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?

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.

As a web developer, there’s little I dislike more than building sites to be accessible.

That’s some confession. Now, cards on the table – I don’t know Drew, though I do appreciate his efforts in promoting web standards adoption. And I’m not here to suggest he is arguing against accessible design – on the contrary, from his blog it’s something that he feels obliged to do, so he does it:

So as much as I find it an unpleasant chore, I’m firmly committed to building sites that can be accessible as I can make them.

What I do take from the blog, though, is that this is an example borne of frustration that accessibility considerations are stifling innovation in web application design and development. As I’m not yet familiar with the technologies discussed in the blog, I’ll leave the details of the argument surrounding those technologies to others.  I will say that much of Drew’s ‘accessibility’ objections seem to focus on the avoidance of dependency on JavaScript – which, since publication of WCAG 2, is no longer considered a disability accessibility showstopper (in other words, the very use of JavaScript does not immediately exclude a particular group of users on account of a disability).

I wrote a paper a couple of years ago that commented on how important it was for accessibility that the Web Standards movement embraced WCAG, after accessibility advocates argued that standards-based web design naturally encompassed accessible design. But are we now seeing signs of the same movement become tired of dealing with the human messiness that is accessibility?

Accessibility is no longer seen as purely an exercise in WCAG validation and a nice technical string to a developer’s bow, where all user needs are met in their entirety. Now we know that assistive technologies don’t always take advantage of HTML’s accessibility support in the way we might expect; there is a heated debate over whether current HTML attributes aimed at supporting accessibility must have evidence of usefulness for their inclusion in HTML 5, and whether non-use or abuse means rejection from the spec., regardless of potential usefulness.

And we know that users themselves are non-conformant, in that they cannot be assumed to have the appropriate accessibility solutions available for their needs. To me, the problem is this. It’s quite possible to legitimately argue that old browsers that poorly support standards are holding back evolution of the web. It’s also probably legitimate to say that the assistive technology industry has not yet met its side of the bargain in terms of supporting standards (judging by comments screen reader developers are not participating in the HTML 5 specification process). But for people who have no choice in the matter in terms of the assistive technology they use, is it fair to accuse them of holding back innovation?

I accept that accessible design can in some cases be challenging, frustrating and time consuming, and this is all done under a – occasionally unreasonably applied – pressure to ‘do the right thing’. But the danger of comments from respected figures in the web standards movement that accessibility is a drag on progress may be interpreted by those who are less informed as evidence that accessibility is something that’s no longer worth striving for. Railing at the shortcomings of screen readers doesn’t help people who have to use them. I don’t know the politics of the apparent lack of engagement of screen reader vendors in HTML 5 and other Web standards projects. But suggestions that accessibility advocates work on educating AT vendors instead of encouraging content providers to think about accessibility could easily be distorted and interpreted as the sort of attitude to disability the appalling Daily Mail stirs up amongst the political-correctness-gone-mad brigade.

Let’s not try to blame accessibility on unreasonably holding us back. Let’s look instead to innovation through inclusive design – the Ford Focus, Oxo Good Grips and several other examples of where taking into account ‘extraordinary users’ has led to a better user experience for all. Can WAI-ARIA lead to more examples being added to that list?

But, when I said disabled web users had ‘no choice’ above, of course that’s not quite true. For those who need a dedicated assistive technology, there increasingly is a choice, especially in the number of quality open source alternatives emerging. The problem is that lack of awareness of what’s available usually leads to a reduced choice of the most well-known (and ironically expensive) commercial products, and is something that activists like OATS and the guys behind AccessApps are trying to address.

So, just as increasing rejection of Internet Explorer in favour of other browsers has helped drive standards-based development, perhaps the same can happen in the assistive technology scene. Poorly implemented AT is a problem, but ATs that take advantage of web standards, and increased awareness of their existence amongst potential users, can help ensure that accessibility doesn’t take the blame for holding back innovation on the web.