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?

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.

So I thought I’d summarise the points I made in my talk (my slides are available on Slideshare). Why do web authoring tools have an increasingly important role to play in supporting web accessibility, and why is it so important that we talk about authoring tool accessibility in the right way?

With the web design profession, the challenge was (and still is?) to encourage a web-standards, accessible approach to design. They (should!) have the freedom to make an informed choice about the authoring tools they use – it’s a case of using them correctly. Where authoring tool accessibility becomes most relevant to them is when these professionals are creating web sites with authoring capability – i.e. for others to use to publish content.

However, the democratisation of the Web as a publishing medium, made possible by this Web 2 phenomenon of social networking, user-generated content and rich internet applications, means there is a huge number of people who publish web content who have never picked up a web design book. People who don’t know or care about HTML tags and elements, and don’t have any real awareness of what we recognise as ‘usability’ and ‘accessibility’, beyond perhaps a vague notion of ‘user-friendliness.’ And why should they? For them, the tools they use – whether Facebook, a corporate content management system, Word’s “save as Web page’ option, WordPress, Youtube, whatever – have a huge responsibility in supporting accessible authoring.

Authoring tool accessibility can be defined as:

1. Is is possible for the tool to produce accessible content?
2. Can a disabled person use the tool to create content?
3. Can a non-expert use the tool to produce accessible content?

All questions are valid, all are important, and the answer to all should be YES. But, generally, where any work has been done in this area, it’s been to answer question 1 or 2. In particular, there’s been a fair bit of activity on authoring tool accessibility from the perspective of supporting disabled people in using social networking web sites (reports from AbilityNet and the AFB Access World are two examples).

But by comparison, very little attention has been paid to the third, and for me the most critical question. Why is this?

While some useful guidelines exist (namely W3C ATAG), version 1 is nearly 10 years old, and written for developers of authoring tools. So they are programmer focused, not easily usable by someone who wants to assess an authoring tool for accessibility support; conducting an ATAG review can be challenging (Joe Clark’s ATAG review of WordPress was as much a review of the guidelines as the authoring tool). The last section is particularly difficult to follow without a high level of technical knowledge, but thankfully this is being addressed in ATAG 2.

WCAG is the ‘sexy beast’ of accessibility (to quote @iheni). So ATAG generally doesn’t get a mention when people talk about authoring tools and accessibility support – instead, by asking only for WCAG conformance, the focus is only on the tool’s output, not the quality of the process. And when customers talk about authoring tool accessibility in terms of WCAG, then that is what the developers focus on too. The result is that tool vendors tell customers “This tool generates WCAG-AAA output” without any indication of how difficult it is to actually get the tool to do so.

Without an educated customer base (and who is the customer, when we talk about Facebook or Youtube?), I think there’s an inertia in the willingness to improve a tool’s support for non-expert authors in creating accessible content. Having recently been through a CMS procurement process, I was shocked at the lack of awareness of ATAG amongst vendors, let alone information about how well candidate systems met ATAG‘s requirements. The default position seemed to be that yes, the systems ‘could’ create accessible content, and authors could do what they were allowed to do within the limits of the authoring interface, but admins were responsible for configuring editing workflows, and checking, editing and blocking if need-be content that did not meet accessibility requirements.

I acknowledge that authors will not take kindly to being pestered with all manner of accessibility checking questions as part of the publishing process, but there is still so much more an authoring tool can do to help authors and to save organisations time and effort in meeting accessibility obligations. For the past few months, we’ve been carrying out some research looking at a broad cross-section of authoring tools, from full-blown CMSs to specialist tools, to web site creation tools geared to non-technical authors. Our main focus will be to identify issues where we think support for non-experts is particularly limited.

More detailed results will be published soon, but as an outline, I can cite as recurring themes:

• lack of support for the provision of appropriate alternatives to graphical content;
• limited encouragement to represent content structure appropriately;
• a lack of accessibility checking facilities;
• a scarcity of advice and documentation on accessibility.

