccess+ team are fully aware that there is much work to do on improving user experience!

The fact that these two efforts are underway – and there are bound to be other similar activities – illustrates the problem of fragmentation of activity. There’s a high chance that each new effort to produce a definitive accessibility portal intended to unite all pre-existing resources will have the opposite effect of adding just one more voice to the crowd (perfectly illustrated by XKCD).

What do we do next?

So, as a member of the eAccess+ network who have a responsibility to produce something of this nature, but also sensitive to the efforts that others have put into the work that’s happened already, I’m wondering how we can best harness the combined energies of a11yBOK and eAccess+ (and any other similar effort) and synchronise efforts to ensure that we collectively produce something genuinely worthwhile – and sustainable – as a resource we can all trust.

I’m writing this the night before the W4A 2012 conference in Lyon, which will be the biggest annual gathering of the web accessibility research community. I want to take the opportunity during W4A coffee breaks and at the W4A Camp on April 18 the day after W4A to have a discussion about this topic. If you’re around, please come along, and give your thoughts to the following questions (or others I haven’t thought of!).

• Should the eAccess+ Hub and a11ybuzz co-exist?
• If so, what should be their relative aims and relationship?
• What’s the best format for presenting resources to be included (visible information, metadata)?
• What’s the best way for maintaining quality control of resources in a manageable way (dealing with new submissions and editing existing content)?
• How should we best provide wider access to academic research?

Please share your thoughts – I’ll provide a follow up comment or post on discussions after the event has finished.

Edit: This LinkedIn discussion provided further insightful views on an a11yBOK, including the question of whether something new is even needed, or whether we should focus on improving what we already have.

However, in academia, there’s a small, yet bright and enthusiastic community of people tackling various accessibility research challenges (and often injecting inclusive design into the teaching curriculum too). Too often, traditional research dissemination models mean it’s a long time (if ever) before the outcomes of this research make it into the public domain, and academia has work to do to adapt to better use social networking services to share plans and discoveries more quickly and effectively.

So to redress the balance slightly, here’s an overview of some of the groups I know of in the UK who are doing interesting and high-impact web/ICT accessibility research – starting from the north and working south (of course!).

University of Dundee

My own place of employment, the School of Computing at Dundee University has a long history of research in digital inclusion for disabled and older people . We’re interested in exploring how to improve existing tech to be more inclusive (and teaching others to do the same), and developing new tech to help reduce social exclusion.

As an example, I was recently internal PhD examiner for Suzanne Prior‘s thesis defence, which explored how user centred design techniques can be modified to work with people with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPIs). This work has implications on how AAC devices can be created with greater input from end users; but there are also exciting opportunities to learn more about how web sites and other ICTs can be designed to work better for people with SSPIs.

Teesside University

In the northeast of England, in Middlesbrough, Teesside University’s Accessibility Research Centre is a very active group of e-accessibility researchers, led by Elaine Pearson and Steve Green. They have a focus on accessible learning, investigating topics around the concept of an inclusive virtual learning environment, ranging from learner profiling and adaptive learning environments to aids to teaching web accessibility to enhanced transcript generation tools.

University of York

Down the A19, the University of York HCI Group has a long track record in research focusing on technology, disabled and older people. Accessibility researchers Helen Petrie, Alistair Edwards, Chris Power and colleagues are fellow network members of eAccess+ network, participate in the i2Web project and were previously partners in EU4ALL, a European project focusing on accessible e-learning.

University of Manchester

In the University of Manchester Web Ergonomics lab, Simon Harper and his colleagues work at the intersection of web science and digital inclusion. They’ve carried out several accessibility projects of interest, including transcoding web content to improve non-visual accessibility (SADiE) , accessibility of dynamic web applications (SASWAT), and RIAM, which explored the convergence of mobile web usability and web accessibility; in particular the similarities between data input problems experienced by mobility-impaired desktop PC users and mobile device users on the move.

Loughborough University

Loughborough’s a hotbed of activity in accessibility research, across different subject groups. We’re currently working with colleagues from Computing Science and Information Science on accessibility support for older people as part of the SUS-IT project,.

