From a technical perspective, this is related to electronic survey accessibility, which in turn could easily be seen as a real world instance of accessible web form design plus accessible navigation; and therefore covered by a subset of WCAG 2.0. However, it’s not as straightforward as that.

I’d initially thought e-assessment was a tool mainly used in colleges and universities – my bias being partly due to working in that sector, and also my impression that the tertiary education community seemed to be responsible for much of the research and development into e-assessment, such as that funded in the UK by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). But I’m now aware that there’s a much, much wider scope of use – in schools, by professional standards bodies, organisations assessing employee capabilities, lifelong learning.

Despite this diversity of use, there are common constraints which can affect how accessibility of e-assessment is approached.

Balancing accessibility and fair competency assessment

E-assessment is about objectively measuring whether someone has sufficient knowledge/skill to meet a certain level of attainment. All candidates should have an equal chance of being objectively assessed, and accessibility barriers should not obstruct a disabled candidate from being able to demonstrate their competency. This can lead to problems when trying to figure out for example how to provide appropriate text alternatives for a graphic that forms part of a question, or choosing between drag-and-drop or radio buttons as a question type.

The e-assessment author should know what knowledge and skill is being assessed, so that should be at the forefront when thinking about accessibility. Are someone’s powers of visual interpretation of a photo, diagram or video being assessed? If so, is it reasonable to exclude someone who can’t see by not describing the graphic or providing audio description for a video? Is manual dexterity a critical part of the skill being assessed? If so, is it reasonable is it to exclude someone who has a tremor, or is unable to use their hands by utilising a drag-and-drop style answer selection? These are questions that have to be answered by the assessment author before effective accessibility solutions can be applied.

The problem occurs when the method of assessment requires a capability that isn’t necessary for the skill being assessed. So, in the above example, example keyboard-inaccessible drag and drop questions are rarely justifiable.

Assessment Environment

The assessment environment also presents accessibility challenges. In theory, e-assessment presents many accessibility wins, by supporting flexibility of delivery – alternative formats become easier to generate based on personal preferences – and easing maintenance tasks. In practice, flexibility can be difficult to achieve in a controlled environment. There is the question of the extent to which the interface used to present the e-assessment to candidates is accessible. Can a disabled candidate navigate through the questions, understand each question, and select and input an answer without undue difficulty? This should be assessed, and any issues acted upon, in advance.

But, also, will a candidate who needs a particular assistive technology or accessibility solution be able to use their own computer and AT? Or will they have to become familiar (potentially at short notice) with another AT that has been provided to them at the last minute, may be unfamiliar and might not be exactly suitable for their needs? The latter situation means a disadvantage for the disabled person being assessed. How do you provide the assessment environment – which might  be a special locked down browser – with sufficient accessibility support? Can you justify refusing to allow someone to bring and use their own computer and AT on the grounds of fairness to others taking the assessment?

The inaccessibility of the assessment enviroment was the central focus of the Latif vs PMI court case, where a ruling found in favour of a blind person claiming discrimination by a professional association.

Assessment creation

We’ve been doing some work looking at the extent to which e-assessment software supports accessible assessment authoring using W3C ATAG as a reference. This work highlighted some of the potential issues that an author might unwittingly introduce, through insufficient or obscure accessibility prompting by the authoring tool. These issue can be managed short term by author training and support (general accessible design and the specific issues surrounding the authoring tool they use) and a suitable quality assurance process before assessments are presented to candidates. Longer term, of course, we need improved authoring tools.

But, at a recent event on e-assessment and accessibility held by Becta, I became more aware of the complex chain of organisations involved in the supply and delivery of an electronic assessment. At a university, a lecturer is likely to be responsible for creating and delivering their own assessments; but elsewhere there are organisations which are responsible for managing and validating the assessment process. They, or a third party, might author assessments which are then provided to schools and other organisations to administer to students.

So if the original authors are not aware of accessibility issues, there is a long chain down which a request for accessibility information – or adjustments – must pass; and there is no guarantee the request will get to the end of the chain. More informed procurement processes may help to ensure that organisations ask for, and receive, e-accessibility in an appropriate way. But the short term requires people administering e-assessments to make doubly sure in advance that they are aware of any potential accessibility barriers present, and takes steps to manage their impact.

The extreme circumstances under which e-assessment takes place means that developments like better accessibility profiling of users and assessments will hopefully have a positive impact, but a contextual and pragmatic approach to accessibility is essential. Thankfully there are people on the case helping to raise awareness, including Becta, and also Techdis, with their guidelines for accessible assessments.

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