bestkungfu weblog

John Richards of IBM Research presented under the title “Web Accessibility: A Broader View”. (This always makes an accessibility geek like me nervous, since “broader” views like this usually translate in the minds of listeners to, “great, these eggheads are solving the problem, so I’ll just stonewall when it comes to accessibility, and hope it gets fixed before the shit hits the fan.” Something similar happened earlier this year at the W3C Technical Plenary. So, to clarify: Yes, you as an author still have a responsibility to make your content accessible. Automated techniques are going to help, but they will not do your dirty work for you. Trust me. They’ve been trying for thirty years.)

Web accessibility is not just about recreational surfing. In some cases, it’s a lifeline (e.g., buying groceries when you can’t leave the house). In others, it’s about Web mail, messaging, and e-commerce. And we’re seeing the desktop and the browser morphing together.

The cost to comply with Web accessibility standards is high. (Well, it is and it isn’t. If you did it right to begin with, your cost is going to be low, and stay low.) Ownership of content has been haphazard, and the requirements have been on legal grounds, since there are “not that many” users with disabilities. (Oh, whatever. This is just an attempt to redefine disability to suit the approach cited in the paper.)

The goal, then, is to reduce the cost of remediation through technology. Moving from checking tools to automated repair tools, from source modification to on-the-fly transformation, and from hardware to software input adaptations. This would increase market adoption by addressing a larger body of users. (I interpret this to mean, companies don’t care about accessibility until they can buy it in a box, and if we can just abstract all these hairy, ugly problems called “users,” that would help us sell it to them. It’s safe to say I have issues with this.)

Let’s take older adults, because they have more to spend. There are benefits for limited dexterity, non-native-language speakers, and those with cognitive disabilities. And there’s situational disability, like poor visibility or constrained ranges of motion, that we all experience. Older adults are a wild card. They have multiple and fluctuating levels of disability, but don’t often consider themselves as being “disabled”. They want a standard browser, want to use the entire Web, but can’t specify their needs concretely.

Older adult users have the same problems, and they addressed them in the same way as with any other user with disabilities, but with an interface that has a less disability-oriented slant than usual. (While I disagree with the motives I can discern here, I have to say this is a really good idea. People should feel comfortable managing their Web sites, rather than treating them like they are printed in indelible ink and Not To Be Modified.)

The researcher’s project is in the form of an IE plugin that pops up menus for setting text size on the fly, color schemes, and so forth. (This is a good idea. Fonts on sites change, and the side effects of such do as well. It’s good to have a way to change things like this more interactively.) A lot of these changes can be done through the browser, but “how many people know how?” (Yup. Not a lot of people know how to set a user style sheet, unfortunately.)

The problem was, nobody could discover the settings icon they created. (Whee! Icon blindness!) So they had to create documentation to show how it’s done. (Which, unfortunately, has the same problem as setting the original preferences: nobody actually studies them. Much better to set a preference right at the start that says, “I don’t want any fonts smaller than x.”)

So they started working on a proxy. It was slow, error-prone, insecure, and had problems with copyright. And it didn’t work for a lot of people. 40% of users used the “speak text” feature — in fact, it was the most-used feature. The system leverages good, accessible content and user agents, rather than trying to boil the ocean of junky, broken content that’s out there. (Which is to say, make good accessible content and a system like this, once they make something that’s usable and effective, and fewer people will have problems. I always hate to say it, but accessibility is not going to go away until everybody picks up a shovel and starts digging. If you were hoping IBM fixed it for you, its really you who needs to take a “broader view.”)