London

In the London area, there’s:

• The Centre for HCI Design at City University has an active HCI research group with strong interests in accessibility. They also have a consultancy arm, and researcher Makalya Lewis is the driving force behind a11yLDN, the first UK accessibility unconference.
• Middlesex University’s Design for All research team is led by Gill Whitney and Suzette Keith, a colleague on the SUS-IT project. They also set up the UK’s first Masters in Digital Inclusion.
• User-centred design researchers at Brunel University have been looking at the accessibility of online forms to older people, as part of the DIADEM project.

Southampton University

On the south coast, Southampton University’s Learning Societies lab contributes an accessibility focus to Southampton’s wider web science research activity. Led by Mike Wald and EA Draffan, their recent projects have included LexDis, a resource on accessibility, Web 2.0 tools and e-learning, and the JISC Techdis toolbar, a browser extension that can help to improve page accessibility on-the-fly.

Who else?

There’s a lot of research on accessible e-learning taking place in the Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology, and I know several other people who have been active in web accessibility research over the years – people like Neil Witt (@dr_neil) at Plymouth University and Sarah Lewthwaite (@slewth) at Nottingham University. I should also mention Techdis, the UK’s advisory service to the post-16 education sector on disability, technology and education, regularly supports and publishes work aimed at improving accessibility of online educational environments and experiences.

But I know I’ll have missed out a project or group doing interesting accessibility work – so apologies if that’s you! Please add details using the comments feature at the end of this post.

The more people know that there is an active and eager accessibility research community in the UK, the better the conversation will be between those who are doing the research and those who stand to benefit from its outcomes – which bodes well for influencing future web accessibility research directions.

The prospect of escaping cold and wet northern Europe to spend a few days enjoying the early spring sun in southern California, hearing about developments in inclusive design and access technology, while networking with some of the brightest and best people in the field, seems unbelieveably appealing! (Especially if combining the trip with a visit to SXSW, as many are doing).

But for those of us in academia, in the UK, and likely elsewhere outside North America, right now it’s difficult to justify attendance at CSUN on academic grounds – which in turn impacts on whether we can afford to finance a long and expensive trip. Like higher education around the world, research impact drives funding in the UK. For those of us without healthy conference budgets, we need to be able to justify the impact of presenting a paper at a particular international conference, compared to alternatives, or saving our work for presentation in a journal paper.

‘Impact’ is a constantly changing metric; as of now we’re still unclear as to how impact of our research will be measured for the next assessment under the UK Higher Education Research Excellence Framework – the mechanism under which core research funding is allocated to universities in the UK…although given today’s difficult financial climate and the political battleground that is higher education, who knows what will drive future research funding?

What helps us in gauging the impact level of a conference is a rigorous peer-review system for submitted papers. We need to know there is strong competition for paper acceptance, that our work has been scrutinised by our peers and that the work in the papers presented meet the highest standards of academic rigour. I took part in the CSUN review system this year for the first time, and found the review system much less thorough than for other conferences I’ve reviewed for, that  also seek to attract good accessibility and inclusive design research.

Let me be clear that I’m not saying here that the review system means the papers presented at CSUN are likely to be poor – far from it, from the schedule, there look to be some terrific sessions planned. I also want to be clear that I’m not questioning the value of the conference. It’s enduring presence seems to me to be a testament to its ability to attract great people and influential talks.

For researchers, CSUN should be an opportunity to make influential accessibility advocates in industry, government, the non-profit sector (and indeed others in academia) aware of their work, receiving feedback, entering into dialogue that hopefully leads to greater impact of the research being presented. As to impact beyond the accessibility community, that’s not something I can judge from afar, but I assume the conference has great appeal to those new to the field and seeking to learn about accessibility.

The problem is providing evidence of impact of presenting work at CSUN to those who decide how to measure impact and influence of our research. Accessibility and inclusive design research, like much of HCI research, seems to have a tough battle in demonstrating impact within our parent field of computing science where other subjects are dominant (have a look at this list of high impact factor CS journals reported by the Times Higher Education Supplement).

So we have to be careful about our publishing strategy. Budgeting to attend conferences is increasingly tricky, making those with comparatively high publication ratings obviously more attractive. CHI is the daddy, but there are other good places to publish, such as W4A (disclosure – I’m on the steering committee), ASSETS, ICCHP and Interact. With that in mind, CSUN unfortunately has difficulty competing.