In the meantime though, this is a rallying call to all those responsible for commissioning, managing, selecting or using a web authoring tool, whatever format it may take (and I accept there are many!), whatever content it generates. Think accessibility, think ATAG! Review it against ATAG (the latest draft of version 2 will be much more helpful than version 1, and if it’s not, now’s the time to comment!) If it doesn’t meet all ATAG success criteria, consider what sort of impact this will have on the accessibility quality of the content produced, and the likelihood of the target audience experiencing accessibility barriers. Then figure out what you can do to manage these issues (since in most cases, stopping using the tool will be impossible or inappropriate).

The more we can shout about authoring tool accessibility with a common, and accurate voice, the more tool developers will hopefully raise their game.

PS The blog post title experiment didn’t last long. So, instead, this is named after one of the best albums of the last couple of years

I’d been asked to give a perspective from the UK on developments in web accessibility over the years, and in putting together my talk, I ended up with a 10 year biography of web accessibility. I thought this was a nice, round figure, given that it’s almost 10 years to the day since version 1 of WCAG was published by the W3C on 5th May 1999; and nearly 10 years since I started working in this area as a researcher/consultant in the newly formed Digital Media Access Group.

Of course, a lot of very valuable research and development had been carried out in the field of web accessibility before then. But WCAG brought together existing knowledge and expertise in a way that allows us to define its publication as a catalyst for the popularisation of accessibility as a major topic of web development.

Four Stages of the Evolution of Web Accessibility

Slides from my talk are available on Slideshare, but here’s a summary of my perspective of what’s happened since WCAG 1.0 was published. I plot developments in four stages, with approximate time periods for each.

1. Advocacy and conformance (1999-2001)

Activity is all about raising awareness of web accessibility – of how disabled people use the web, putting forward financial, technical, legal and moral arguments for considering accessibility in web design, and encouraging following WCAG 1.0.

2. Accessibility joins the Web Standards movement (2002-2004)

Encouraged by books from Zeldman, Clark, Thatcher et al and Slatin and Rush, the Web Standards movement adopts WCAG conformance as part of a suite of technical skills a web developer should adopt in order to create web sites that look good but function appropriately across diverse browsing platforms. Grass-roots web developers embrace accessibility, and become creative in solving accessibility-related design and development problems; larger organisations like Yahoo! make significant efforts to promote web standards.

3. Guidelines are not enough (2005-2007)

The UK Disability Rights Commission Formal Investigation into Web accessibility finds that disabled people could use some sites for their intended purpose even when WCAG conformance indicated otherwise, and vice versa. This illustrates the challenges of making the WAI model of accessibility (requiring WCAG-conformant content and UAAG-conformant browsers and assistive technologies) work in the real world; and more specifically the limitations of an organisational accessibility policy defined solely by conformance with standards for accessibility of web content.

So, the concept of holistic accessibility is developed, inspired by blended approaches to learning, where using multiple routes to achieving accessible end goals on the web are encouraged in cases where practical challenges may make a single, universally accessible solution, impossible.

4. Web 2 and new challenges for human-centred accessibility (2008-present)

Defining accessibility as supporting disabled people perform tasks on the web becomes ever more important, with the emergence of rich internet applications and the gradual move from the web as a passive collection of information to a place where users can create, share, communicate – and in general become contributors in a more powerful way then ever before.

Today, the iPhone and emergence of the mobile phone as the key web access device in the developing world are key factors in making the accessible web/mobile web crossover even more business-relevant. Opera lead the way in creating and providing open-source educational resources on web standards and accessibility; NVDA becomes a significant addition to the open source assistive technology arena.

Developing and rolling out WAI-ARIA and accessibility challenges posed by authoring tools are current hot topics; with the emergence of producer-consumers (prosumers), ATAG is more important than ever, whether when applying to Facebook or a corporate content management system.  So too is the challenge of supporting disabled people and in particular those experiencing age-related impairments in finding and using the most appropriate accessibility solutions for their needs.

