Accessibility; Ever changing; Always the same

It’s been a couple of years since I last worked on WCAG 2.0. However, being at the RNIB today for a demo of assistive technology made me think a lot.

Web accessibility hasn’t changed, some of the techniques have, but really it’s the same old problems that were bouncing around a couple of years ago or more. Web accessibility is still the combined experience of a user agent and a web page. If either of those two let the side down, then one of them has to fill the breech, or the user gets a let down.

I’m still not impressed with the innovation of manufactures like Freedom Scientific, Dolphin and Windows Eyes. I know they are smaller companies but they just don’t to be improving the offerings in the market place, just slowly shifting to keep filtering out the dross of the web for their users. I just don’t think it’s good enough.

Cognitive disabilities were also talked about. It’s a shame really, because they are the forgotten child of the Accessilibity world. Not through malice or sloth, but because they are the hardest to cater for. To badly paraphrase a point I think Joe Clark made.

It’s possible to cater for people who are deaf and blind or motor impaired. Those people all understand the information and you just need to transform it from one medium to another. How do we cope when the person needs very different information.

Update: Joe points me to a much more eloquent explanation (see last paragraph of his comment).

It’s not that we don’t care, but do we let our complete inability to sensibly deal with cognitive disabilities affect our work for everyone else? It’s the worst choices in pragmatism, we don’t want to leave anyone behind, but you have to start somewhere. Perfection on the other side of the mountain, but I make a start by climbing the foothills.

Possibly I’m being contentious but I guess it comes from looking at the same problem two years on and hearing the same arguments from different mouths.

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Web Development, Accessibility, Screen Readers, JAWS, Windows Eyes, WCAG