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?

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!

Finding out more about how older people become successful users of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is particularly interesting for me as an accessibility researcher. We know that there are things we can do as designers to compensate for implications of reduced visual, hearing, motor and cognitive capability. And we know that these capabilities decline as part of the aging process.

But how well does our current assumed best practice really support older ICT users? How appropriate are current accessibility guidelines for dealing with the additional social factors – attitudes to ICT, life experiences, relationships – that may impact on how well (if at all) an older person can become an ICT user?

The W3C WAI recognised that we don’t know enough, and currently Andrew Arch is leading the WAI-AGE project looking at the overlaps and gaps between web accessibility for disabled people and web usability for older people.

‘From factors to social actors’

Sergio has spent 3 years working with and observing nearly 400 older people learning to use ICT in a friendlier environment than an academic usability lab. From his ethnographic observations his PhD thesis provides some valuable new insights into this area. The ethnographic nature of the work means the thesis has many stories of user interaction, illustrated by quotes and photos, so is highly accessible as a document in its own right.

His thesis title ‘Human-computer interaction for older people: from factors to social actors’ summarises the key argument that we need to stop thinking about ICT design for older people as addressing a collection of accessibility challenges mixed in with a dose of technophobia, and take advantage of the life experiences older people have. With his permission, I’ve provided a few of the highlights below.

• Older people want independence but not necessarily isolation. So interface design should give people the ability to  perform tasks using ICT without making mistakes or asking for help. But older people may want to do ICT tasks collaboratively – so we shouldn’t assume someone will be on their own when they email, or browse, or whatever.
• Older people don’t want accessibility solutions that exclude. We might assume people with declining vision, for example, want assistive technology – screen magnification or an alternative input device. But if that marks them out as ‘different’ or ‘special’ in comparison to their peers, then they may be more resistant to use the AT, even though it might be helpful. So any accessibility solution that is provided should as far as possible support gradual transformation of the way they interact with technology, not a traumatic (sudden) change. Kevin Carey expresses this argument of transformation over traumatic change as a desirable goal very effectively.
• The primary goal of interface improvements aimed at helping older people should be to reduce cognitive load – to limit the mental challenges in figuring out what to do, where and how. This will help limit (though obviously will not solve) the impact of issues caused by visual or mobility problems.

The thesis also describes some interesting work investigating:

• the usability of data collection methods – older people prefer being asked questions verbally to filling in long paper or electronic questionnaires;
• interface design. Web developers will be interested to read an evaluation of different options for marking required and optional form fields which found that separating these into two distinct sections using <fieldset> and <legend> was significantly more successful than using asterisks for required fields.

I think it’s an excellent contribution to the field of ICT and web accessibility for older people, using what has been up to now a rarely used method in accessibility research –ethnography – to study what is after all socio-technical problem. I’m sure his work will stimulate lots of discussion, and hopefully further investigations.

Read more

Read the thesis summary online; this page also has a downloadable PDF version of the full thesis in Spanish and English (which I’d say is significantly more readable than mine was!).

Because Sergio’s PhD thesis consisted of a collection of publications, the work is also published in a variety of journal and conference papers – some are available to download, others may require access to academic publication libraries. They’re listed on the web page above.

Update: Sergio comes to Dundee

As of 1st June 2010, Sergio is now working with us in Dundee for two years! He successfully won a grant from the Catalan Government to continue his research focusing on older people, technology use and inclusive design – and we’re delighted that he has chosen to come to join us in the School of Computing. We’re already busy working on a number of collaborative projects, and look forward to sharing our results over the coming months.

In a previous blog post I touched on some of the problems with academic web accessibility research – in particular the cost barriers to accessing research published in some journals, and the sometimes lengthy time-to-publication, which can reduce the impact of late-breaking work in a fast moving area like web accessibility.

Copyright reasons prevent me from replicating the work published in the journal. So instead I’ve provided a brief overview of each of the papers that appear, with a link to the page where you can access a copy of the full paper. The authors are also bound by copyright agreements, but I’m sure each would be happy to answer further questions about their work.

The subjects range from from accessibility evaluation and measurement, to supporting accessibility of Web 2.0 applications to investigating the accessibility benefits of semantic markup to effective policies for using the Web to its full potential in enabling access to disabled people to online information and experiences.

From Web accessibility to Web adaptability; Brian Kelly, Liddy Nevile, Sotiris Fanou, Ruth Ellison, Lisa Herrod and David Sloan.

A review of web accessibility from an organisational and policymaker’s perspective. This paper focuses on ways to strike a balance between a policy that limits the chances of unjustified accessibility barriers being introduced in web design while also providing enough flexibility to allow the web in a way that provides the best possible user experience for disabled people by acknowledging and supporting the diversity of and the occasional conflicts between the needs of different groups.

