This essay is the result of some further study into accessibility. There's more to come, so this isn't the whole story, in fact, this essay really isn't complete. But it is the story so far .. so read on:
Never once has a client asked me for an accessible website. It's hard enough to make the case for usability testing which almost always leads to major improvements that are sledgehammer obvious in retrospect but were missed during development. If it's so difficult to persuade people to pay for concrete improvements, surely no-one is going to pay 'extra' for an accessible website if they can get one more cheaply that's not so high-minded. Why should they?
Of course, it's up to me partly to 'educate' my clients. On a recent Top Gear programme when Jeremy Clarkson spoke with his friend, who is an expert in racing boats, and asked him to put two huge outboard motors on the back of his pickup truck, his friend advised against it. He already had enough power with one, and as it turned out, Clarkson's amphibious HiLux would have sunk immediately with the weight of two outboards. Clarkson client knew what he wanted, but his expert friend knew what would work. Of course the opposite is also true .. clients drive progress with their unreasonable requests. "Nothing ever changed because of a reasonable man." "They achieved it because they didn't know it couldn't be done."
But then, you don't go to an architect and ask for a house design that won't fall down and with doors big enough that tall people won't bang their heads. You buy a professional service, and you expect the architect to comply with relevant laws and to take into account such basic considerations within the design.
Unlike architecture, medicine, and law, computing is not regulated. Anyone can set themselves up as a web developer, working from home, without colleagues with which to compare themselves, and with no personal development plan. It's an industry thick with providers who have done no more than buy a copy of Dreamweaver and some magazines from W H Smiths. It's also, I read somewhere (and I really wish I'd kept the article), the industry with the second highest percentage of directors prosecuted for fraud. I've even forgotten which industry was top of the list.
Consequently, as a buyer of web development services you have to be a bit canny. You can't assume your supplier has the knowledge you'd expect, like you can with an architect or GP. You have to ask and check for yourself.
This article contains enough information to help you consider the issue of accessibility with respect to your new web development. It doesn't teach you how to create an accessible website, but it does tell you what accessibility is, how it affects you and your organisation, why you should be bothered, and how to tell if a website is accessible. If you know that, you can make judgments between your shortlisted providers.
If a web developer produces accessible websites, they know about producing sites that are standards-compliant that will work on any device, about designing for the user, about usability, they are aware of social and legal issues, and they take care to produce a quality product. That's a very good start. If you've found yourself a web developer that really knows about accessibility make sure you get their card because they can make, and save, you a lot of money over the life of your website.
So what is an accessible website? Well accessibility is part of usability, so first we need to know what a usable website is. A usable website is one that is:
So how does accessibility fit into that? Well firstly, satisfaction is probably a little less of an issue here. If the site works, that's unusual enough. But accessibility wants usability for more people in more situations. An accessible website is also one that's:
The other thing to note is that accessibility is not box ticking to get through whatever verifier or piece of legislation you're trying to pass. It's actually usability for disabled people. And for that, you need some real disabled people to test your site on.
Firstly let's tackle the money issue head on. Apparently, accessibility included as part of the design process adds just 2% to the budget. £20 in every £1,000. It's negligable when you compare it to how readily we'll consider spending extra on nice-to-have new features.
What that buys you is protection against lawsuits (which are happening). The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 requires 'reasonable adjustments' to be made (so simply passively not discriminating is not enough) to ensure non discrimination when providing goods and services. Because accessibility is part of usability and a usable and accessible website is more likely successfully to meet its users needs, it's more likely to reach its business goals and less likely to annoy potential customers.
In the same way as a house where all the alterations have accompanying Building Regulations certificates is worth more when you come to sell it, if you ever come to sell your business, buyers will ask whether your website is accessible (because if it isn't, they'll say they have to make it so and will negotiate the price down).
Interestingly, an accessible website is a standards-compliant website. As a consequence, your new website will be readable by more devices, and that includes brand new devices you don't know about yet, purchased by affluent buyers interested in new developments.
Hands up who has a disabled friend. People tend to stick with people like themselves, and when it comes to web design, the unpracticed tend to think that everyone's like them. They really aren't. So unless you're disabled yourself or have perhaps familial experience of disability, it's unlikely you'll know what the issues are and it's all too easy to dismiss them. If you're not surrounded by disabled people, it's easy to think they're a small minority.
Here's a scary thought: disabled activists have a name for the able bodied. They call us 'temporarily able', in view of the correlation between age and disability. So including accessibility into a website design is actually about building the future you may well require yourself later. You may find yourself one day cursing people who don't build accessible websites. It reminds me of the notices on life rings: "Do not tamper with this equipment, the next life it saves could be yours".
In the US, 3.5% of people have vision problems, 3.3% hearing problems, 3.0% dexterity problems and 1.4% learning difficulties. OK some of those will overlap (I've read from two sources that 25% of blind or partially sighted people have hearing problems too), but that's still around 10% of the population.
In the UK, the Department of Health says 3.14% of people are registered blind or partially sighted. This affects older people more often, so 67% of those are over 75, only 10% are aged 18-49.
From the same source, 0.11% are registered deaf (53% aged between 18-64, and 24% 75+), while 3.18% are registered hard of hearing (64% 75 years old or older, 19% 18-64 and 15% 65-74).
4-5% of people are dyslexic.
