Let’s talk about accessibility
The other day, Jeff posted some thoughts about accessibility which were, for the most part, well-received. Some people apparently didn’t get the message, though, and went after him in the comments, so he had to post a follow-up clarifying that, no, he’s not an evil corporate monster who hates handicapped people.
Jeff’s first post was somewhat kicked off by Roger Johansson’s post on Monday, which had comments that got so bad he had to close them for a while, then re-open them with a note:
Comments are open again. You are free to disagree with my personal opinion on this matter. However, do keep it polite and constructive. Name-calling, trolling, and personal attacks will not be tolerated.
When looking at some of the nastier comments left for Jeff and Roger, I wonder: what the hell is wrong with these people? Why can’t we have real discussions about accessibility?
Welcome to Accessibility Club
The first rule of Accessibility Club is: talk about accessibility. John Foliot probably thought he was being oh-so-funny when he pointed out some unescaped ampersands in Jeff’s HTML, but really he was just making himself look like an asshole. What do ampersands have to do with accessibility? Absolutely nothing, as he even admitted in his comment, so leave off it and actually talk about accessibility.
The second rule of Accessibility Club is: talk about accessibility. I repeat myself here because this bears repeating. For example: making petty swipes about designers “painting their pretty pictures” has absolutely nothing to do with accessibility, and just cements your place in the asshole camp. Yeah, John, I’m talking about you again.
The third rule of Accessibility Club is: leave the spin at home. If someone says something you don’t agree with, building a straw man that’s easier to attack isn’t going to win you the argument. Grant Broome, this one’s for you.
The fourth rule of Accessibility Club is: Accessibility Club is not Fight Club. Now, there are people in this world who don’t honestly care about accessibility, and yelling at them isn’t going to change their minds. Those people just need to be kicked in the balls.
But there are people in this world who do care about accessibility, even if they’re not always able to do everything you, personally, would like them to do. Yelling at them isn’t going to make them start doing the things you want them to do, and runs a real risk of alienating them entirely. People who are making good faith efforts but suffering under real-world constraints are not your enemies.
What accessibility is not
Now that we’ve covered the ground rules of discussion, let’s take a look at a few important concepts which need to be kept in mind while we talk about accessibility:
- Accessibility is not a binary toggle. HTML has clear rules on what’s allowed and what’s not, and figuring out whether something is valid HTML or not is a matter of checking the HTML against the rules; either it follows the rules or it doesn’t. There is no equivalent of this for accessibility, because accessibility means different things to different people. Even the oft-maligned W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines acknowledge this, by introducing the concept of “levels” of accessibility and by being called guidelines.
- Accessibility does not exist in a vacuum. It’s impossible to talk about accessibility without considering it in some particular context; “accessibility” as a Platonic ideal divorced from any context just doesn’t exist. This follows logically from the non-binary nature of accessibility: the question “is this accessible or not?” is useless. The useful questions are specific situational ones, like “would adding skip links to this site make the content easier to access for users of screen readers?” and “would setting these navigation links to display as block make it easier for users with muscular/coordination impairments to reach and activate them?”
- Accessibility cannot be decided by rules. This follows logically from the above. Yes, there’s WCAG 1 and the under-construction WCAG 2, and there’s some hand-waving in US federal law and some other countries have more or less adopted bits of WCAG 1 as law. But because accessibility isn’t a binary thing and has to be considered in context, any attempt to codify it into specific rules is doomed to failure — there will never be any set of rules that’s good enough to judge “this is accessible” versus “this is not accessible” for all contexts.
I would trust that these things are obvious, but repeated experience has taught me that such trust would be misplaced.
What accessibility is
And now the flip side:
- Accessibility is a continuum. For a colorblind person, a site which takes care to provide contrast between the color of foreground text and the background color it displays against is probably going to be more accessible than one that doesn’t. For that same person, a site that also takes care to distinguish links by underlining them is probably going to be more accessible than one that doesn’t, and a site which carefully chooses the colors of its visited and unvisited links is probably even more accessible. There are lots of things you can do to improve a site’s accessibility in a given context, and how accessible your site will be in that context depends on the exact combination you implement.
- Accessibility is an ongoing process. There’s no point at which you can step back and say, “OK, our accessibility work is done”. Working your way along the continuum means paying attention to your users and to available accessibility techniques, and making changes over time.
- Accessibility involves trade-offs. As with any feature, accessibility requires knowledge, time and effort; in most contexts, this means it’s also going to cost money. Making the right choices to improve a site’s accessibility means looking at the benefits a particular technique offers and weighing them against the cost of implementation.