Experimental evaluation of usability and accessibility of heading elements; Takayuki Watanabe.

This paper describes an investigation into the usability and accessibility impact of effective use of HTML heading elements on accessibility, and provides data to support the argument that these features positively impact on usability and accessibility for visually impaired web users.

WAI-ARIA live regions and channels: ReefChat as a case example; Peter Thiessen, Erin Russell.

A case study describing application of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Application (WAI-ARIA) in creating a chat application usable and accessible by sighted and visually impaired people.

Web accessibility and open source software; Željko Obrenović.

This is a review of the many diverse technologies and solutions that have been developed under an Open Source Software (OSS) approach, and a discussion of how accessible web browsing can be improved through using these technologies in innovative ways.

Tool independence for the web accessibility quantitative metric; Markel Vigo, Giorgio Brajnik, Myriam Arrue and Julio Abascal.

Efficient and accurate web accessibility evaluation on a large scale remains an important objective in the quality assurance of web content, yet the limitations of automated evaluation methods are well known. The authors of this paper propose the Web Accessibility Quantitative Metric as a reliable and independent measure of a Web site’s accessibility.

Editing Wikipedia content by screen reader: Easier interaction with the Accessible Rich Internet Applications suite; Marina Buzzi and Barbara Leporini.

This paper investigates the increasingly important topic of supporting disabled people as producers, and not just consumers, of web content. Wikipedia is the ‘Web 2.0′ example site used, and the authors explain how WAI-ARIA can be used to enhance non-visual usability of editing features of the Wikipedia interface.

Enabling web users and developers to script accessibility with Accessmonkey; Jeffrey Bigham, Jeremy Brudvik, Jessica Leung and Richard Ladner.

This paper focuses on supporting extension of browser functionality for accessibility purposes. AccessMonkey is a scripting framework that can be used to improve accessibility by modifying standard browser – and the authors demonstrate examples of how this can be used to enhance the user experience for disabled people, for example where appropriate assistive technology may not be available.

I hope by providing an introduction to each paper I’ve given you an insight into the diversity of web accessibility research currently taking place, and introduced you to some of the people who are carrying out this important work.

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 awareness amongst web designers grows of the need to create accessible web content, there’s a natural frustration that despite the designer’s best efforts, people can still experience accessibility problems. In the WAI model of accessibility, this might be defined as a user agent problem. A lack of conformance by browsers with UAAG means it still seems to be extraordinarily difficult to make basic,  effective and persistent changes to web page display (for example changing text size, colour schemes) or interaction style (efficient keyboard shortcuts). Following UAAG, especially Guideline 11 and Guideline 12,  would – the theory suggests – make it easy for a user to make the necessary adjustments to meet their accessibility requirements.

The short term, but unsatisfactory, workaround to this problem, has been for web sites to provide accessibility aids as part of their content – features like text resizing widgets and alternative style sheets. Embedding accessibility features in web content has obvious and significant shortcomings – they can only every apply to one web site; so a user can’t rely on them being available across all the sites they want or need to visit.

This ‘give a man a fish or teach a man to fish?’ conundrum has been a focus of attention for many accessibility and standards advocates. In terms of raising awareness, efforts have been made to make it easier to apply accessibility changes through browser widgets (e.g. Firefox text size extension), scripts for accessibility (e.g. AccessMonkey), or user-definable access keys. There are web sites such as the BBC’s MyWeb MyWay, and video tutorials on how to make basic accessibility changes; there’s an ongoing debate on whether a site’s accessibility page is the best place to provide helpful accessibility information.

However, the paradox with all these efforts is that the people who are most likely to be affected are those who are also highly unlikely to find these solutions independently. Without assistance, these valuable tools may remain undiscovered by the people who need them most.

What’s important to realise is that this issue concerns not those with significant impairments that might require, for example, a full blown screen reader, and where an accessibility problem – and solution – is pretty easy to define.

Instead, the people who are most likely to be affected by an inability to make accessibility changes are people with relatively minor, but multiple impairments, which may fluctuate short-term but gradually decline long-term. This includes many older web users, experiencing age related capability decline – and what makes the problem difficult to solve is that the gradual nature of change, allied to an unfamiliarity with the nature of the Web, these users might be unaware they have accessibility requirements.

We’re used to assuming that in accessible design, the user at least knows they have accessibility needs, but what happens when they don’t?

There’s been a lot of work focusing on defining and storing user needs, and using them making adaptations to resources based on these accessibility needs, for example the Supple project. User profiling for accessibility is now standardised, in an e-learning context, in ISO 24751. The WAI-AGE project  is investigating the overlap and differences between ageing and web accessibility; and browser manufacturers like Opera do now seem to appreciate how difficult ‘simple’ accessibility tasks can be for many users.