I try not to get too driven by impact factor numbers – for me, the real value of a conference is a place to meet peers and friends, present and receive feedback on my work, and find out – and be inspired by – what others are doing. But when finances are driven by someone else’s definition of impact, how do we persuade research funders outside the US of CSUN’s high impact levels on the accessibility community? What could the conference do – if indeed they should do anything? Are you a UK academic who’s been to CSUN (and I know there are several), and found it rewarding?

Or maybe I should just quit moaning and get on with my work?

Don’t break Fix the Web

This week, Fix the Web was launched, and attracted some excellent publicity. It’s an initiative that is a potentially significant step towards empowering people who experience accessibility barriers on line to report them in a way that might increase the chances of someone fixing the problem. One great difficulty in evaluation and repair of the sheer mass of web content we have today is helping people who experience accessibility barriers identify them as such and tell someone who might be able to make a difference.

Not all disabled web users are web developers; it’s unlikely many people will have heard of WCAG, let alone be able to describe a problem with a web page with reference to WCAG success criteria. But Fix the Web gives a voice to someone with a disability to say “hey, I couldn’t add an item to my shopping cart”, and have that problem passed on to volunteer accessibility specialists who can investigate, and back up that real-world problem with a technical description of the underlying code or design defect. And the more people who identify the same problem, the louder the voice.

While Fix the Web may not be able to actually repair the page (though other crowd-sourcing approaches have taken this step, such as IBM’s Social Accessibility project ), it does give web site owners evidence of real customers being unable to use the site for its intended purpose AND informed technical information that might help them fix it.

However, there’s a problem. As pointed out on Twitter today by Eric Eggert (@yatil), Fix the Web ‘s own web site has accessibility issues. This, it’s argued, may lead to a loss of trust by the very people it’s meant to serve – disabled people who think “well, if Fix the Web can’t make their own site accessible, how can they tell other people to fix the problem I report?” This would indeed be a huge problem, if the only way to report barriers was through the site, and some people were prevented from doing so.

But it’s not. The great challenge of Fix the Web is reaching out to people who experience accessibility problems, who have never heard of Fix the Web, never heard of WCAG and who might never have considered reporting barriers. Installing browser toolbars in public access PCs is one approach, encouraging people to email or tweet details of problems is another.

The accessibility of the Fix the Web site should be as good as possible – of course it should, and it needs to be, soon. However, the credibility and viability of the initiative should be based on the quality of the reporting system – the awareness it raises amongst disabled web users, the skills of the volunteer accessibility specialists in following up problems, and the quality of the communication with web site owners.

Casting aspersions on the whole system based on the accessibility of its own site – which is, after all, an intermediary in a wider communication chain – is a waste of energy, particularly by accessibility advocates. Let’s not break Fix the Web before it has a chance to make a difference.

User-centred Design where it’s needed most

On the same day this issue was being discussed on Twitter, I attended a presentation by Simon Judge, an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) specialist working at Barnsley Hospital in northern England. I knew Simon’s name from various open source accessibility initiatives such as OATSoft and MAAVIS; he was in Dundee as a guest of my colleague Dr Annalu Waller, who leads a research group on AAC.  While a busy day meant I didn’t have a chance to speak to him, it was interesting to hear his work on exploring AAC user needs and preferences (and enjoy some vintage 70s TV – Toby Churchill demonstrating assistive technology on Tomorrow’s World!)

In listening to Simon’s talk about work on the Devices for Dignity project, I was again struck by the relationship of accessibility and communication, and why we haven’t quite got things right yet.

It’s impossible to overestimate the positive impact AAC systems can have on people with severe communication difficulties. Yet, for the importance of such systems,  there have been  long term problems with AAC systems relating to their usability and appropriateness for the person whom they are supposed to be helping.  The problem seems to stem from the medical context in which they’re usually given to people – without real appreciation of the environment or personal contexts in which they might be used. Unlike choosing, say, a mobile phone, AAC users are likely to be limited in their knowledge of what choices are available to them, and normally there will be an intermediary (AAC professional) involved in the selection process. Practical issues such as reliability and durability can reduce trust in a device that ultimately is the difference between being able to communicate and not.

