Why should you care about accessibility?...
Will the growing number of "oldies" change the Web?...
How can I tell if my developers are clowns?...
Jenny Macklin put the tough questions to John Allsopp, one of Australia’s top accessibility gurus!
Q: Who cares if a web site isn't accessible? Isn't this just "political correctness" (PC) gone mad?
A: Firstly, people with disabilities, visual, motor skills, cognitive, hearing, and others care whether a site is accessible. For many people with disabilities, the web is a fundamental part of the way they interact with the wider world, more so than most if not all able bodied individuals. So, anyone who cares about "politically correct" concepts like fairness, equity, or "old fashioned" concepts like "a fair go" (supposedly an underlying ethos of this country) should care about whether web sites are accessible.
But, if that isn't enough, the Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act cares whether a website is accessible or not. So if you need a stick, that's it.
PC seems to be in the eye of the holder, so people can decide for themselves whether accessibility is PC gone mad.
Q: Doesn't accessible design just discriminate against people who aren't disabled?
A: On a logical level its almost impossible to get at what this might mean, but rhetorically we seem to increasingly apply a "zero sum" concept to rights. Somehow, if someone else has a right, then it detracts from me. Which is great for driving wedges between people for political gain, but of little or no connection with reality.
But enough philosophy, let's get down to brass tacks.
If it isn't enough for people that someone else benefits from accessible design, with no cost to us (after all, what cost is there to anyone in creating more accessible websites, other than pretty minimal extra effort on the part of developers ) then there are many ways in which everyone wins through a more accessible web - "upside all round" as they say in the States.
Firstly, the full name of the web is the "World Wide Web". It's about making the web available to all, regardless of the "vast differences in culture, languages, education, ability, material resources, access devices, and physical limitations of users" [from the W3C's goals].
Sir Timothy Berners-Lee quite literally gave the world the Web, unencumbered by patents, royalty fees, or other such limitations. It must rank among the most extraordinary gifts any individual has given mankind. Surely, given accessibility for all was an underlying philosophy of the Web in its beginning, and that it remains so to this day, we could repay the debt of honor by all embracing this philosophy, not cherry picking the bits that suit us.
Ok, that's still pretty philosophical, how about this:
The value of a network (whether computer, or a group of people) increases as the square of the number of participants. This effect, known as "Metcalfe's Law" after Robert Metcalfe, inventor of ethernet, suggests that it is very valuable to the network itself, and so all of its users to enable as many people as possible to join the network.
So, accessibility enables more people use the web than would otherwise be able to, and so benefits all users of the web.
Finally, (though this really should be the first point) accessibility is not about people with disabilities. Accessible sites are more usable for everyone, regardless of disabilities. I am sure this will come out more in some further questions, buts let's take a look at a simple example that most people should be familiar with - captioning.
Ostensibly, captions aid the hard of hearing and deaf, but in fact, help all kinds of people. People who are not native speakers of a language for example. And if like me you have the joy of sitting in conferences all day, we can tend to lose concentration. Captioning allows us to keep track of something said even if we missed all or part of it.
Assistive technologies, like captioning, are often like this. We think of them as being for the benefit of people with disabilities, but really they are beneficial for all kinds of people.
Q: Why is accessibility good for business?
A: I think all of the above answers this more or less but in a nutshell
- 1. you increase the number of potential customers who would otherwise be excluded, not simply those with disabilities (for example, many people in rural and remote areas use the web at 14Kbs, and so routinely turn off images). Good accessible design will still work with images turned off. And given people in remote locations look like ideal customers for web based businesses, it seems pretty foolish to me to turn them away.
- Its the right thing. Doing the right thing is good for business (at least in my books). On the web, no one may "know you are a dog", as the old saying goes, but they will know you don't care about people with disabilities. Seach at Google for SOCOG, and you'll find the top entries are about Bruce Maguire's complaint against SOCOG's inaccessible website. The web's memory is Google, and Google remembers first of all that SOCOG discriminated against people with disabilities. Not a great reputation to have 4 years after putting on "the best Olympics ever".
- Accessibility tends to go hand in hand with using CSS, valid X/HTML and other web standards and best practices. In many ways you can't separate them out. So all the benefits of these best practices - lower development and maintenance costs, reduced bandwidth use and costs, increased site responsiveness, ability to more quickly upgrade and extend a site - come as part of this parcel.
- Accessible websites get higher Google rankings. Google is blind. It cares about headings and titles, not about fonts and bold elements. Accessible, standards based designs routinely rank higher in google searches.
Q: Why is CSS design so boring (according to some people)?