This is all important work; but beyond technical problems we need to look at how people develop skills in IT use, in how they learn web browsing techniques – and what role, if any, accessibility plays. And we need to understand better how we can discover that a person’s visual, cognitive or mobility capabilities have declined to such a point that applying an accessibility solution (or changing an existing one) would help to sustain independent access.

Tracking a user’s capability changes, keeping this information as accurate and up to date as possible, and using it to make helpful changes – all in an ethical way – is something we plan to tackle in the SUS-IT project over the next three years. I’m really looking forward to working with a team drawn from sociology, psychology, information science as well as computing science to tackle this problem in a more holistic way.

And maybe at the end of it all, we can have a situation where, to use one of my favourite analogies, awareness of the text resizing functions of a web browser is as widespread as that of another accessibility aid – the TV volume control.

In order to do this, I should spend most of my time reading journal papers and attending academic conferences. These publications are peer-reviewed, and should be rigorous and high quality accounts of relevant investigations into how technology can be used to improve the experiences of disabled people. They’re usually the results of major funded research projects, lasting one or more years, and are indeed generally of high quality.

In academia, this is how the quality of our work is measured – the number of publications we achieve, and more importantly, the quality of the place we publish.

The catch is that I can’t afford to travel to every (most!) conference I’d like to (W4A of course an exception), and accessing conference proceedings and journals can cost money too. This shouldn’t be a major problem – we know this is the score, and we have to deal with it. But it makes me think twice if access to a paper isn’t immediate, and I have to pay. (So let’s see more high quality – and free – online journals such as JMIR.)

And given the slow process of peer reviewing, there are occasions where journal publications report on a situation of 18 months ago, which may not reflect current reality, especially in a fast moving (socially as well as technologically) field like the Web. There is also the chance we might be receiving research results by drip-feed – presenting 50% of results in journal X and 50% in journal Y gives researchers two publications, but doubles the efforts required of people who want to learn about the work.

OK, I’m 100% sure these frustrations have been expressed before, and are not original to me. But if I find accessing the research I need can be challenging, what about the people who are making day to day decisions that might affect the accessibility of the resources they produce, and who could benefit from the results of research? It’s why I find, to adapt a phrase from Jakob Nielsen (and Julian Rickards) guerrilla accessibility research so valuable. This is the work typically done in a short period of time, to answer a very specific question, or target a very particular group of web users and published online in a (usually) easy to find place, such as a blog.

So, it’s always wonderful to find and read pieces of work like WebAIM’s screenreader user survey, or Joe Clark’s WordPress ATAG review, or the various screenreader support investigations of TPG’s Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner, or Alastair Campbell on accessible PDF creation- to name just four examples. This work is current when it is published, and directly focused on questions for which people need answers.

As a bonus, (reflecting the web in general?) research written for the web is generally easier to read than an academic paper, and easy to extract the key points. It will be peer-reviewed, but after publication. If the work is good, people talk about it; if it’s of poor quality, reaction in the blogosphere will be swift. And more and more often, the results of this work are referenced in academic literature, yet I’ll bet is of more direct impact to the people it aims to inform – web designers and developers, assistive technologists, policy makers and anyone else who needs accessibility information quickly.

The paper I wrote on the gulf between the web standards community and researchers working in the field of gerontechnology – supporting access to and use of technology by older people was, perhaps, the first time I really began to look into this problem.

So, where does academic research fit in? Bigger, more complex projects. Personally, I’m not a developer, and I could never call myself a geek – the sort of research I described above can in some cases require a level of technical nosiness I still haven’t acquired yet! I think my best role is figuring out how the impact of research and development such as the examples I gave above can be most effectively conveyed to the harder-to-reach groups: users and web content creators who are not actively looking for (or are likely to happen upon) web accessibility information and innovations. This sort of work does take longer to produce, so is perhaps most suited to an academic research project where a team of people can attack a problem over a decent period of time, and have access to a larger group of people as participant end-users.

Our pledge as academic researchers, though, needs to be to do our best engage with everyone else working towards promoting web accessibility, by making what we discover easier to find. This blog is one attempt to help bridge the gap.

(NB I should say, of course, that academia can contribute technical innovation in the area of web accessibility – of course it can, and has done; many innovations do emerge into the public domain before being published in relevant academic literature. It’s also important not to underplay the work of major tech companies such as IBM, who produce and publish their work in journals and conferences alongside university researchers. In this post I’m addressing the shortcomings of the research publication culture, rather than the people involved in doing research. )