Simon has spent time speaking to AAC users and professionals in order to understand the similarities and differences in their perspectives; generally users are more negative in their views. So clearly there are issues in usability of such technologies. On the surface, the apparent limited use of user-centred design by the AAC and assistive technology field might seem surprising, but traditional UCD techniques can be difficult to apply in the field of AAC design particularly since access to users early in the design stage might be challenging.

This is an ongoing area of study, but work like Simon’s, and that of Annalu, Graham Pullin and colleagues here in Dundee, will hopefully lead to a more user-centred, more context-aware design process in creating genuinely usable and useful assistive technology.

Web accessibility advocates may recognise parallels with screen reading technology too – so be forgiving of people who are not intimately familiar with their AT, and be conservative in your assumptions of the role a user’s AT plays in enhancing the quality of their web interactions.

Lots of effort, time and money has been spent on developing and promoting e-accessibility – ways in which digital content and applications can be created and used in a way that disabled people have equitable access to services, information and entertainment. As we all know, despite these efforts, there’s evidence that the arguments promoting inclusive design have only had limited success in persuading organisations to act to improve the accessibility of their web sites. In some cases understanding of the ‘what’ and ‘why’ – never mind the ‘how’ – of accessibility is still frustratingly low.

Aim of eAccess+

The key aim of the eAccess+ network is to involve as many stakeholders as possible – policy-makers, organisations in industry and the public sector, groups supporting people with accessibility needs, and disabled people themselves. We’ll contact organisations, ask them about their views and approaches to e-accessibility, listening to them to understand more about any resistance to e-accessibility they may have. We’ll answer questions honestly, allay fears, provide evidence where evidence exists, and generally support organisations in thinking and acting more inclusively in their use of the Web and other ICTs.

Who’s involved?

The network is led by the Johannes Kepler University Linz, and consists of 25 accessibility-aware organisations from across Europe, representing academia, industry, the public sector, and the non-profit sector. Since a key aim is to promote and support adoption of W3C standards such as WCAG, ATAG and WAI-ARIA, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is also represented. I’m pleased to be representing the University of Dundee as one of the network partners.

What we’re going to do

There are three main areas of focus:

1. Web accessibility
2. Interactive Digital TV
3. Public information systems – such as self service kiosks and ATMs

The aim of the network isn’t to rewrite guidelines, or develop new tools, or do large scale evaluations.

Instead, we want to:

• provide a central resource hub pointing people to useful and important resources about e-accessibility. Our first task will be to build up some resource pages before we share the hub with the wider world – with the main focus on building it up to answer the questions organisations ask us about why and how to improve e-accessibility. Examples might include evidence to support the business case, and best practice in including accessibility in procurement processes.
• grow a network of e-accessibility advocates and experts who can spread the message of why e-accessibility is important, and help people achieve it. That starts with the 25 member organisations, but eAccess+ will expand to include associate members, who will in turn help to widen the support network.

From my perspective, this firstly means becoming even more familiar with all the good work that has already happened in the field (I’m an accessibility researcher but even so I regularly discover new e-accessibility projects that I think I should have known about years ago!), and secondly doing as much as possible to grow the network by talking about e-accessibility to as many people as possible in as many places as possible.

In particular, that means attending events where there’s an opportunity to talk about e-accessibility to people who might not be as aware as they should be – particularly those in industry and the public sector; from  policy-makers to developers.

Get involved!

There are lots of good things going on in e-accessibility -but until now, so much of this knowledge has been limited to specific geographical regions or groups of people. What we need most now is to join up and share all this knowledge. If you want to help, contact me, follow @eAccessPlus on Twitter or visit the eAccess+ web site.

The format of the session was that each panellist was provided with a few minutes to present a position statement on accessibility in today’s practice, and this was followed by questions and discussion. In the short time available to them, my fellow panelists each took a specific angle on accessibility:

• Liam McGee (Communis) argued that usability is ‘accessibility for sissies’, and illustrated how he viewed accessibility as a term that covered many objectives of usability and search-engine optimisation.
• Amy Chen (Senior Usability Secialist at Oracle) described how a large technology vendor can adopt accessibility as part of the design, development and implementation of their technology products.
• Rolf Molich (DialogDesign). As a highly respected and highly influential figure in the usability and HCI field, Rolf took on the mantle of devil’s advocate, arguing that the message of accessibility advocates can sometimes be obfuscated, disguising general good practice in usable and user-centred design as complexly-worded accessibility guidelines.

