Q: Hello Charles - welcome to the Community. Could you tell us a bit about W3C?

Charles: W3C is an international consortium made up of stakeholders in the Web. Development companies, research and user groups and governments make up the membership which is currently about 500. It was set up in 1994 to "lead the web to its full potential", and in particular to ensure that it remains interoperable (i.e. useable by everybody) and not depend on one system or on owning a set of license for some piece of software.

The director, Tim Berners-Lee, is the man who invented the Web when he was working in Switzerland in the late 1980s and early 90s. He wrote the first browser, server, and authoring tool, and put the first web server online about 10 years ago. His role is now the technical director - he oversees the work done to make sure it still leads the Web forwards.

The work of the consortium is to make "standards" - in fact working groups develop specifications for things like HTML (the language web pages are mostly written in today), XML (the language that more pages are being written in, and the planned future for the web), MathML and SVG (languages for maths and better graphics on the web), and so on. These groups are made up of members' representatives, with some invited experts, and a staff member (W3C has a staff of about 60, whose job is to coordinate the work of individual groups with the rest of what happens at W3C).

Q: Web Accessibility is such a generic term. In a nutshell, what does it mean?

Charles: It means being able to use the Web. In a W3C sense it refers to being able to use the web regardless of disability, so that is what I work on. (Other places and people address such problems as poor infrastructure, or language barriers as part of accessibility - at W3C these are treated as separate problems, although they are of course relevant work).

Q: Why is web accessibility important?

Charles: I think in terms of four reasons:

1. The Web is about communication between people. If the communication fails because the technology gets in the way, or becuase it was not designed to work for someone who has a disability, then it has failed to be useful.

2. The requirements of accessibiltiy in large measure are the requirements of good web design - using the technology as it was built to be used. (Rather like using a car for driving, instead of as a spare storage area...)

3. Profit. There is a large proportion of people out there with disabilities that are affected by Web access. This makes up a market segment, and as it happens one that is poorly served at the moment, and so represents an opportunity.

4. The law. In countries like Australia, it is illegal to discriminate aginst people on the basis of disability in providing services. This includes providing services and information via the Web, as shown in the case of Bruce Maguire vs SOCOG.

Q:What are some of the key issues that need to be addressed when people are attempting to create accessible sites?

Charles: Some of the really important principles are:

1. Equivalent forms.
If people can't hear, or see, or use a mouse, they need to be able to get the information or use a function in some other way. Having text that describes an image, or replaces it functionally, being able to use a keyboard as well as a mouse to work with an interactive function like a form, is critical.

2. Context, orientation and notification.
For many people who use assistive technologies (specialised technology for example to allow a computer to speak to a person who is blind, or magnify the screen for a person who has low vision), using the Web has been compared to reading a book through a straw - only a very small part of it is visible at once. So it is especially important to be able to find out where you are within a document, page, or interaction. It is also important to be able to find out if a bit that can't be seen is changing - think of wathing television through a straw so only a bit of it is visible at once. It is important to know which bits to focus on.

3. Consistent, meaningful presentation.
When people first started developing sites for "accessibility" many of them focussed on being useable by people who are blind. This is of course important, but not all people with disabilities are blind. For many people in general, and in particular for people with a wide range of disabilities, graphics and layout are important as a way of understanding what they are
looking at. These need to be focussed towards communicating the information - not too much but not too little. This also relates to the previous point of knowing where in a site you are.

4. Navigation
People have many ways of approaching ideas and information, and the Web was designed to supoprt this. There are different strategies for navigating through the web that will suit different types of people, and more so where people have a disability that makes one type or another more important to them.

5. Using standards
There are lots of different people using lots of different devices to access the Web. It is important that the standards that have been developed are used, rather than assuming that all people will switch to the system that the content designer is using.

6. Documentation
Where things are created other than the "the normal way" (and this is inevitable because there is no normal way - see above) it is critical to document this, so that people can find out how a site works. This is especially important for many people with disabilities because they are using devices the authors didn't anticipate. They know how to use their own software, but they don't know what the authors expect people to do if they can't find instructions.

Q: What, in your opinion, are the most common (and avoidable) mistakes people make when providing online services?

Charles: There are different mistakes made in different circumastances, and it changes a bit over time. Here are three I still find consistently:

1. Bad coding. Many designers assume the whole world uses the browser they tested with, and will make coding mistakes that this particular browser can repair. Unfortunately some authoring software people use also does this, so it is a widespread problem.