The ongoing research into systems to allow adaptation of interfaces based on a user’s (often changing) accessibility requirements is not just an excuse to rescue the accessibility of poorly designed legacy web pages through transcoding, but actively supporting enhanced personalisation while reducing the burden on designers from trying to cater for diverse (and possibly competing) needs.

Reflection

These four stages summarise what I think has characterised the evolution of web accessibility as a topic in recent years, and also reflect the evolution of my personal approach to working in web accessibility, as a researcher and consultant based in a university in the UK. You may find it interesting to chart progress of particular countries and sectors against this timeline; you may also want to argue with me over the definitions I’ve used above!

I realise some people may not entirely agree with my fairly positive look; maybe I missed an event or two which were key in the evolution of accessibility as a design issue. I know there are many battles still to be fought and won, but a discussion of the role of a fundamentalist approach to disability rights advocacy versus a more moderate approach is one for another blog post.

Though I will say (and apologies for the military metaphors) that I have always appreciated the frontline work of organisations like the RNIB, and people like John Foliot and William Loughborough, who are not afraid to ask awkward accessibility questions, and take the initial flak that might ensue, but ultimately force accessibility to be considered in situations or organisations where previously it might be been ignored. And the rest of us follow in behind, once the resistance has been softened up.

But whatever you think about this brief 10 year biography of web accessibility, I’ll be happy to hear any feedback!

Another view: You might want to look at Brian Kelly’s Web accessibility timeline for a similar consideration of what’s happened over the years.

One of the discussion topics was “do accessibility and usability advocates lead by example?” Do their web sites exist as inspiring examples of good design? We had a good laugh finding examples of where that answer was a resounding ‘no’ – although disability charity web sites are certainly improving in terms of design quality – and I pointed students to the fantastic Design Eye for a Usability Guy makeover of Jakob Nielsen’s Useit.com web site. The serious point was that if people wish to inspire designers to think about accessibility while maintaining creativity and design appeal, we need to show that it can be done. Not all accessibility advocates are talented designers (I wish I was), but we recognise the importance of getting the message over in an appealing way.

It’s a topic we care a lot about in Dundee; one of my colleagues, Graham Pullin has just written a book Design meets Disability, while by fortunate timing, tonight I became aware of the Enabled by Design web site.

It was ironic, then, that having publicised the schedule for W4A 2o09 today, I noticed a couple of twitter messages deriding the design of the conference web site. You can decide for yourself in what kind of light these comments shed on a web standards advocate; whatever, I’ll not be too proud to take any criticism on behalf of the conference team who developed it. But I did immediately think of Kynn Bartlett’s 2001 article on How to complain to a webmaster about accessibility.

So having used the ‘look at the poor design of some accessibility and usability advocacy sites’ arguments in talking to students, here I am on the end of the very same criticism! It made me wonder – just how critical is the design of a web accessibility conference web site in giving it credibility? How many potential attendees are we (or these Twitter comments) turning away?

I think my answer is that it depends on the target audience. W4A is a research-oriented conference where research is presented – new findings, new theories, new perspectives on an issue, new commercial approaches. Its target market is academics, corporate and public organisations – people who want to learn and share research and development. The attraction is the opportunity to present and publish new work, and to gain – and offer – feedback through talking to one’s peers. If our web site isn’t achingly clever or outstandingly beautiful, are we turning away prospective attendees? Are we stabbing accessibility in the back? I’m not so sure we are.

By contrast, there is a whole other group of web standards and accessibility focused conferences, which are targeted at industry – at web design professionals. The attraction is to come and hear the superstars talk about their new design techniques and web applications, be convinced that accessibility, web standards and a rewarding user experience is something achievable and worthwhile, and go home with knowledge that can be applied straightaway.

