Knowbility News
What's Up with Accessibility in 2007: by Sharron Rush
Access to the web for people with disabilities is a topic that has gained a lot of attention in the years since 1999, when Knowbility was founded. At that time, the WCAG 1.0 Guidelines were still in Draft versions. Section 508 had been reauthorized, but the standards that would define web accessibility for US government agencies had yet to be adopted. It was not at all uncommon to receive blank stares from highly experienced programmers and web developers if the subject of “web accessibility” was introduced. As 2006 draws to a close, that has changed dramatically.
That is not to say that the web is significantly more accessible now than it was in 1999. New technologies continue to be introduced or mashed together and accessibility is often an afterthought. Increased awareness among smart, savvy innovators is an important beginning however, and should not be overlooked. Accessibility barriers are now out in the open and are generally at least considered by developers across a spectrum of private companies, government agencies and Web Standardistas. Talented technologists are working on accessibility from a number of promising directions.
Let’s take a look at some of them and at some of the challenges we can still expect to encounter in the year to come.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has been a tremendous boon to web accessibility, even though disability access is not the central focus of the movement. WaSP insists on valid code and semantic markup rather than accommodation for assistive technologies (AT). As more web professionals become enlightened to the benefits of using markup languages and style sheets according to standards, it becomes easier to measure compatibility and to predict behavior. Various devices (including screenreaders and other alternative browsing technologies) can be designed to common standards and therefore perform more predictably – an asset to successful communication. Look ma, we’re standards compliant and suddenly much more accessible!
If the carrot of web standards is motivating, we must also not overlook the stick of legal action. The National Federation of the Blind VS Target case now making its way through the courts has the potential to extend accessibility requirements to the private sector. Jim Thatcher wrote about the implications of case in the last Knowbility newsletter and there is no doubt that the suit is causing businesses to look twice at their compliance status.
Another factor that could become important in increasing accessibility is the open source movement. When the state of Massachusetts announced in 2005 that it would move to an Open Document Format for all state employees, the cry went up from the disability community that the ODF did not support their assistive technologies, creating the potential for people with disabilities to get sidelined or even to lose their jobs. One result is that open source advocates are now taking accessibility more seriously. Mozilla is supporting the development of a free screenreading extension to Firefox, many accessibility testing tools are open source, and a group of developers working with the popular open source CMS Drupal are contributing accessibility upgrades. Even IBM has jumped on the accessibility bandwagon and IBM’s commitment to accessibility is well established.
These trends all seem good, don’t they? But the biggest news on the Web is user generated. YouTube, Flicker and millions of blogs upon which the users themselves generate content are the fastest growing use of the Internet. What to do about accessibility when the content is being created by millions of users who do not have the first clue about accommodating the needs of people with disabilities? We are back to the blank stares – times millions.
Technologies are changing rapidly and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has issued new Guidelines, WCAG 2.0, to try to address the changes. By defining the Guidelines to be technology-neutral, many in our community have lamented that the guidelines now lack sufficient specificity to provide clear direction. The next year will be challenging as the Guidelines are adopted and implemented within a skeptical environment.
And what about AJAX applications? Again there are some great minds working on these problems but as it stands now, most functionality - such as the drag and drop convenience of many web calendar and search interfaces – are completely unavailable to a user who depends on a screenreader or who needs to navigate using a keyboard rather than a mouse. If you believe as we do that accessibility means that a person with a disability can access the same information and perform the same functions on a web site as any other user, nearly all currently offered AJAX applications are completely inaccessible. We have been here before with other technologies. Flash and JavaScript, once forbidden as wholly inaccessible, have worked with the makers of AT to improve results. We have confidence that we can get to accessibility with AJAX as well.
Derek Featherstone and others are providing leadership in helping developers learn to use AJAX more accessibly. Screenreader manufacturers have work to do as well. Some are calling for the old “make a separate but equal web site” for those who cannot use AJAX created applications. We reject that solution, because it really is not feasible. The web does not stand still and as new applications are built upon those we are now using, once again people with disabilities will be left out unless we think and design inclusively.
Technologies are being combined in exciting ways – RSS feeds, wikis, blogs, mash-ups – that allow for much greater immediacy and interactivity. However, these technologies do not lend themselves to the same techniques that we can depend on for making static web pages accessible. When a web page has multiple live regions that can be changed by user input, those changes must be able to be communicated to a user who does not see the page. So there is much work to be done by accessibility experts, assistive technology developers, and innovators in this space.
This article opened with an appreciation of how much more awareness there is in the technology community about the need for accessibility. That is a fortunate and very important development. As technologies continue to evolve it is that very awareness that inspires really smart people, many of whom use assistive technology to do their work, to continue to bring down barriers. People with disabilities want to use these same tools, to participate as producers and consumers in emerging opportunities. With each new development in the evolution of communications technology, we must rededicate ourselves to making it so.