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.

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!

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.

That’s why earlier this year I found myself in the longest queue for the ticket machines outside the Museo del Prado in Madrid, because I was curious to know why nobody seemed to be able to make it work (the answer was confusion caused by two user interfaces – one for selecting tickets, one for the credit card reader positioned below).

Yesterday, I had to send someone a fax. I’d sent the same person a fax last week, and made the common mistake of sending the fax to a telephone number instead of using the fax number (there is a peculiar and specific embarrassment of hearing a disembodied voice try to answer the fax machine’s call while you can do nothing about it). I was so determined not to make the same mistake again…but I did.

I can’t blame what I did on the fancy document-management machine we have in the office that supports printing, copying, scanning and faxing. So I looked at the document I was trying to send, on the second page of which was the fax number.

This was the first problem – the destination fax number was on the document I wanted to send, and being too disorganised to write it down somewhere else, I had to quickly mentally note the number, type it into the machine, and put the document back in the slot ready for scanning.

The second problem is the obvious one. Below the fax number was a phone number. Fax numbers are in an identical format to phone numbers (at least here in the UK), and most commonly will start with the same digits as a phone number: (0nnn) nnnnnn. Chances are the area code and first few digits will be identical for an organisation’s phone and fax number, which means without a distinguishing label it’s impossible to tell whether a number is a fax or phone number.

So when the two are placed close to each other on a document – even when clearly labelled as ‘fax’ or ‘phone’, the chances of entering the wrong number are pretty high – and as I just proved, even when the consequences are known. Just like Derren Brown‘s TV ‘experiments’ where people  press a big red button despite (because of?) being told not to and being shown the consequences.

OK, you’re probably wondering what my point is – we must have known about the problem of fax numbers for years, and aren’t faxes yesterday’s technology anyway? But in 2009, here I am, making the error – twice – so what could have stopped me?

The problem was the presence of two pieces of similar data – one important to the task, one irrelevant. The information design on the document was such that the two very similar numbers were physically close to each other. I didn’t need the phone number to send a fax, so it could have been somewhere else in the document, or not there at all (As it happens, there was also an email address beside the phone number, but I would bet very few people accidentally send faxes to an email address).

It’s a simple information design lesson – think carefully about showing information that may hinder successful completion of a task. If it’s not essential, don’t show it, otherwise position it away from where the user’s focus will likely be.

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.

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.