Like an academic conference, there is revelation of new information, there is peer-to-peer discussion and sharing, but I think these conferences also have a much bigger role in attracting non-experts – people who are there to learn and be inspired. Thus the conference web site must – I think – work that much harder as a way of attracting people to attend, people who don’t yet know a huge amount about the subject but who may be encouraged by a cool-looking web site much more than a bunch of academics (not that academics have no aesthetic values!).

I’m not writing this to excuse bad design, nor will I take a ‘yeah, but what about THEM?’ approach and write a long post about the usability problems regularly present on HCI and usability conference web sites. Instead, I’ll finish by hoping that W4A 2009 is as successful as last year’s, in bringing together a terrific mix of people to talk about and share new ideas and discoveries in web design – people who want to attend because of what they’ll find out, what they’ll contribute and who they’ll meet, regardless of the appearance of the conference web site.

Just as I hope CSUN, ASSETS, EAFRA, @media, FOWD etc etc all do with equal success.

These initiatives are all evidence of a brighter horizon, the product of efforts by web standards advocates to improve the quality of web design education, and thus the skillset of people entering the web design industry. This follows criticism of the standard of web design education, particularly at university level.

Web standards and accessibility have a very close relationship, so I wanted to talk a little about efforts being made here at Dundee University to promote accessibility and best practice in web design across all areas of education. We do this on a number of fronts, some of which I’m more involved in than others. (Oh – and please read the following as a case study rather than a blatant piece of marketing!)

Web design and accessibility/inclusive design is of course taught as part of the School of Computing’s undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses (Applied Computing, E-commerce Computing, Interactive Media Design, Design Ethnography to name a few), and I give the odd lecture here and there. Accessibility and inclusive design is pervasive from the start and throughout the degree programme, so is taught to all students – even those who don’t continue to Honours level in a Computing-related course.

A couple of examples:

• a Yahoo! sponsored hackday has been a part of the Junior Honours (third year in a Scottish four year Honours degree) web design module on our undergrad programme for a couple of years now. and this year’s winner was a way of supporting searching that may be particularly beneficial for people with physical impairments.
• And given that so much research here is looking at how technology can support disabled and older people, many individual and group student projects have a strong accessibility flavour, and involve interaction with older and disabled people.

We’ve been doing this for many, many years, and we think all this is a unique and very effective way of giving graduates a greater awareness of user diversity and the skills to develop software that takes this into account. I was asked to talk about our approach at an event held last year focusing on best practice in teaching inclusive design across the EU.

Beyond formal taught programmes, web design education takes place on many other levels here at the university, and my role as co-ordinator of the University’s Web Accessibility Support service sees me participating in some of these activities:

• Staff development – reaching out anyone who might be publishing web content: teaching staff, researchers, people working in central services, admin staff. There are courses in web accessibility, in accessible document creation, accessibility in using major content creation applications such as Blackboard, our Virtual Learning Environment. Unfortunately these courses tend to be optional, so awareness-raising and skills-building relies on busy staff finding (or being encouraged to find) time in their schedule to attend.
• PhD and postdoctoral researchers: at Dundee, the Generic Skills team runs a specialist programme specifically supporting in developing career skills alongside their research specialism. We produced and recently taught a introduction to Web design using Web standards, with Ian Lloyd’s Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way as the course text.
• Classes available to the general public. Some are run by the Continuing Education department, and include Web design (I don’t know so much about the content of these courses as my remit is limited to supporting staff). And, separately, there’s often an accessibility flavour to the informal training given by colleagues here in the School of Computing to older people who come to visit our User Centre.

So, as you can see, we’re trying to spread the message to many different audiences, with different backgrounds, different roles, different aspirations, different levels of technical expertise. Inspiration comes from other Higher Education-based or focused organisations and initiatives, such as TechDis in the UK and  WebAIM and Stanford’s Online Accessibility Programme in the US.

It’s an ongoing task – there’s lots more I and others here want to do without the time to do it; but I hope this gives some reassurance that (at least!) some universities are indeed trying to promote and foster understanding of current and future best practice in web design.