A: Ah, a variation on the classic journalists' leading question is "when did you stop beating your wife" :-)
Sites like the CSS Zen Garden the CSS Vault and many others showcase some of the most attractive web design on earth, and all of it is CSS based.
The interesting question is, why do people think that CSS design is boring?
When CSS was first being used for design, it was a new and little understood tool. Browser implementations were poor or worse. And perhaps most importantly, its early adopters were usually developer types, not designers.
Since designers have woken up to the power and possibility of standards based, CSS design, the web has become a whole lot more attractive, usable and accessible. These days, if you aspire to good, let alone great web design, then CSS is the only way to go.
Q: Why do I sometimes hear people say accessible design is good design for everyone.
A: I think I've covered this pretty well above. But again, in a nutshell, accessibility by philosophy and design is not about people with disabilities.
Accessible design is about giving the user control over information, and their access to it. It's not about second guessing what is in the users' interest, or patronising people with text only or "alternative" pages for those with disabilities.
Great web design recognises that the user, not the designer is in control, and empowers the user.
Q: How will an aging population and age segmentation change the way that websites are designed?
A: The single largest growing demographic on the web is people over the age of 55. As a group, this demographic suffers the highest incidence of visual disability. It's also a group more likely than most to benefit from the use of the web, with increasing leisure time, and reduced mobility in comparison with younger age groups. They are the ideal web users of the future.
As a consequence, sites that wish to cater to the needs of this demographic must be very mindful of issues with visual disabilities. Can text be zoomed to cater for the needs of those with diminished visual abilities? When text is zoomed, do page layouts break?
Many so called "cutting edge" techniques today rely on the use of flash, or images, for text, both of which impact on the ability of users to adapt text size to their needs.
Similarly, many "cutting edge" techniques rely on dynamic controls for navigation - "fly-out menus" and the like. These can be extremely difficult for those without very good hand eye coordination to use.
I think that there is a growing realisation that simplicity in design makes sites more usable and accessible. I think it is a trend which will continue.
Q: When designers say "it is important to have web content separate from its presentation"... what are they talking about?
A: In the very early days of the web, Tim Berners-Lee's Web 1.0, particularly HTML 1, there was no presentational aspect to the web. No bold, italic, underline, font, link color. The elements of HTML were all "semantic", things like citations, quotes, blockquotes, and emphasis. The web was pure content, with no presentation.
Then Marc Andreesen, and the rest of the developers of Mosaic and later Netscape went and both made the web wildly popular, and at the same broke the web, by introducing presentational markup into HTML. So we got bold elements, and font elements, and block elements (if you have been around the web long enough you'll remember the awful summer of 1994 when every page had at least 10 blinking elements on it - I kid you not.)
Finally, David Seigal's Killer websites let the world in on his dirty little secret, that you could use tables for page layout, and the web was broken so badly we are still cleaning up the mess - take a look! http://www.killersites.com/
OK, that's how we got to about 2002, with the complete mish-mash of presentation (stuff like elements) and content. Yes, CSS has been round since 1996 and usable since about 1999, but widespread adoption in large scale commercial development is only a couple of years old.
What's bad about mixing content and presentation? Well, the better question is - "What's good about it?" Before Mosaic and its presentational extensions to HTML, the web didn't look too pretty. A pretty web was much more attractive to developers, publishers and most users. So a pretty web exploded in popularity. This is good.
Now, why wasn't the web pretty before this? Well, the original users of the web were largely scientists, and for them content was king. Tim Berners-Lee's original HTML proposal included the concept of style sheets for styling otherwise plain HTML based pages, but he didn't get around to implementing style sheets. Others did in the early 90's, but Mosiac's HTML extensions like were so simple for developers to implement that these took off like wildfire.
OK, what's wrong with mixing up presentation and content? For this we have to go back to the philosophy of the web. The same content, available to all, regardless of the devices they use, the speed of their networks, the abilities and disabilities they have - a World Wide Web.
Now, as soon as you shove presentation into your content, you are essentially making the content specific for a kind of device (a web browser on a monitor working at at least 640x480 pixels) and abilities - people with eyesight. You are privileging certain devices, abilities, network speeds and so on, to the detriment of others.
What happens when you push such pages onto a handheld device, at a high resolution 200x200 pixels? Or a braille device, or a screen reader?
What good does "bold" have for a blind person? Why is that information bold? Is it emphasis? Then use an element.
In addition to doing the right thing, there are all kinds of practical benefits to separating content and its presentation, reduced bandwidth, easier and so cheaper development and maintenance, improved accessibility, improved device independence, improved search engine rankings. The list is long.