The role of the accessibility specialist in the usability profession

I decided to focus on what I saw, based on my experience over the last 10 years, were the key roles that an accessibility specialist should perform – whether as a member of a web/software development team, or as an advisor to a large organisation procuring and implementing technology to help it perform its day-to-day activities. These were:

1. Technical advisor – someone who understands the principles behind and implementation techniques of accessibility guidelines, and how to evaluate whether they have been successfully met. Someone who is up to speed on the accessibility benefits and shortcomings of relevant programming languages and digital information formats, whether established or emerging.
2. Motivator – someone who generates empathy for the objectives of accessible design, by encouraging others to appreciate the diversity of ways in which people access and use technology, and the impact accessibility (or lack of) can have on them. Someone who shows that accessibility is something that can inspire innovation and spark creativity, rather than constraining what can be done to the mundane and unexciting. (at this point I had to yet again plug Graham Pullin’s excellent book Design meets Disability )
3. Translator – someone who can effectively present accessibility requirements in their appropriate context – from legislative requirements to practical, pragmatic design requirements. Someone who can ensure that accessibility requirements expressed in an invitation to tender or internal policy are achievable, unambiguous and, if met, genuinely lead to more inclusive technology. Organisations who express accessibility requirements in a coherent and appropriate way are more likely to encourage technogy suppliers to meet those needs. I recounted here examples of where I’ve seen poorly expressed accessibility requirements in a technology specification that could not feasibly be met let alone tested.
4. Gerontechnologist – perhaps my most left-field suggestion, I think accessibility specialists should recognise the particular benefits of involving older people in user centred design, for the added-value that they are likely to provide as participants in requirements gathering activities, and evaluators throughout the design lifecycle. Arguably accessibility guidelines focus on the more extreme end of impairment, at the expense of those with less severe, but multiple, impairments. Evaluating with disabled people is important, and rewarding, but recruitment and scheduling can sometimes be difficult. So the unpredictability of the presence of any age-related sensory, dexterity or cognitive impairments make recruitment of older participants for participatory design and usability testing a particularly attractive option, particularly if resources are tight (see Henny Swan’s comments on the value of testing a web browser with older people).

I offered these definitions as a way of helping people decide whether an accessibility specialist was indeed a specialist, or whether this was a role a usability professional could or should take on.

Discussion

The focus of the discussion with the audience was, from my perspective, largely focused on the challenge of selling accessibility, a topic that is always near the top of the discussion charts and which has received much attention in recent blog posts from Gary Barber and Vlad Alexander.

It’s hard to argue against the objective of accessibility, but in a financially driven context, we’re all too aware that accessibility can sometimes be perceived as a luxury, as a lot of effort for a small group of people. Several members of the audience gave examples of how they have found it difficult to persuade others of the value of investing in accessibility considerations.

Of course, one way to counter that argument is to downplay accessibility as a separate objective – most of good practice in accessibility is general good practice in user-centred design; the SEO overlap is also a powerful argument. That’s more difficult to sell when there is obvious additional work to do, like synchronised captioning.

We can also argue that for every group of disabled people who benefit from a particular accessibility intervention, there is another group of ‘situationally disabled’ people who will also benefit at a particular time and place. But how do we provide hard figures for the number of unexpected beneficiaries of accessibility interventions? And isn’t it an awkward dilemma for an accessibility advocate to be faced with: providing hard statistics that help to calculate cost-benefit of an accessibility requirement when that effort may actually lead someone to justify exclusion?

The most powerful tool seems to be more examples of how accessibility is done well, and in particular how it can spark or encourage innovation. There are plenty examples out there of where this has happened, and it was great to hear that WAI is collecting such examples for an addition to their suite of resources arguing for accessibility. We need to be able to show sceptics examples of where innovation in accessible web design can genuinely lead to benefits for end-user and provider, because if we can’t, it makes advocating inclusive design that much more difficult.

What does all this mean for the usability profession? Do we need accessibility specialists, or is this knowledge and skills that all usability professionals who acknowledge human diversity should expect to have? What do you think?