In Australia, 8% of males are colour blind, 0.4% of females.
If we ignore overlaps, the total of those is just over 15%. That's significant. If you still need persuading, browse this, and don't stop reading this article until you find out about situational disability.
But is it economically significant? Aren't these people either too old and frail to care about surfing the net, or if not, don't disabled people earn less? If so, they're less likely to buy my products, right?
According to the Internet Society, the 54 million people in the US with disabilities or special needs control annual discretionary income of $175 billion. So now, wouldn't it be good to be ahead of the curve for once and get an accessible website before your competition does?
It's a growing market too. Many disabilities correlate with age, and the average age of the world's population is increasing: people are living longer (in 2003 there were 100 million people of retirement age in Europe). Older people are also increasingly affluent.
From what I'm reading, disabled people are only half as likely to go online, but those who do often become avid users. After all, if you can't see, the problems of online shopping are a piece of cake compared to struggling into town, and when you get there, how will you know what colour that shirt is? Online, the descriptions can be audible.
Studies show that the usage profile of media such as television and film is the same whether people are blind or not. It seems reasonable to assume Internet use is likely to be no different: blind people use the Internet for the same things everyone else does.
My local Blind and Partially Sighted Society (in my town with its population of 60,000 people) has set up more than seventy users with adapted technology, aids and adaptations to help them use the Internet. And yes, by far the bulk of those people are of retirement age or older. But they are keen enough to learn to use computers, sometimes for the first time, to keep in email contact with family, to read correspondence, and to find information and surf the Internet.
But all that is a trap. Yes, accessibility aims to benefit people with disabilities, but others who may be using basic equipment or a new handheld computer with limited abilities, who may not speak your language and so need clear text that an automated translator can handle, who may be in an environment where their abilities are compromised (driving, sailing), or may be using a brand new browser or a very old one or a different operating system to the one you're used to, are all everyday people trying to get something done. And you can make the decision to stand in their way, or you can help them. Here's where you make that decision.
When you add an image to a web page you use the <img> tag which has various properties, one of which tells the browser where the image is. The 'alt' property provides some alternative text which has a number of benefits beyond accessibility. It's the text that is displayed when you roll your mouse over the image, so it acts as a description for the images. It's displayed if the image isn't (for instance, if the user is using a handheld computer that can't display images or a slow connection and has turned image display off) and also before the image has loaded, so the user knows what's coming. For blind people using a text to speech system to read out the contents of a web page, they would hear what you provide in the alt tag.
So here we have a very simple, quick and easy thing to do which really should be done by everyone (as it's required for a valid web page), that's essential for accessibility, but also provides numerous benefits for others too. The person using the handheld device that can't display images, and the person using a slow enough Internet connection that they must turn off images, are both situationally disabled .. disabled by the situation they find themselves in. Someone working in a noisy factory, or in an office with building work going on nearby, would not be able to hear audio prompts. They are situationally disabled.
Along similar lines, a solely German speaker is situationally disabled when presented with an English language website. Internationalisation is really another article, but it is worth saying that at least if the website uses ordinary text (rather than text as a visually pleasing graphic) this user would stand a chance of understanding your site using an automated translator such as that offered by Google.
Accessibility is at the root of the Internet, which was always about designing pages that people can interact with according to their needs and preferences. It was never about page layout, it was and is about page markup .. marking the elements of a page (this is a title, this is a paragraph) and allowing the page to be laid out and presented at the user end, by the browser, according to that user's preferences. You do know you can override the look and feel of any good website with your own website style don't you? So if you want a pink world, you can have it. Seriously, if you read better with particular colours, you can set your browser up so that all well-designed websites are displayed in those colours (in your favourite font, font size, etc).
Interestingly too, the forthcoming semantic web might be seen as accessibility for computers, since its aim is to mark up pages so they might be better understood by software agents roaming the web looking for, for example, cheap tickets or a house in Chichester near the golf course.
Something highlighted by my local Blind and Partially Sighted Society is that everyone is an individual. Yes there are trends and groupings, but each individual setup is different. Among deaf and hard of hearing people, hearing impaired people are not completely deaf and may use lipreading to help them converse. Those who were deaf from birth are more likely to have language and particularly speech problems than late deafened people who became deaf after they'd learned their language. Deaf people are more likely to use sign language (the two main ones, American and British, are not mutually intelligable) and to form a community with other deaf people locally.
Visual impairment correlates strongly with age. Perhaps only 10% of blind people read Braille.
The iconic mobility-impaired person uses a wheelchair. That doesn't stop anyone from using a website. The relevant impairments to web developers and website owners are those relating to hand or arm movement and co-ordination: eg. Parkinsons, or Cerebral Palsy.
People with learning disabilities may have impairments affecting their perception, processing, understanding and reception of information and other stimuli. They may have unaffected IQ, but simply have a mental roadblock at some point in the learning process. The phrase is quite wide ranging, dyslexia falls into this category. Others may have lower IQ. Two Wikipedia sites provide a good place for further exploration (particularly of the difficult area of which words to use): learning disability and developmental disability. Since it will become apparent that there's actually not a huge lot a website can do for people with these impairments over and above what can be done for other disabilities, I'm going to move on.
.. and I will, but not right now. This is as far as I got with writing it up, but keep a lookout as there's more to come.