Fencing In The Habitat

Fencing-in the habitat

How to do the right thing and get it wrong

Christian Heilmann, AbilityNet, London, April 2008

We’re here at an accessibility conference.

Most likely all of you want to create accessible products and know why we should.

Genuinely usable and accessible sites and products

are very rare.

Sites that claim accessibility and companies that claim to

make your product accessible are not.

People only grudgingly embrace the need for

accessibility.

How many times where you asked to provide numbers of how many disabled people a

site has?

Don’t play the game of numbers (buying power of

disabled users).

Anybody can make up random charts and numbers.

Madness Sparta

Here’s a classic “accessibility software” sales pitch.

Third party science

and technology!

MAGIC!

Old, broken and

unloved product.

Shiny, modern and

totally accessibleproduct.

COME IN!

Which of course is total $expletiveOfChoice

However, when the same people ask us, we’ll tell them

something like this.

“It is going to be hard to make this product accessible,

best to start from scratch.”

Who will get the job?

Regardless of who is right, our plan is to make the world

more accessible.

In order to achieve that we need to find a way to sell it.

Accessibility is not about creating a habitat for

disabled users.

It is about making sure that our products work for as many users as possible.

Regardless of disability, location and technical

environment.

We will not be able to cater to everybody.

However, what we do now is actually not helping.

Font resizing widgets

Skip menus.

Clever plugins that read out text.

It is not about gadgets.

Gadgets cost money, need to be implemented and will sooner or later fall off the

maintenance plan.

It is about smart implementation.

Picture of a lift in a Hotel that has large black braille

buttons which are not the buttons to choose your

destination. The real buttons have the same colour as the

wall and are not very beveled

Picture of a toilet that was converted from two stalls to

on wheelchair accessible one.

They forgot to move the toilet rolls to the other side.

Here’s a very smart assistive technology:

Picture of a loudspeaker.

Photo by Declan TM: http://www.flickr.com

/photos/declanjewell/1832785178/

Accessibility and other best practices should actually be a

no-brainer to sell.

The main reason it is hard is that people do not

understand the need.

What is the main driver of web sites with:

‣semantically valuable markup,

‣progressively enhanced interaction,

‣good internationalization and

‣localization?

Geeks that care.

Geeks that slip all of these in on the sly.

We need to do the same with accessibility.

If we want accessibility, we need to make it beneficial for

all.

One option is SEO.

Search engines are hungry beasts that read text and

follow links.

Page titles are terribly important, yet people do

them wrong.

Show them where they are used!

<title>The business case for web standards | Main / Home Page</title>

<title>The business case for web standards | Main / Home Page</title>

<title>The business case for web standards | Main / Home Page</title>

<title>The business case for web standards | Main / Home Page</title>

<title>The business case for web standards | Main / Home Page</title>

Alternative text can be misleading, make sure to

show your pages to people without images.

<img src=”32.jpg” alt=”A nice pair of tits”>

Photo by treefell http://www.flickr.com/photos/treefell/194857040/

What can we do to battle the bogus accessibility software

sellers?

Use technology hypes.

Example:

Battling pixel perfect layouts with miniscule interface

elements and no breathing space.

FFS(Fat Finger Syndrome)

Photo by Jeff Kubina: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kubina/109669912/

Example:

How simplifying the interface for humans spells success.

The Nintendo Wii shows how a lesser quality game console

can be a smashing hit if it is fun and easy to use – even for

elderly people

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_ARvhT6Gzc

Web 2.0 is bad for accessibility, right?

Only if your interface doesn’t make it fun to add good

content.

How to make Powerpoints and PDF accesible?

Screenshot of slideshare.net, which automatically generated a text representation of the slides for you

Upload and share them with others

on slideshare.

What about online video?

What search engines and assistive technology finds on

YouTube is the header, the description and the

comments.

How about giving comments context?

Screenshot of a video on viddler.com with timed comments.

It is time to take off the blinders and expand our

accessibility solutions horizon.

JavaScript and Flash – used in the right manner – can increase accessibility.

Not necessarily for the disabled user, but it can both

automate processes and make it fun to add relevant

content.

Example: YouTube

http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/youtube-captioning.html

Example: Twitter

Using Google’s JavaScript translation API you can inject

the correct lang attributes into twitter updates.

http://icanhaz.com/twitterwithlang

Example: Flickr

Making it easy to add captions and descriptions

leads to alternative text that wouldn’t be entered

otherwise.

Technology is the solution, but only when it comes natural and everybody

benefits.

Don’t fence in disabled users in a habitat, let everyone

benefit from what they need to access your product.

Thanks!Questions?