So in a nutshell (yet again) separation of presentation and content, is really about using semantic markup, free of presentational HTML for your pages, and CSS for presentation. And it is really good to do.
Q: I don't know anyone with an internet fridge. Will people really be accessing the internet from devices other than PCs? If this is the case, how will this affect the way that web sites are designed?
A: Yeah, those fridges. I'd love to know whether anyone has ever bought one because they are web-enabled. I notice that the latest ads promote the TV aspect of the fridges, suggesting that nope, people don't care less.
But, will people use non browser devices to access the web? I'd put my house on it.
Today, almost every new mobile phone has a web browser on it, or can run one. In the next year or two, 600 million people will get a new mobile phone. That's around the same number of people who currently use the web. In car navigation devices are increasingly common. Wireless networks are becoming increasingly pervasive. Already, mobile phone based browsers are showing up in web statistics.
In Japan, mobile phone based web use have been significant for over half a decade, as much because the network pricing models are reasonable, and access is close to ubiquitous.
What has to change here, and elsewhere to see a similar take off?
First up, mobile phone carriers need to open their networks up to the web, not just some small, premium version of it. They need to realise that they are bandwidth providers, and stop being greedy about also making their money off content, in pat by excluding people from the wider web, as most providers currently do. And web sites have mostly got to be redesigned so that they actually work on anything at all other than IE6 for Windows at a minimum of 800x600 pixels.
Now, how will all of this affect web design? Well, there is an enormous opportunity for those who provide content and services to people on the go to obliterate their competition by making their sites actually work on handheld devices.
What kinds of services are these? Banking, entertainment ticketing, travel booking, anything that revolves around spontaneous decisions and disposable income.
If you look at any major site in any of the above areas they are simply dreadful on virtually anything other than a fast connection using IE on Windows, with a large screen. They would be a joke, if only the amount of business they were losing wasn't so phenomenal.
Q: How can you tell if your developers are up to the job when it comes to making your site accessible?
A: Well, the easiest way to determine would just be to assume that they aren't. Sounds harsh and sarcastic, but in truth, most developers just don't get any of this.
If you wanted a few two minute quizzes, you could ask for a succinct description of the difference between XHTML and HTML, or how a developer ensures their page is valid, or which HTML or XHTML doctype they use and why, or what quirksmode is. These aren't strictly about accessibility, but if you aren't across the basics of standards based web development it is highly unlikely you will be across issues in accessibility.
Perhaps more importantly, as developers or decision makers (managers, business people and the like) what can you do to improve your skills and knowledge, your competence, in these areas?
First up, I don't think you can be a good managers in this area without some understanding of the underlying technologies, standards and best practices. Otherwise, how can you decide whether the advice your developers are giving you is any good, whether their technical decisions are the right ones, or only reflect their current level of competence or otherwise. Or how can you make strategic decisions about the direction of future development if its all just gibberish to you?
I recently wrote an article aimed at decision makers, which covers a series of issues that all development teams need to be addressing.
For developers, I think they need to accept is that this approach, of standards, accessibility and other W3C best practices is the future. You can turn your back on the tide, but it is coming in. Many developers have been at it a long time, and really aren't all that keen on starting over. But the longer you wait, the more out of touch you'll be.
But really, the benefits you get as a developer, the benefits that the users of your sites get, and the benefits for your employer or clients are remarkable once you get up to speed, which isn't all that hard, despite what many people think.
Q: OK. We're convinced. So where do we start?
First, get inspired. This is not a chore, its an adventure, with tremendous rewards. See the ZenGarden and CSS Vault for examples of what you can do with CSS and standards based development.
My company has been involved in all this stuff for years, and we have a lot of free, very useful learning materials, courses, tutorials, guides, and so on. Take a look at http://westciv.com/style_master/house/index.html
Many others have similar resources, we link to many of these too at http://westciv.com/style_master/academy/links.html
A great Australian based organisation, free to join, the Web Standards Group, has a fantastic mailing list where smart people from all over the world will be happy to help you, and even has meetings in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane every few weeks. See http://webstandardsgroup.org/ for more details.
John Allsopp is a founder and technical director of Western Civilisation Pty. Ltd. , (Westciv) an Australian based world leader in web development software training, development and strategy. Their flagship application, Style Master, is the leading cross platform CSS development application, and their courses and learning materials are used by hundreds of thousands around the World. With the Web Standards Group, westciv recently ran the successful Web Essentials '04 standards development and accessibility conference.
