Inaccessible web site? It may not be entirely your fault

I was reading through some posts of the excellent Joe Dolson. This one particularly struck me, “What’s the key to Accessibility?“. In it Joe says:

In a word, options. Building an accessible website doesn’t mean building a visual experience which will work perfectly for all audience. It doesn’t mean writing content that everybody will be able to read equally. What it means is creating an experience where users can alter their experience as they choose so they can best experience the site.

I couldn’t agree with this more, and Joe phrases it very well. However I have to disagree with what he wrote about implementation. Jared Smith from WebAIM talks about this in the comments saying In nearly all of the testing that we have done on accessibility widgets and options, the resounding response has been that people with disabilities don’t like or even use them. I can well believe this, since with all the good intentions in the world there are no ‘standard’ accessibility widgets. Which means using widgets is just another non-standard thing to learn.

The message I think this discussion brings out is that, there is that web development is a combinations of things to make an experience. Part of that is the web site, but part of it is also the user agent. For a while now web developers have been working to WCAG 1.0 but feeling rotten about the fact that their efforts can fall short of the mark. I don’t like it, but I think the solution is not good intention and clever web widgets. The solution is mature user agents for people with a range of needs.

To go back to my post from a few days ago, we can transform information (especially in a text form) to be rendered in a way that works for someone with any physical disability, we can provide interfaces that work with almost any level of control. However the web development community needs to find their place in this and realise it is not there to solve all the problems. Web development is about presenting the information in such a way that it can be manipulated for rendering on any device, and interacted with by any control. We aren’t here to make all the rendering or devise all the controls. We are the facilitators.

So, if web development reaches the point of offering semantic manipulatable content, what is missing? What’s missing the user agent support to work with the semantic content. While a lot of assistive technology is made by smaller companies, it is still frustrating they don’t fully support standards. If I were feeling cynical I might suggest that assistive technology vendors that sell software to read web sites rely on the poor quality of code for their market edge. To my knowledge there are no UAAG conforming user agents. Why not? It is because there is no driving factors to encourage UAAG compliance.

A standard like UAAG would require additional work, costing the vendor money. What is needed is either a stick or a carrot, in way of encouragement. If an governmental organisation like the DRC were to mandate that all user agents need to conform to UAAG (or be a part of a UAAG compliant package) to sell in the United Kingdom it would have a profound affect on the market. We don’t allow people to make ineffective wheelchairs, why would we allow them to make ineffective user agents? In a similar way, if a large organisation like the NHS offered to buy exclusively from the first vendor to make a UAAG compliant product the market would also change dramatically as vendors scrambled to get the big sale.

It’s not just the user agent vendors that seem to have been unaffected by the increasing drive for accessibility. Web development tool vendors have yet to produce anything which complies with the ATAG. While Adobe/Macromedia applications like Dreamweaver have been making inroads towards more semantic and accessible markup, Apple have released tools like iWeb which is as bad a frontpage ever was. Yet another area that needs a stick and a carrot.

Really what I hope this article has emphasised is the need for web developers to realise that the web site is only one part of a bigger picture to deliver information to the user. I also hope I have raised some questions about why User Agents and Web Development tool manufacturers have been exempted from the legislation which is in place to enforce the accessibility of the web.

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Browsers, Web Development, Accessibility, Screen Readers, WCAG, ATAG, UAAG