With Jeff’s posts that last one seems to be where the controversy centers, so let’s look at a couple of examples:
-
Providing
alttext for images doesn’t require much time or effort, so it’s a low-cost improvement. And the accessibility benefits for visually-impaired users are significant; without that text, an image may well be useless to them. So this is almost always a good trade-off to make. -
Providing transcripts of videos (or embedded captions, though that’s a messy realm of technology) may be easy if you’re producing the videos yourself and they’re scripted (for example, a TV news broadcast is almost always read from a prepared script). And the accessibility benefits for hearing-impaired users are on a par with the benefits of
alttext for visually-impaired users. But if you’re not producing the video or if it’s unscripted, it can have much higher costs — you’ll have to have someone transcribe the video, and not everyone who puts video online can afford that. Whether you provide transcripts for videos, then, depends on the resources you have available.
And just to hammer it home, because I know there are people who will ignore the rules of Accessibility Club and try to shove words into my mouth: when I say it “depends on the resources you have available”, that doesn’t mean “it’s OK not to care about it”. That doesn’t mean “don’t worry about it”. That means “it depends on the resources you have available”. For example, if you’ve got transcripts for your videos or if you’ve got the ability to produce them, and you know it would provide a significant accessibility benefit for some of your site’s users, then you should provide transcripts. But if you don’t have them and if producing them would be prohibitively expensive, then don’t provide them, and focus your resources where you know they can do good. In general, I think it’s better to reach the people you can reach than to reach nobody at all.
Closing thoughts
Web accessibility is a deep and complex subject, and — pardon the pun — not always a very accessible one. There are lots of things which can impair someone’s use of the web, in lots of different ways, and some are more common than others. A lot of accessibility guidelines have been propagated over the years based on anecdotal evidence or on hypothetical considerations (usability, which is arguably a superset of accessibility, suffers from the same problem). What solid research there is on the topic can be hard to find at times, and hard to understand when you do find it. Many of the laws regarding web accessibility are horrendously vague. And no matter how hard you try to get it right, there’s probably going to be an asshole somewhere who will be all too happy to crucify you over a particular trade-off you decided not to make.
But that doesn’t mean we should give up. It means we should be willing to adapt, willing to share what we know in a civilized manner, willing to make the trade-offs we can afford to make, willing to ignore the inevitable rogue assholes and, above all, willing to learn.
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August 25, 2006
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wonderful article james.
i like how you started with defining what accessibility is not. good approach. keep on writing. great articles coming from you.
August 25, 2006
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So how do we join this so called accessibility club? heheh.
I think you articulated your point very well, and I was rather disgusted by comments made both at Jeff and Roger’s blog. I know that sometimes writing a post about something you are passionate about can leave many holes in your argument - and many will point right at those holes instead of UNDERSTANDING what was being said. I think this happened with Jeff’s post, even though I understood exactly what he was trying to convey.
September 6, 2006
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Well said. Me personally, well I’m an argumentative bugger most of the time, but I hope I’ll stop and think “we’re all on the same side” now and again; we’re trying to make websites more accessible. Just because we disagree with someone doesn’t make them bad people. Hell, they may even be right some of the time. Possibly even when they’re disagreeing with me… …and I’d rather a room full of accessibility advocates agreeing about the 90% of things they agree sites SHOULD do, than spending all their time disagreeing on the remaining 10%. …But I’m probably just as guilty as anyone else. Sorry.
September 10, 2006
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Accessibility, like any other “ility” is certainly not black or white, rather a shade of grey.
Just because you have a capability, doesn’t mean that you are more or less capable than someone else who has the same capability.
So, it follows that if you believe that accessibility is something that can be worthwhile, then you are on the path towards making things MORE accessible.
Those who argue that accessibility is rubbish may be able to enlighten me as to why making something more accessible (not just to people with disabilities, but for devices other than modern web browsers) with little to no extra effort is a bad thing.
There will always be fenatics and evangelists who are so one eyed that they fail to see any point of view that isn’t in line with theis dictatorial view of the world but in reality, as long as people are thinking accessibility then it is only a matter of time beofre they start implementing their learnings in their work.
I am a seasoned table master, but have seen that accessible web development with standards is the way to go for so many reasons, only one of which is assistiong people with disabilities.
