Is it time to make web accessibility more, well, accessible?
Digital agency Zone’s head of development, Rich Bultitude, has had accessibility very much on his mind recently…
When you work in the business of creating something, be it selling a brand or promoting a cause, you want to speak to as many people as possible. The more barriers you put in front of a prospective audience, the lower the potential impact. This, essentially, is the principle behind online accessibility: eliminating the barriers an audience faces — after all, almost one in five people in the UK have a disability.
Working as my agency does with a host of clients in the pro-social sector, this principle is of particular relevance, and is why I have spent a lot of time recently considering the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. First published in 1999 by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), the second edition (and current) edition was published in 2008 and is still considered the global standard in terms of accessibility.
No doubt millions of users have benefited from the guidelines’ implementation. However, it can still be tricky to see a way through the minefield of accessibility best practice because some of the criteria are somewhat controversial and because technology is ever-changing.
So we have to ask ourselves: do we look to WAI to deliver an updated set of criterion or do we adopt a completely new, more inclusive, approach?
This is a critical question, as championing accessibility doesn’t just benefit a minority set of users, it benefits everyone — it means that the content in question is, by definition, easy to access and the structures which support that content are robust. Also, we must remember that almost everyone is born with or develops some kind of disability… common ones being sensory degradation, tinnitus or memory loss.
Accessibly designed websites ensure that mentally or physically impaired users can reach and consume the content in two ways: unassisted and assisted. If the web were a house the former is the staircase — essentially, your basic browser — and the latter a lift — the employment of assistive technologies such as screen readers. To cater for both worlds the industry needs a set of standards as a baseline — the aforementioned WCAG 2.0
But there’s a lot more to accessibility than simply making sure your dev team bookmark those guidelines: it’s about promoting a culture both within your own organisation and beyond.
My own agency, Zone, has just created and shared an accessibility guidelines web app to help people find explanations for accessibility criteria quickly and easily, and by people I mean everyone… from editors to UX designers. It also allows users to filter by priority level (e.g. A, AA, AAA), which is an obvious but absent feature of existing standards.
We’re certainly not alone in creating apps such as this, and accessibility is being taken more seriously in the wider dev community. Trade bible Net Mag recently dedicated a regular section to accessibility, albeit at the very back of the magazine, and popular conferences such as Smashing have given the topic more airtime over recent years.
I sincerely hope that this trend continues, and that this movement filters out beyond the technical field. As the traditional silos are broken down, with developers sitting alongside designers, writers, testers and so in in the agency environment, shouldn’t everyone involved in a project be concerned about accessibility principles?
In fact, given that the WCAG 2.0 only become ratified as an international Standard (ISO/IEC 40500:2012) in 2013 do we really need WCAG 3.0? Speaking as someone who heads a team of developers I initially thought so, but having created the aforementioned accessibility app, I’m now unconvinced.
Some of the guidelines may seem too prescriptive and others out-of-date, but perhaps we’re just best remembering the point of accessibility: to empathise with every possible user type and to give them the best experience possible.
We have the materials to build our house (servers, a global network, quality content), we have the foundations (HTML5 spec, WCAG 2.0) we have a considerable toolkit (HTML validator, Fangs, WAVE), and we have, in our team-mates, the manpower to get it done — so let’s not get too stressed about the guidelines and concentrate on the user.
That’s the message we should be spreading.
