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Accessibility

“Availability does not equal accessibility”

In 1999, the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) were ordered by the Australian Human Rights Comission to redesign the Olympic website following a complaint by a user who claimed that the site was inaccessible to him as a blind person. SOCOG refused to redesign the site, but lost the resultant court battle, and were forced to redesign the site and pay A$20,000 damages.

The user's inability to access parts of the SOCOG site was due partially to the failure of the site designers to observe certain standards. These standards ensure the accessibility of web content for users of assistive technologies such as speech-browsers and refreshable braille displays.

Furthermore, the concept of access to services for the greatest number of people, in addition to being increasingly enforced by law, is a sound business principle.

The issue of accessibility for all has never had such a high profile. 2003 was the European Year of People with Disabilities. Now, with the UK Disability Discrimination Act due to be enforced in October 2004, British businesses are beginning to wake up to the fact that accessibility is an issue that requires their urgent attention.

What is accessibility?

For a device, application or website to be accessible, it needs to be reasonably possible for anyone, including someone with disabilities, to access the content and its associated functionality. As the level of accessibility increases, the differences in ease of access between different groups of users decrease.

There is considerable overlap in the goals of accessibility and usability, because both strive to:

• Improve satisfaction, effectiveness and efficiency.
• Either make it easier for everyone to use a particular technology, or make it easier for a certain group to use it.

However, accessibility is more explicitly dedicated to improving conditions of use for those with physical, sensory or cognitive disabilities.

Making websites accessible is particularly important, because the Web is thought to epitomise the availability of information for all. Information is very often not freely available to people with disabilities. Below are some common examples of the sort of code that causes big problems for assistive technologies:

• No text alternatives for images.
• Structural elements (e.g. tables) used clumsily for aesthetic reasons.
• Streamed media with no captions or text transcript.
• Poor labelling of forms and frames.
• Script and/or programming code that is not recognised by assistive technologies (such as speech-browsers).

Colour is also a key issue, with 1 in 12 people suffering from colour blindness. Some colour combinations that are clear to many of us are totally indistinguishable to somebody who is colour blind.

What is disability?

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium is working from statistics of more than 750 million people living with disability worldwide. This number is larger than many people expect, because we tend to think of only the visibly and permanently disabled. Within the accessibility community the term Temporarily Able Bodied (TBA) is used to describe non-disabled people to illustrate the fact that many of us will become disabled, either temporarily or permanently, at some point in our lives.

Disability can be congenital and acquired (through injury, illness or ageing). It can be permanent and temporary. Types of disability include motor, sensory (deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low visions, colour blindness), cognitive (difficulties with learning, reasoning, memory and attention) and linguistic (speech production, speech comprehension, reading, writing, dyslexia).

Why is accessibility important?

If the ethical reasons for considering disability when designing technology are not convincing enough, there are also legal and business cases to be made:

• Accessibility is increasingly included in anti-discriminatory legislation, such as the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), and Section 508 in the US. A period of grace for UK businesses ends when the DDA is enforced in October 2004. The code of practice accompanying the DDA explicitly makes reference to a website example, which strongly implies that the DDA is applicable to online services.
• With a global market of 750 million people, many of whom could benefit immensely from more accessible technologies to conduct their everyday lives (including shopping), accessible design is often a tool for directly increasing business revenue.
• As people live longer, the number of disabled people will grow with the global increase in senior citizens.

How do I achieve accessible design?

Accessible design requires a proactive approach, with inputs throughout the process of product development. For example, typical inputs to a website design project could include:

• Inception: test prototypes on a range of disabled users to gain usage insights and identify key usability issues with assistive technologies.
• Coding: validate HTML and any other technologies against WAI standards; conduct an expert accessibility audit with different combinations of browsers and operating systems.
• Usability Testing: make sure disabled users form a segment of the recruitment sample when Usability Testing.
• Pre-launch: for good measure, do a final code review to check your site against up-to-date standards and guidelines.

Many businesses are put off by the costs associated with accessible design. This type of thinking is short-sighted because it fails to recognise that the cost of improving the accessibility of a product in development is miniscule compared to the cost of making changes to a launched product, or even the costs of lengthy legal proceedings.

Further Reading

A full blown account of Maguire versus SOCOG

The Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) has an accessible information site which lays out the principles and legal requirements for businesses to provide accessible information. They also have a web accessbility site.

A good guide to web accessibility principles and standards:
Slatin, J.M. & Rush, S. (2003) Maximum Accessibility, Addison Wesley

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