Here are my thoughts.

Why tags?

A tag is a useful piece of metadata – i.e. a description of some content. Tagging allows us to refind the content, and allows others to find it more easily. Tagging also allows us to find other related content. Aggregation works in many ways – I can describe a resource using more than one tag, I can describe lots of related resources using the same tag. And so can others people.

Tags can be abbreviations, and therefore provide meaningful information and at the same time saving space when there isn’t much available (like in a tweet). I think that the particular restrictions provided by Twitter, and the growing use of hashtags, have brought the issues of a suitable abbreviated accessibility tag to the fore (hence why in this post I use the Twitter hashtag notation when I quote a tag).

A tag for accessibility

There are lots of problems with using ‘accessibility’ as a tag, as a single word description of content.

• It’s a long word – 13 characters, almost 10% of a tweet.
• It’s hard to spell correctly (google for ‘accessability’ or ‘accesibility’ or ‘acessiblity’ to see what I mean’).
• The term accessibility means lots of things to lots of people. I use it to mean “something related to disabled people and the web or other ICT“. Others might use it to describe what I would call ‘availability’ or ‘affordability’.

So when we need to tag something as being related to accessibility, and space is tight, it would be good to have a short tag that we can all agree on to represent accessibility as “something to do with disabled people and the web or ICT“.

‘a11y’ versus other options

#a11y has been used as a tag to mean accessibility for a while. It has benefits:

• It’s short.
• It follows an ICT-oriented convention of shortening long words by using a format AnnB where A is the first letter of the word, B is the last letter of the word, and nn is the number of letters between the first and last letter. So we have a11y for accessibility, i18n for internationalisation, and l10n for localisation.
• It’s used by lots of people in the accessibility community, so a search for ‘a11y’ finds useful and relevant content.

It also has shortcomings:

• It uses a rather geeky convention, so lots of people don’t know what it means.
• It’s awkward to type (for example on an iPhone, switching between alphabetical and numerical key screens)
• It’s easy to misspell, mistaking the ’11′ for ‘ll’. I’ve tagged more than one tweet as ‘ally’ (as in Sheedy or McCoist)…
• It may not sound meaningful when spoken by a screen reader.

So some alternatives have been proposed:

• #access – in comparison to #a11y, it’s longer, and only marginally more recognisable as relating to the concept of accessibility we want to define.
• #axs or #AxS – this has been proposed recently as an alternative, and is shorter than #a11y, and less prone to mis-spelling (although are we supposed to use the capital letters or not? It shouldn’t matter, but may confuse some people) or mis-pronunciation. But I’d argue it is no more recognisable as representing ‘accessibility’ to a newcomer, and less recognisable for those who already use #a11y.
• #ax - this could represent ‘accessible experience’ in the same way that ‘ux’ is reasonably well recognised as ‘user experience’. But I’d argue it’s almost too short to be useful, and (stating the obvious to US readers), it’s already a word – an implement for cutting down trees.

And, for me the biggest problem – none of the above are in widespread use right now. So if we were to adopt one as the new tag for accessibility, it would then make it that mcuh more awkward to find useful existing content already tagged with #a11y?  None of the above options have compelling advantages over #a11y.

The question of whether a tag should be understandable and recognisable to people is interesting, as I’d argue that when we tag in Twitter, the primary purpose of the tag is to be machine readable, not human-understandable. A hashtag in Twitter is useful because a Twitter client can automatically do useful things with it:

• a Twitter feed can be set up to retrieve all tweets with a particular hashtag;
• A hashtag could be displayed as a hyperlink to the results of a search query for all tweets with the hashtag.

Ah, you say, but how would you know to use #a11y in your searches? My answer is that I learnt about the term by reading tweets from people I follow who talk about accessibility, and who used #a11y to tag their tweets. Think about how you build up a subject-specific network in Twitter. You start by following people you know provide interesting tweets on that subject. Then you follow people they retweet, or mention. Then, you might start to search for tweets on a specific subject, by which time you should have got a sense of which tags are used by your network.

And let’s not forget about hashtag definition sites like ‘what the hashtag‘, which do provide a way to store definitions of tags.

