Is Accessibility 2.0 Becoming Mainstream?

In May 2007 I presented a paper entitled “Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes” at the W4A 2007 conference. This paper reflected discussions which took place at a professional forum on “Accessibility 2.0: A Holistic And User-Centred Approach To Web Accessibility” which took place at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference.

Yesterday Frankie Roberto, a Web developer at the Science Museum, emailed me with details of a recent conference entitled “Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom“.  Now the use of the 2.0 meme to refer to a renewed and user-focussed approach is nothing new, so we shouldn’t be surprised at seeing the ‘Accessibility 2.0′ term being coined by independent bodies. But what was pleased was to see that the ideas andf approaches which Lawrie Phipps and myself first described in a paper on “Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility” back in 2004 being reflected by those more directly involved in accessibily support and advocacy.

The Accessibility 2.0 conference was described as “the first ever conference focussing on web accessibility in a Web 2.0 world. By Web 2.0 we mean rich web applications which allow users to create content by writing blogs, uploading videos or commenting on other user’ content and creating networks.“.  The conference Web site went on to say that “The title of the conference was inspired by T.V. Raman, a Google Research Scientist, to describe the current wave of creativity and innovation brought about by the development of web applications“.

The introduction to the conference was given by Robin Christopherson of AbilityNet. I’ve met Robin on a number of occasions and Robin participated at the Accessibility Summit II hosted by the JISC TechDis service for which I was one of the event co-facilitators and speakers. A report on the meeting was published in the E-Government Bulletin. The participants at the meeting “call[ed] for change in the way web accessibility is advocated particularly in local and central government, education and the museum and cultural sectors.“ Although we have not managed to organise a follow-up meeting, I feel the “Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom” conference has reflected the views and approaches expressed at the summit and brought those ideas out to a wider community.

The blog post about the conference which Frankie referred me to was entitled “Open Data“. In the blog post, written by Jeremy Keith, a Web developer living and working in Brighton, England, Jeremy expands on the talk he gave at the conference.  Jeremy drew parallels with approaches which can address long term access to resources. He commented “Open formats are better than closed formats” whilst acknowledging that the ”terms “open” and “closed” are fairly nebulous“. Jeremy went even further by admitting that “Standardization doesn’t necessarily lead to qualitatively better formats. Quite the opposite in fact. The standardization process, by its very nature, involves compromise“. He goes on to support the simplicity of HTML, but, in response to the diversity provided by a Web 2.0 environment “instead of battling against the anarchic nature of the Web, go with it” and “embrace flexibility in your attitude towards accessibility“.

Jeremy argues that in today’s Web 2.0 world, users are now making use of publishing services (he himself mentions Flickr, Twitter, Pownce and Magnolia). In a world in which users may read and write in equal measures “accessibility guidelines that deal with Web content just don’t cut it any more“.

I very much welcome this contribution to the debate and, indeed, the image of Accessibility 2.0 reflecting a renewed approach to accessibility in which we encourage ‘a million flowers to bloom’.  And it’s great to see this approach being advocated by those actively involved in the accessibility arena, such as organisations like Abilitynet, which hosted the conference. But how, I wonder, should we address the conservatism we’re likely to face within the institutions which have adopted an approach to Web accessibility which is based on simple conformance with checklists which simply cover the Web content? And what about the Web developers and content creators who, possibly for a period of almost 10 years, have prided themselves on implementing such guidelines? How should we change this culture?

One World, One Web … But Great Diversity

Yesterday I presented a paper on “One World, One Web … But Great Diversity” at the W4A 2008 conference  which was being held in Beijing. After the presentation and responding to the questions I received I went to the Claverton rooms at the University of Bath for coffee with my colleagues.

For the first time I presented a peer-reviewed paper which I had previously recorded and made available on my Web site and also via Google Video. The 22 minute long video was played at the conference and I was available to respond to questions via a Skype connection with the conference chair, David Sloan.

This was a very valuable learning experience. My previous use of video to give a presentation was at the UCISA 2008 Managment Conference, where Andy Powell was available to complement my introduction with his live participation at the conference. On both occasions I’ve found that my talk has sounded ‘flat’ without the feedback one gets from presenting to a live audience.  Perhaps the next time I do this I should record a talk I give to a live local audience. But at least I saved an estimated 2.9 tonnes of carbon emissions and was able to get back to pressing items of work after the presentation.

The paper build on previous papers on accessibility, and explored how the holistic approach to Web accessibility we have developed previously can be applied in a Web 2.0 context. The paper arguing the need for a user-centred approach to Web accessibility, rather the the resource-centred approach which is the underlying basis for the accessibility guidelines developed by WAI.  

Your comments are welcomed.

Are Social Networks Accessible?

Are social networking services such as Facebook accessible to people with disabilities? As suggested by the title the ZDNet article on Social networking: Not as inclusive as you might think would indicate that they’re not.

