Website accessibility

The issue of website accessibility is a sometimes controversial one in new media circles.

There are a whole lot of misconceptions about accessibility, as well as numerous objections, some valid, some less so.

The most common issues are:

The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 doesn't apply to us, and/or even if it did it is not enforced.
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards are almost impossible to comply with.
WAI1 unduly restricts design decisions and Web 2.0 and 3.0 type services, so for practical reasons are best disregarded.
Accessible websites are not usable websites, and it is more important that we are usable.
WCAG 2.0 has superceded WCAG 1.0, so WCAG 1.0 does not apply anymore.
It's just to expensive to test for, and while we would like to comply, it's low in terms of being a business priority.
Our website isn't for blind users, so accessibility is not relevant to us.

The World Wide Web is for everyone… and anyone of them could be a user

For me the motivation for creating accessible websites is that it is the right thing to do. I think Tim Berners-Lee puts the case succinctly:

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

If doing the right thing isn't enough, well just consider that anyone — being they blind, dyslexic, or just an ordinary user who happens to benefit from the clarity of function and purpose accessible website's tend to display — is a potential user.

Accessible websites are more easily indexed by search engines

Accessibility requires well-formatted semantic HTML mark-up.

Semantic mark-up simply means placing content in the correct HTML elements, headings in headings tags and quotations in block quote tags for example.

Because search engine robots are (metaphorically) 'blind' this makes it it easier for robots to assess page content.

Accessibility also requires that images are provided to alternative text. Again this helps search robots better categorise web content, and with more people utlising image searches this assist your website be found by users.

But we don't actually have to be compliant do we?

There is a view that any company with 15 or more employees is obliged by law to be compliant to level A of WCAG 1.0, and all government websites must comply to level AA.

There have been no prosecutions to date in the UK, although the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) is known to have approached companies and threatened legal action if changes weren't made to their websites. This lack of any concrete legal precedence is further complicated by the fact that the Equality Act 2010 has superceded the DDA in England, Scotland, and Wales.

The truth is that unless you are a large company you are very unlikely to face any legal consequences from not having an accessible website.

And isn't compliance ultimately unacheivable anyway?

The short answer is 'yes'.

Within the letter of the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines all HTML code must be 'valid'. Anyone who has used W3C's validation service will know that even the most minor of infractions will invalidate their HTML. It's a classic 'computer says no' scenario. And if your code isn't valid, technically (or should that be 'pedantically' speaking ) you cannot be WAI compliant.

You can spend days cleaning the code, only for your CMS editor to cut and paste a curly apostrophe from a Word doc, and there goes the compliance.

However, this doesn't mean there are not benefits to working with the standards as far as practical.

If you apply common sense and build accessibility into your website from the beginning, and into your style guide it is simple to pass the most crucial checkpoints in the WAI guidelines. Even these small considerations will make a massive difference to users.

A rejoinder — it's actually quite easy to comply to level A, and not much more difficult to comply to level AA. Acheieving this to the 'letter' is very difficult, but to do so in the spirit of the guidelines is neither difficult nor costly.

But what about films and Web 2.0 and Web 3.0?

It's true that WAI requires films to be captioned, and this can be simply too expensive and time consuming.

There is, however, an oft overlooked part of the guidelines, which is concerned with the concept of ensuring 'core content' is accessible. This means that if your customer complaint hot line contact details are only provided in an embedded video you have a problem. If these are in HTML text format you have no problem.

If you are a vendor of some product and service, you are unlikely to want to offer these only via video or an AJAX widget anyway, because even the most able user wants to find things fast, and that means (for now at least), providing information in text and simple images.

Thought of in this way accessibility guidelines can act as a useful aide memoir to make sure that important information is not solely contained inside flashy 'widgets'. Ease of use makes commercial sense.

WCAG 1.0 or WCAG 2.0?

There is widely considered to be some level of legal precedent for WCAG 1.0 AA compliance as a legal minimum for web accessibility is the UK.

This is the standard recommended for government departments and adopted by many public institutions.

WCAG 1.0 AAA is generally too difficult to comply with, because of the restriction of using tables only for data, and not for layout. As virtually all websites — W3C or sites designed by Harry Loots aside — use tables for layout it is a evidently a challenge. One day CSS may make layout without tables relatively straightforward, but until then …

WCAG 2.0, issued in 2008, attempts to address the great changes in the web since WCAG 2.0 was issued, in 1998. It succeeds WCAG 1.0, but does not replace it, though it is the W3C oreference that it eventuallu should.

WCAG 2.0 has not been embraced even by many evangelists for web accessibility. Its time may still come, but it is for practical purposes a standard full of aspirations, which is how best to view it.

In conclusion: Should my website be accessible?

"Yes"

Even for companies unlikely to face any legal consequences the advantages to being accessible outweigh any additional effort.

If you are keen to have a 'user-centred' website, you simply cannot ignore a significant proportion of users.

Also accessible websites have a strong tendency to be better designed, and will more often than not have benefits in terms of usability.

If you have a website that is both accessible and usable you will see an improved return on your investment in creating the website in the first place, in improved locatability (being discovered and indexed by search engines) and conversion rates.

So should be invest in an automated accessibility checker?

In a word 'no'.

Some tools maybe useful, but ultimately these tools cannot tell you whether your site is WAI compliant or not.

An automated tool can tell you that there is no alternative text with an image, but cannot tell you whether that alternative text is in anyway a useful description of that image. Only a human can do that.

A slight rejoinder to my first answer is that if you are serious, or have to be serious because you are a government department or similar, then a tool such as Powermapper will make your webmaster's life much easier.

If you are a small or medium sized company, build accessibility into your site at the beginning, and remember to follow some simple editorial guidelines, and give those images some alternative text descriptions.