Web Access Centre Blog

Great news, PAS 78 “Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites” is now available for free from the Disability Rights Commission website.

This is essential reading for anyone involved in running a website. It’s a non technical document aimed at website owners, project managers, marketing and business development people. It gives advice on what standards to follow, how to plan, test and roll out an accessible website as well as write an accessible website policy and source accessibility friendly web designers.

Download a copy of PAS 78

Unfortunately, Robin ran into major troubles with the lack of wifi access, which meant that his presentation - Beyond a Code Audit - was significantly interrupted, and I was quite worried that the impact - both in terms of Robin as a speaker, and in terms of the material he was showing, would be lost as a result.

In the end, although he may not have been able to present all his material in the way he would have liked, and his slot didn’t wind up being about additional things that can be done, beyond the code, it did end up being a startling example of just how difficult relatively simple tasks become when using a screen reader, and that alone has had a significant impact.

In fact, one or two people I spoke to afterwards about it said they felt it was the best and most impactful presentation they’d seen at the entire conference, which just goes to show that a dose of Presenter’s Curse can result in a positive visit from the Department of Unintended Consequences.

For those who didn’t make it, or want to see what Robin would have said and demonstrated, his speaker notes are available from the AbilityNet website:

Beyond a Code Audit - Robin Christopherson

Molly gave an excellent presentation that got a few people I spoke to involved in accessibility fired up. Her passion for the “world” in the world wide web reinforced the importance of addressing the needs of not only users with disabilities such as visual, motor, hearing and cognitive impaired, users with older browsers, dial-up, mobiles, PDA’s but also users from different backgrounds, cultures, religions and languages.

While we tend to focus on users with disabilities and different technologies perhaps not enough thought is given to users from other cultures, languages and religions who may interpret text, colours or images differently unless they are correctly presented and marked up. The message is clear:

internationalisation is a piece of accessibility

Some key accessibility guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that underpin optimising content for an international audience include:

• Structural markup - code the natural language of the page and any changes in the page using the LANG attribute. Screen readers rely on this.
• Clear and simple English - reduce the use of jargon and provide expansions of acronyms and abbreviations. This makes text more readable to users with cognitive impairments, users with screen readers and non-native speakers.
• Clear and simple page titles, link text and headings - relied on by screen readers and users with dyslexia and reading problems to both navigate and understand content.
• Appropriate use of colour and images - be sensitive to the meaning of colour and images in different cultures and provide clear alt text for symbols and icons. A red light in the China is a very different thing to a red light in the West!

Molly went on to say that some people feel that web standards, such as WCAG, inhibit creativity - something we hear people use a lot as an excuse to not make sites accessible. But as Molly put it, we need web standards to create a platform in order to move on, innovate and create while taking everyone with us.

It could be said that at the start of the Web it was by its very nature accessible. The addition of images, colour, audio, video, Flash, PDF have led the web astray but if we continue to advance these technologies together with web standards then we can ensure accessibility is borderless and work towards it being:

a globally accessible medium.

Read the full presentation of Internationalisation: Awakening the sleeping Giant

Read a transcript of the presentation on Muffin Research Labs

I’ve long been a fan of Dan’s site - Simplebits - and have been reading it for a long time now, so I was really looking forward to seeing him speak. I wasn’t so much looking forward to the early start after something of a late end to the day before, and it was a bit of a shame that he was given Slot of Doom 2 (Slot of Doom 1 being post-lunch Day 1 of any conference, Slot of Doom 2 being first on Day 2) but it was worth the effort.

A few people who already had Dan’s book - Bulletproof Web Design - seemed disappointed that there wasn’t anything new to them in the presentation, but although there wasn’t much that was new to me either, it was still interesting to hear him talk, and share his experience and philosophy. It was especially good to hear him talk about issues which affect accessibility not from an accessibility standpoint, but from a designer’s standpoint - of wanting to do the best job, and ensuring that as wide an audience as possible can read the site.

For those who don’t want to wade through the 20mb PDF of his presentation (linked below) and can’t wait for the recorded audio, I’ve transcribed a few of my notes below (my additions in parenthesis).

The Bulletproof Design Concept

• Embrace flexibility (of both text size and layout, if appropriate)
• Let go of pixel precision
• Plan ahead for worst-case scenarios (graceful degradation in older browsers, etc.)

The 10 second usability test

• Take away the design (disable CSS)
• Is the site still understandable?
• Does the structure make sense?

The Bulletproof Dashboard

(of tools that can help you ensure a bulletproof design)

• Do the 10 second usability test
• Turn off images - is all information still available?
• Validate markup and stylesheets
• Perform the Digdug text test Named after the video game Digdug, where the “enemy” characters are blown up until they explode) - increase (and decrease) the text size

Obviously, just doing the above won’t guarantee an accessible site, but if more people followed those simple rules, a number of sites would instantly become more accessible than they are currently, and I’ve got hopes that the people in the audience who hadn’t thought this way before will go back to their jobs and put this kind of sensible advice into practice.

Bulletproof Web Design - Dan Cederholm (20mb PDF)

I could try and summarise this presentation, but it’d be impossible to get across the real impact of hearing him speak.