The article initially suggests that “social networks have created a level playing field for internet users — regardless of their physical disabilities” with a description of a user, Simon Stevens, with cerebral palsy who ” is a highly successful entrepreneur and consultant, and finds time to run a successful nightclub”. The article goes on to say:

Stevens is highly active in Second Life, and also uses Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Social networks are a vital business and social tool, he says. “Sometimes, it’s difficult for people with impairments to physically meet or get to places, and the internet makes that much easier,” he says. Added to which, social networks present entrepreneurs with a golden business opportunity. “There are 10 million users on Second Life and Facebook — that’s a big potential market and it’s ideally suited to campaigning,” he says.

Good news for users with disabilities, it would seem. But the article then goes on to suggest that social networks have barriers to users with disabilities: “Most mainstream social networks don’t offer a simplified audio or “text only” version of their pages” and “… the biggest challenge for users is something that might at first seem very small: Captcha. … many disabled users have to rely on friends and family to complete Captcha forms on their behalf, and those without anyone to help them are often locked out of the networks altogether“.

The article goes on to suggest that “A lack of accessibility is driving many disabled web users to create their own, alternative social-networking platforms” and argues that “Sites need to tighten up the privacy and control settings and make them easier for people to understand“.

So social networking services fail to be accessible, then? And we should therefore stop using them, it might appear? I would disagree. The comment that “Most mainstream social networks don’t offer a simplified audio or “text only” version of their pages” clearly fails to appreciate that o comply with the WCAG accessibility guidelines you shouldn’t be providing text only version of pages!

And when the article suggests that “A lack of accessibility is driving many disabled web users to create their own, alternative social-networking platforms” is this really the case - or are disability organisations simply following the crowds in setting up social networking services just like so many other organisations? And Disaboom, which provides “disabled people with a secure, accessible online community” ironically fails to comply with WCAG 1.0 guidelines!

What evidence is there that disabled users are failing to use the mainstream social networks? Facebook has a number of groups for users with disabilities including “Blind Students on Facebook” and “Deaf all around the world” and a blog post on “The Gift Shop is Now Open .. for Everybody” by a Facebook developer states that:

Most Facebook pages adhere to the guidelines which make the site accessible to the blind community. Recently, however, we received reports from a few devoted users that not all of our features were up to snuff. So, this week we launched a screen-reader accessible version of the Gift Shop . It’s currently linked off the help page, though later this week we’ll be incorporating it more tightly with the original Gift Shop.

Well they would say that, you might suggest. But a blog post entitled Myspace and facebook, Comparative published in August 2007 the author concluded that “I have found myspace to be completely inapproachable and seemingly uncaring of their visually impaired users. Facebook were prompt and their content is completely accessible“. OK, the methodology may be flawed and this is only one report - but at least it is based on user testing rather than compliance with guidelines.

The one area I haven’t covered is the barriers impose by CAPTCHA when registering to signup with social networks. The RNIB has reported on the accessibility issues associated with CAPCHA and concluded:

It really seems to me that there is no catch all accessible alternative to CAPTCHA that can be secured from spammers. As we’ve seen some sites make efforts to incorporate an audio CAPTCHA but this isn’t sufficient, even if a logic question were thrown into the mix, (putting aside the fact that this places a lot of development work on the website owner to provide all three options).

The article goes on to say that “it certainly seems that website owners are choosing security over accessibility“. Possibly true, but lets not forget that the ZDNet article argued that “Sites need to tighten up the privacy and control settings“. And if automated bots succeed in signing up to social networking services due to the lack of CAPTCHA barriers, users with disabilities will be particularly inconvenienced by the spam which is bound to follow.

A post entitled “Thanks, Facebook!” on the American Foundation for the Blind’s blog indicated that Facebook does seem to be addressing the CAPTCH problem and concluded:

For now, we want to thank Jeff and Facebook for making accessibility a priority. As Michelle said after the meeting, “I really liked what he said about Facebook really being accessible for everyone who wants to use it, because, of course he’s right, but I don’t think other people are always as considerate.” 

Clearly much more research on the accessibility of social networking services is needed - but let’s remember that disabled students are students too, and will be likely to want to make use the same social networking services as their friends. Let’s not assume that new services are bound to be inaccessible! And let’s apply the same level of criticisms to the other services we make use of too - it would be ironic if systems procured or developed for use within institutions were even more inaccessible than social networking services. And sadly I have heard stories of enterprise systems within universities which only worked with Internet Explorer :-(

Is Second Life Accessible?

Is Second Life accessible to users with disabilities?  If your views on accessibility are based on compliance with guidelines (especially WAI’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and you feel that all digital resources must be universally accessible to everyone, you may feel that an inherently graphical and interactive  environment such as Second Life is unlikely to be accessible.

If you share such views I would strongly recommend that you watch the Wheeling in Second Life video clip which is available on YouTube (or, if you cannot access YouTube on the Tips Dr.com or DotSub services).

This video clip shows a user with cerebral palsy, Judith, using Second Life with a headwand. As Judith explains (which you can read on the transcript):

“I’ve got a wheelchair in Second Life also. You can choose whether you want to be in a chair or not. You can have crutches, you can have whatever disability you have in real life in Second Life“.