Summary

So, in my opinion:

1. Longer, descriptive tags are best when space is not constrained, and certainly more human-friendly.
2. If space is constrained, #a11y is currently the best (or least worst) option for an abbreviated tag for accessibility.
3. Let’s not make already-tagged content harder to find by trying to find and promote a ‘better’ accessibility tag.
4. But it would be much, much better, for Twitter at least, if we could tag tweets outside the 140 character limit, as Jared Smith suggested. Tags, after all, are metadata, and not content.

Firstly, apologies to everyone who received one of these messages and who was inconvenienced by it.

This is a known scam, and there are recognised steps to take if it happens to you. But it made me realise how awkward it is to clear up the mess an incident like this causes, and the impact of the breach of trust that inevitably occurs when people think that I am sending them malicious or junk messages:

• It’s embarrassing for me, as people are at best annoyed with me because a stupid message was sent from my Twitter account, and at worst have their security details compromised because they trusted what I ‘apparently’ sent them.
• It may affect my reputation, and lead to people unfollowing me, or otherwise unengaging with me because they don’t trust me any more.
• It wastes the time of people who are decent enough to alert me, either by direct message, twitter post or email, to say that they believe I sent a dodgy message. 20 people contacted me to tell me about today’s problem, and I am grateful to each of you for taking the time to do so.

I sent an apologetic tweet as soon as I realised what happened (I thought it better not to use DM to apologise!). But people continued to respond after that. I apologised again 7 hours later to catch those who hadn’t seen the first tweet.

So apologising effectively is really difficult! Twitter is a global community covering all time zones, so people might miss my apology tweet because they were asleep, or away from their PC, or just because it was lost in the crowd. Yet the personal nature of a DM is much more likely to compel someone to act on it (firstly to discover it’s spam, and secondly tell me so).

So what’s the most efficient way of telling everyone “I’ve been hacked. I’m sorry. Please ignore my recent DM”? Should I temprarily change my Twitter profile’s description (which people might not notice)? Or send regular apology tweets (potentially annoying followers who already know)? Or should Twitter provide some additional way of allowing me to alert everyone with information of this nature?

This is of course likely to be a problem for any social networking/communication system that has exploitable security flaws – how we go about cleaning up the damage caused by spammers to human relationships. Thoughts are welcome via the comments facility – and thanks to WordPress’ use of Akismet, uninvited spammers are likely to be kept well away from the conversation.

Lesley McIntyre’s work aims to explore how architects can be provided with tools to help them understand better the impact of design features on the navigability of a building to visually impaired people. As with the Web, the attitude of architecture towards accessibility and considering disabled people in design is typically positive, but may be defined – and probably perceived as being constrained – by the need to comply with legislation (in the UK, “DDA compliance” can sound as doom-laden to architects as it does to web designers!) rather than as an opportunity to improve the quality and usability of a design. So there is a need to help architects understand the problems faced by people with sensory, physical and cognitive impairments when navigating the built environment, and how design can help to minimise the chances of these problems occurring.

Part of Lesley’s work involved asking a number of people, each with some form of visual impairment, to navigate through an unfamiliar building, and tracking their journey to identify the location of barriers to progress. She now has a rich collection of data and is working on ways in which this can be presented to architects in a meaningful and helpful way. The aim is to use this data – whether presented through videos, illustrated scenarios, guidelines, manuals, whatever -to help architects avoid making incorrect assumptions about disability, and instead give them a more accurate understanding of the common – and different – problems that face visually impaired people when navigate a building that might be unfamiliar to them (which, let’s not forget, might include sighted people trying to leave a smoke-filled building in an emergency). In turn, the hope is that this knowledge helps them to avoid well-recognised design pitfalls and inspires them to think of new solutions to make the built environment more accessible.

People who create, design and construct objects, whether physical or virtual, benefit from appreciating the diversity of their target audience, which in turn gives  meaning to accessibility-related design guidelines, and thus a sense of the constraints and freedom that such design guidelines offer. As Ann McMeekin (@pixeldiva) and Graham Pullin have both recently and brilliantly demonstrated, designing for disability can lead to great design rather than compromised design.

I’m looking forward to exploring how web accessibility can learn from (and contribute to) Lesley’s work.