September 20, 2006
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First of all…
While the opinions I expressed to Mr. Post were heated, I (unlike you, and Jeff for that matter) did not stoop to name-calling (Jeff deamed to call me a troll, where you were even more polite and called me an asshole). And if you are going to reference what I said, be sure that a) you’ve actually read what I said, and b) quote it back correctly.
What I said was that there were far too many “designers” commenting on Jeff’s blog that all agreed that “web accessibility” had gone too far. Bollocks! I further posed the question: “…why is it then that even basic, group developed CMS applications can’t produce valid HTML?” and pointed out that un-escaped ampersands were a classic case of this inability.
What does this have to do with accessibility you cry? Well, for one it is a requirement to meeting the WCAG Priority 2 Guidlelines to produce valid HTML… now that may not mean anything to some, but for those who must meet this level of compliance for legally mandated reasons, it is an issue - whether or not it actually impacts on the real acccessibility of a site notwithstanding. Your coment that:
…only serves to illustrate your lack of knowledge here. Rightly or wrongly, countries such as Canada have adopted, at the federal level, the ABSOLUTE requirement to meet WCAG AA as law. And whether or not you agree with it, the law will interpret this as a binary right or wrong result. And HTML validation is certainly a WCAG checkpoint that is binary right or wrong. And as the recent developments vis-a-vis target.com show, it is more than just US Federal sites that need to be “accessible”. So before you go on as some kind of informed web accessibility expert, learn the facts bud.
So while I may have heatedly posed the question, it exposes a very real issue. All of these high-fiving designers bemoaning the fact that web accessibility has gone too far, yet these very same designers can’t even meet the guidelines that have been established and published since 1999!!! Too far? No-where near far enough.
If web accessibility has gone too far, how is it that as recently as Sept. 6th, 2006, a US Circuit Judge ruled that the suit against Target.com can continue. A quick check of target’s web site today (Sept. 20, 2006) still shows numerous accessibility issues including even the most basic - images missing alternative text.
So, don’t tell me, or anyone else for that matter, that web accessibility has gone too far. Jeff Post did all a dis-service by posting that ill-conceived peice of propoganda… and even he admitted after the fact that perhaps he should have chosen his words more carefully. The problem is, many will quote his headline, few will bother to add the addendum of his mea culpa.
And rule five of the Accessibility club is to remain respectful to an individual person (whether you agree with their point of view or not) - asshole.
JF
September 20, 2006
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Oh, John, you underestimate me. I have not yet begun to be an asshole.
And what, pray tell, is the accessibility impact of an unescaped ampersand? Just as real-world accessibility is a trade-off, so are some aspects of validation; we often have no control whatsoever when it comes to the HTML supplied by advertisers, for example — am I accountable for their ampersands? I’d like to think not, and I’d like to think you aren’t such a royally blinkered ass that you’d be able to recognize people who are making good faith efforts and not launch tirades against them when there are real problems you could be solving. Sadly this appears to be beyond your meager powers.
Where did I claim expert status? Oh, dear, John, you’re shoving words into my mouth. Do that too often and I’ll start shoving things somewhere very uncomfortable.
Laying out a binary, hard and fast set of guidelines for accessibility is a damnably stupid thing to do. Period. If you really care about accessibility, you should be out there lobbying your government to get sane about accessibility. You should be out there lobbying the W3C to get sane about accessibility. You shouldn’t be here shooting your mouth off at people who are doing their best to make things accessible within the constraints they’re stuck with.
Jeff raised an extremely salient question: to what extent should accessibility be the responsibility of a web designer or developer, and to what extent should it be the responsibility of vendors who produce web browsing tools? How you’ve managed to twist this into… well, whatever it is you’re perceiving in your strange little brain, I don’t know. Supplying
alttext for images is one that clearly falls on the designer/developer side, and — let me look — oh, yes, I believe I made that quite clear in what I wrote above. Perhaps I’m not the one with the reading comprehension problem?His name is Jeff Croft, John. Reading comprehension: strike two. I never told you or anyone else that web accessibility has gone too far and, if you read Jeff’s posts, you’ll see that neither did he; instead, he was exploring some interesting and important questions about the roles different people should play in accessibility. Shoving words in people’s mouths: strike two.
John, you clearly have no desire to play by the rules, so neither shall I.
In closing, as someone with not one but two different visual impairments which affect my use of the web, I’d like to respectfully say: with advocates like you, I sure don’t need any fucking enemies.
September 20, 2006
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And with that, comments are closed on this entry. I’ll post a followup in the next couple of days, and anyone wishing to spit venom at me will be able to do so there.