2. Assuming a particular presentation. Many sites will say something like "best viewed at 800x600 with thousands of colours", and in fact will not be useable with other settings. Unfortunately that is not possible for everyone - if people can only distinguish light and dark, or need to magnify their screen 12 times, or even decide to increase the font size a little to help their tired eyes, many poorly-designed sites will break.

3. Lack of structure encoding. When people produce a page, they will make some things stand out - such as headings or keywords. If this is only done by marking up content in a different colour or font-size, then it is difficult for people using alternatives for presentation to navigate the important features - something most people do subconsciously by looking at a page. The difficulty is in fact significant, making using the Web between 5 and 100 times as slow, which is a big problem for people trying to do a job or complete studies. Instead, it is important to use the fact that web pages can have the important features marked up for what they are - a heading, or a list, or a quotation.

Q: The Australian Flexible Learning Community comprises vocational education and training practitioners across Australia who are grappling with the challenges of developing and delivering quality, flexible learning to students. Can you tell us about any accessibility issues that relate specifically to online learning?

Charles: There are many issues that relate to learning in general which have particular requirements for online learning. But most accessibility requirements for online learning are the same as accessibility requirements in general.

Q: Are there any sites that you could recommend to us that exemplify web accessibility in their design? Or resources our readers could use to learn more about Web accessibility?

Charles: Yes. Here are some resources your readers could try:

The Web Content Guidelines are "the instructions" for making web pages accessible. They are a technical document (that is, large, but hopefully reasonably understandable by anyone) at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10

For a quick list of ideas, there are the Quick Tips:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/QuickTips (these can be ordered as business cards in about a dozen languages, and are available online in some more languages)

There is a "curriculum slideset" - slides that walk you through applying the guidelines, with examples, more explanation, and so on - http://www.w3.org/WAI/wcag-curric

There is a page that lists a number of testing and repair tools for accessibility:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/existingtools.html

A typical slide set from a presentation on accessibility:
http://www.w3.org/2001/Talks/0612-monash/slide1-0.html

Q: By the way, nice cape. I know we're geographically a world apart in this conversation, but I get the sense you've transcended the time continuum as well. Can you explain?

Charles: When I am not thinking about how the Web does and should work I spend time thinking about medieval history - that's my hobby and that is what I did my degree in. It gives me an interesting perspective - most of what the Web does is what librarians and authors were trying to do 1000 years ago, but today we have more helpful technology, and more people can use it.

Q: On the other hand, at the 2001 Ausweb Conference I was a bit fascinated to watch the way you work, with your working world quite literally in your lap(top). As I recall, you were en route to Argentina or somewhere, stopping off briefly in Melbourne to do some laundry. What's it like working almost exclusively in cyberspace?

Charles: Almost - I was en route from Europe via the US to Hong Kong, as you say stopping in Melbourne to do some laundry (and say Hi to my family). In fact I work a lot in the real world - having a person to bring a face to the ideas is important to many people, although most of the thinking gets done in cyberspace, collaboratively. (That's important - my work relies very heavily on the hundreds who participate in online discussion and write things on the Web that we can go back and look at). I think the great things about working in Cyberspace are that it can help overcome the problems of time-zones - people can have conversations that take days, but that gives us thinking time, and we can go back over what we said. It is also, of course, possible to work with people from all around the world, and I am priveliged to do that and then to meet many of the people I have been working with, often for years before I meet them. The fact that there is time between each side of a dialogue is helpful in working across language barriers - I work in three languages, and the collection of people I work with are using a dozen - and this of course is still only a tiny group of people.

Q: Finally, what are your predictions about the sorts of technologies, tools, trends and practices that might emerge in the next few years and change the way we view, think about and use the Web?

Charles: Blue sky dreaming is a seductive and dangerous game, but also fairly important - if we can't imagine where we are going it is hard to make steps to get there.

I think we will see the increasing importance of the Semantic Web as a way of supporting accesssibility, along with supporting the other things we are trying to use the Web for. A slideset for a presentation on the topic can be found at http://www.w3.org/2001/Talks/09xx-semwai/all and there is more information on the Semantic Web available from W3C: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

Clearly XML is becoming more important. We will see tools that make better use of XML, and we will see browsers slowly getting stricter about accepting poorly coded pages (this is important when the content is services and not just text - imagine if your bank's computer was happy to ignore the bit of a document that it didn't understand where you expected it to be transferring money so you could pay bills without overdrawing an account, or a surgeon not worrying about the middle steps in an operation procedure).

And we will see (and are seeing) authoring tools that support accessibility a lot better. To a large extent how fast we see this depends on people being consumers of anything they get, or asking for tools that support their requirements. But the newest tools are already useful and helpful, although there is a lot more development to come.

Q: Thank you, Charles. Great to catch up again.