Although he wasn’t specifically referring to accessibility in his talk, the principles he outlined to consider when buildling web applications should, if properly followed, ensure that developers think about their audience - their entire audience, not just the able bodied section - when doing the latest cool thing with AJAX.

For me, it was an incredibly inspiring talk, and reassuring to see so much focus on the structure, information architecture and planning to underpin the “ooh, shiny!” features of visual design to give a solid user experience.

Building the next generation of Web Applications - Jeffrey Veen (18mb PDF)

Gez Lemon, Ian Lloyd, Patrick Lauke and Andy Clarke presented a panel on “The New Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG 2.0″, which was interesting for more reasons than the content.

I think this was possibly one of the most misunderstood panels of the conference. I spoke to a few people afterwards, and some expressed surprised that it was fairly reasoned and sensible, even polite - especially in light of Joe Clark’s recent A List Apart article, To Hell with WCAG2, which is fairly critical of WCAG2, but has been very useful in generating discussion.

Overall, I felt it was a good overview of the guidelines and the supporting documentation, giving a bit more clarity to controversial issues such as baselines and scoping.

To paraphrase Gez Lemon, speaking as a member of the WCAG Working Group:

Baselines define technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, PDF, etc., not user agents.

He went on to talk about how to define a baseline, and what might be an appropriate baseline, and said that the Working Group would be interested to hear from anyone who had read the guidelines and decided on a baseline.

On scoping, the overwhelming message was:

Scoping is not a get out clause.

The point being that it’s not appropriate to set a baseline of Internet Explorer 6 with Flash and JavaScript and then only claim conformance for one small part of the site.

He also made the point that if a baseline that was considered too high was chosen, then the site could not be considered to be accessible. How that will work in practice remains to be seen.

Andy Clarke talked a bit about accessibility and guidelines for accessibility from a designer’s perspective and made a couple of very good points.

First of all, he said that his approach as a designer was to make the site the best he could make it, and make it so that people have a pleasurable experience using it and how those are the fundamental reasons for creating any product, let along web content.

This leads to him being “guideline agnostic”, believing that if he follows the above philosophy, accessibility comes as standard - which, in Andy’s case I think it does, but I’m not convinced that the guidelines are unnecessary for everyone, I think they help those that don’t have quite the same understanding of the issues or user perspective.

The overwhelming impression I got from talking to people afterwards was that they were expecting more. More fire and brimstone, like Joe Clark’s article. More information about what to actually to do implement the guidelines. More than what’s been published on the various blogs since the latest draft was published. It’s a bit of a shame really, because for those who don’t read blogs, I think it was a great introductory guide to WCAG2 and that those who had a different expectation perhaps didn’t appreciate the work that went in (particularly in Patrick’s case, as the only person (other than Joe Clark) who I think has read every single piece of documentation) to put together the panel.

The Retail Bulletin has just announced that they will be publishing, monthly, a league table of the websites of “the UK’s top 15 retailers”. They say:

Using the fully automated testing techniques of website specialist SiteMorse, we will find which of the country’s retailers have the best performing websites and which have the worst.

It’s not clear at this stage how much accessibility will form part of the testing. But this month’s results include factors such as:

Usable (out of 100 per cent) – that the page met the following usability measures: a speed of 5Kb/sec or greater, a response time of 1 second or less, no accessibility failures for visually impaired people, no errors, and seven or fewer warnings.

Read the full article:
http://www.theretailbulletin.com/index.php?page=5&id=8496

Oh dear! It seems the FA and FIFA both failed to ensure that, with the World Cup now upon us, their websites would be easy and welcoming for users with disabilities.

See AbilityNet’s latest “State of the eNation” report

This was a presentation I went to mostly with my design hat on, to see if he was going to highlight anything I didn’t already know, and to see if there were any new techniques he was going to highlight.

Actually, it turns out that I pretty much knew everything he was talking about, but it was still interesting to get a kind of benchmark on my knowledge of typography.

Dave’s kindly already put his presentation and some additional information online, although I can’t swear that the PDF of his slides is accessible.

Dave Shea - Fine Typography for the Web - Presentation Materials

Well, I eventually made the tough choice I talked about last night and went to Jeremy Keith’s presentation on Using DOM Scripting to plug the holes in CSS.

Now, I should probably point out here that I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, a programmer, and to date, have avoided doing anything more with javascript and DOM scripting than modifying scripts that other people have written and clearly explained.

That said, Jeremy was such an excellent presenter, and was so clear and understandable that I think he might well have convinced me to re-think my stance, and perhaps explore more of what DOM scripting has to offer.

There were loads of great examples of what could best described as progressive enhancements - even when it looked like he was generating content via DOM scripting, all he was really doing was manipulating information that was already there - which reassured me when I managed to get hold of the microphone and ask the question.

He was very clear when he said that these techniques (specifically generating content) should not be used for mission critical information.

AJAX is another matter, but that wasn’t the focus of the day.

As a prize for asking a question, I managed to get my hands on a copy of Stuart Langridge’s book, DHTML Utopia, which will be very interesting reading.

Presentation Slides: Using DOM Scripting to plug the holes in CSS (use cursor keys or click with the mouse to advance through the presentation.