I’ll shortly be blogging in more detail about the aims and activities of the University’s Web Accessibility Service, but I’d love to hear more about other approaches to promoting accessibility and web standards to diverse audiences, especially in an educational setting.

• a speed limit may imply that driving at, or just below, that limit automatically means ‘safe’.
• a safe driving speed depends on context – weather, time, road condition, surrounding environment, visibility, to name but a few factors.

The reality is that:

• if I break the speed limit, then I risk being caught, and either fined or charged with dangerous driving. So I try(!) not to break the speed limit.
• if I stick to the speed limit on an urban or semi-urban dual carriageway where there are two lanes and good visibility, but a 40mph speed limit, I can guarantee that at some point I’ll be overtaken by vehicles who are breaking the law yet who are overwhelmingly unlikely to be punished for it. (There are several roads round Dundee like this; the other day I was passed by a speeding bus, on the back of which was an advert for a road safety initiative illustrated by a large picture of a speed camera.)

So there’s a penalty for speeding, but it doesn’t stop people breaking the law, especially when they see little reason for keeping to it. I might get a bit annoyed, but so long as those other drivers are driving safely, is it really a big deal?

Which brings me to…the reawakened argument over web page validation and accessibility.

A post by Jeff Attwood questioning the merits of HTML code validity has caused a lot of debate amongst web standardistas, and on the GAWDS discussion list. Jeff’s debate revolves around the lack of code validity of home pages of high-traffic sites like Google. He concludes by encouraging developers and designers to aspire to validation but suggesting that few will notice the difference if it is achieved.

The dominant reaction on GAWDS is one that often occurs in this debate – accusations of the organisations concerned of a lack of concern for accessibility. That includes the employer of accessibility pioneers like T.V. Raman, a company with a home page that a very, very large number of people visit and use (including disabled people) without undue problem. Wouldn’t we have heard about it if it were not so?

Large tech companies have a history of embarrassing themselves by undermining their own accessibility R&D expertise with corporate blunders (see Google Chrome or IBM’s Sydney Olympics site). But as Matthew Pennell points out on the GAWDS list, there are most likely compelling commercial reasons why Google limits the amount of code on its home page (and has no DTD), so as to reduce download times as far as possible. I don’t have experience of working for a large tech company, so I’m in no position to question their motives for failing to achieve validation across the board. But, based on the validation errors found, Matthew challenges anyone to prove that these errors on their own lead to exclusion for disabled people. I’d also like to see that evidence.

We had this debate in the drafting of WCAG 2 and the role of validity within the guidelines. It also reminds me of the reaction to the DRC ‘s survey of web accessibility conducted in the UK in 2004. The survey carried out automated testing, expert testing and user testing with disabled people. It found that some sites which did not validate to WCAG 1.0 nevertheless could be used for the intended purpose by the disabled evaluators. Instead of a debate as to the validity of the guidelines, some people questioned the validity of the research. There seemed to be a preference to use guideline conformance over the experiences of disabled people as evidence of accessibility.

For me, the sensible position to take is that aspiring to have as few validation errors as possible is an excellent design principle. But let’s not kid ourselves that validity means universal accessibility for disabled people and non-validity means inaccessibility, or illegality (as one comment in Jeff Attwood’s blog appeared to assert). As accessibility advocates, we do our cause no favours by haranguing people for behaviour we object to based on points of principles rather than solid evidence. Mike Davies (@isofarro), who has criticised this approach for years, has recently made a similarly scathing attack on CSS evangelism, and in doing so identifies examples of where informed use of invalid code can enhance accessibility.

In both cases, the standards-based approaches are the way to go – as far as possible. But in the messy world of the Web, this may – for valid reasons – not be all the way.

Just like that 50mph speed limit on an open, straight stretch of rural road is no more making it safe than the 30 mph limit on the city road outside a school at 3pm when it’s raining, your wiper blade has stopped working properly, you’re tired, and stressed by the white van in your rear view mirror.