In the early days of web accessibility, post WCAG 1.0 release, published surveys of the accessibility of large numbers of web sites were relatively rare (I’m distinguishing these from reviews of a single site conducted by or on behalf of the development team, with the specific aim of identifying and repairing barriers present). So whenever a new survey emerged, it usually provided informative data on levels of conformance against WCAG 1.0, which took time achieve any significant impact on the web design industry. The data allowed us to see how particular sectors were faring, and which checkpoints were most frequently not met.

The publicity surrounding a published accessibility survey that presented data showing how poorly sites were dealing with WCAG conformance could also be claimed to raise awareness of web accessibility in general, and more specifically shame the organisations in question into doing something about the barriers present on their site. The former effect probably did take place, although I’d like to see concrete evidence that surveys actually have a positive effect on the organisations whose sites were reviewed.

(Indeed, there have been concerns that surveys may have a negative impact on ‘usable accessibility.’ If the methodology used focuses excessively on a technical measure of accessibility that becomes a highly public ‘official’ ranking of each site’s performance – with rewards for finishing high up a ranking, there would be understandable pressures for site developers to design to satisfy the surveyors and not disabled people.)

Many published surveys have had severe limitations in methodology and scope – frequently conducted using automated tools only, using a subset of WCAG, and often of the Home page only; and very, very rarely have researchers extended their survey to contact each site’s organisation for follow-up data (a notable exception was a study by Ronald Milliman in 2002). Several published surveys have appeared as academic papers in a wide variety of journals (not just computing/HCI). As the topic was initally relatively uncovered in academic literature, an investigation into the accessibility of web sites in a particular sector – be it higher education, government, e-commerce, tourism, or whatever – made for an attractive publication topic. I should know, I wrote a couple! But at least in the early days we had some data to help say ‘ hey, we all need to do a bit better here’.

Over time, we’ve had some very high impact surveys, such as the UK DRC Formal Investigation into web accessibility, published in 2004, and which combined automated testing with manual inspections; evaluations with disabled people and interviews with web developers. Just recently, at the Accessing Higher Ground 2009 conference, Terrill Thompson presented data from a longitudinal study that compared progress towards accessible content between organisations who had received technical support and those who hadn’t.

Additionally, publications have presented accessibility survey data as part of other valuable research activity, for example when testing new methodologies and tools for large scale accessibility evaluation (important in the real world for regulatory bodies as well as organisations with many web pages), and testing how effective particular evaluation methodologies could be in minimising false positives and false negatives (check the proceedings of W4A for papers by researchers such as Markel Vigo, Giorgio Brajnik and Bambang Parmanto).

Putting aside limitations of scope and evaluation methodology, surveys have not been so good at focusing on content providers and the content provision circumstances. This is to some extent understandable, as it’s easier to run an automated tool across multiple sites than identify, contact and gather data from all the content providers for each site.

Some exceptions are mentioned above – to add to these, my thesis focused on the impact of accessibility audits on the recipient organisations, and my research yielded a limited amount of information on how organisations responded. A few surveys have specifically looked perceptions on and attitudes to web accessibility (for example Lazar et al’s 2004 paper on Improving web accessibility: a study of webmaster perceptions and Bloor Research’s 2009 survey), but we still don’t know very much about the organisational reasons as to why accessibility of a particular web site is not as good as it could be.

As time goes by, therefore, the impact of a survey that presents data on web accessibility diminishes, unless it adds something new to our understanding of the problem. In 2009, it’s not enough to simply claim that results are ‘disappointing’, and that web content authors must ‘do better’. WCAG has been here for 10 years, so it’s not as if we have no best practice; and people and resources promoting and supporting web accessibility are easy to find. A failure to acknowledge in a survey report that that this has been a problem for many years does a disservice to everyone who has been advancing the cause of web accessibility (even if it also gives another stark reminder that there’s much work to do).

So if you conduct a survey of web sites and find accessibility barriers, don’t stop at reporting conformance levels. Find out why the barriers exist. Is it a lack of awareness or training amonst the providers of the content you surveyed? Is it a lack of involvement of disabled people in the design process? Is it a lack of resources; of money; a lack of will, or lack of prominence of accessibility in an organisation’s business practice and philosophy? Is it sub-standard authoring tools, content management systems; quality assurance systems? Is there another reason?

And whatever you find out, please share it with us!