In response to the question “Do you think that this will be a really useful tool for people who are unable to get around, who have problems of mobility in real life?” Judith feels that “Yes, because you can have friends without having to go out and physically find them“.

Should institutions really be developing policies which prevent use of services such as Second Life on grounds of inaccessibility?  And who will explain the reasons for such decisions to users such as Judith?

Will The UK Government Shut Down The Queen’s Web Site?

In a post on All UK Government Web Sites Must Be WCAG AA Compliant I recently warned of the dangers that the UK Government’s blunt instrument of mandating that all UK government Web sites must comply with WCAG AA accessibility guidelines could be counter-productive as the current WCAG 1.0 guidelines are widely felt to be out-of-date and government departments which seek to comply with the guidelines may well result in Web design patterns which are now widely felt to enhance the effectiveness of Web sites but which infringe guidelines released back in 1998 being discarded.

I recently viewed the Official Web Site of the British Monarchy (don’t ask) and spotted a visible <FONT> tag preceding a news item about the Queen’s speeches in Uganda.

Surely the Queen’s Web site isn’t using <FONT> tags, I thought? The Queen can’t possibly have employed a self-taught Web coder who hasn’t updated their skills in over five years? But looking at the source code and validating the page my worst fears came true: 36 HTML errors, no DOCTYPE, spacer GIFs, unclosed <FONT> tags (as I had spotted), <IMG> tags with no ALT attributes, a mixture of XHTML and HTML elements, …

Now this page clearly fails to comply with the UK Government proposed accessibility requirements. What, then, will happen if these proposals are accepted and the Queen fails to correct the errors by next year’s deadline? Will the Government attempt to shut down Her Majesty’s Web site? Will the Government take the Queen to court? But won’t “Regina vs Regina ” lead to a constitutional crisis? Will this lead to the demise of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic? Or will such a vindictive move by pedantic civil servants lead to a backlash, with the possibility of the Tower for the more extreme of the ‘accessibility standardistas‘?

More seriously the British Monarchy Web site probably does provide a good example of a service (perhaps not quite a public-sector service, though) which would be improved by simply following the WCAG guidelines.  So maybe my concerns would only apply to those Web sites which are seeking to be more interactive and user-focussed than the brochureware approach which the British Monarchy site provides.

All UK Government Web Sites Must Be WCAG AA Compliant

The UK Government has published a Public consultation on Delivering Inclusive Websites document (TG102). This document (available in MS Word and PDF formats) states that all government Web sites must comply with the WCAG AA guidelines by December 2008. And failure to comply will result in the withdrawal of the .gov.uk domain.

Great, you may think. At last the Government is doing something positive for people with disabilities.

I would disagree - I think this is a flawed approach for several reasons:

• The WCAG 1.0 guidelines are widely acknowledged to be out-of-date and inappropriate for the technical environment and ways in which the Web is used today. And this is not just what I think. Michael Cooper, who works for WAI (who produce the WCAG guidelines) admitted this is a paper he presented at the W4A 2007 conference. As I described in my report on the conference Michael write:

However, we recognize that standards are slow, and technology evolves quickly in the commercial marketplace. Innovation brings new customers and solidifies relationships with existing customers; Web 2.0 innovations also bring new types of professionals to the field, ones who care about the new dynamic medium. As technologies prove themselves, standardizing brings in the universality of the benefit, but necessarily follows this innovation. Therefore, this paper acknowledges and respects Web 2.0, discussing the issues and real world solutions.

• The WCAG 1.0 guidelines are flawed and ambiguous, as described in a paper on “Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World“. For example a strict interpretation of the priority 2 guideline which states “… use the latest versions [of W3C technologies] when supported” would mean that a WCAG AA conformant HTML 4 Web site would be degraded to WCAG A conformance overnight when XHTML 1.0 was officially released! There are similar flaws when one considers use of GIF (a widely used, but proprietary graphical format) and PNG (an open and rich, but comparatively rarely-used W3C graphical format). Use of a closed graphical format such as GIF would appear to break the WCAG priority 2 guideline which requires Web developers to “Use W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a task“. But is there any evidence that use of GIF rather than PNG is a significant accessibility barrier?
• It is unclear whether proprietary file formats such as MS Word and PowerPoint and Adobe PDF can be hosted on a government Web site. The document implies they can, provided the file formats are used in an accessible way. But doesn’t this conflict with the WCAG guideline given above? And if Word, PowerPoint and PDF formats can be used, what other proprietary formats can be used? Would a Flash-only Web site be permitted, prpvided accessible Flash was used?
• Although the document supports use of both automated testing tools and manual testing, I fear that time pressures will result in priority being given to automated testing, perhaps based on the EU-funded automated accessibility checking tool, the limitations of which I wrote about recently.
• The conservatism often found in the public sector will stifle initiative and innovation, even when this could provide more accessible services to people with disabilities.
• The difficulties of ensuring that user-generated content complies with WCAG AA guidelines (e.g. ensuring the abbreviations and acronyms are marked up when first used in a page) will discourage government bodies from providing services which seek to actively engage UK citizens.
• The requirement seems to ignore the benefits that can be provided within a particular context. A Web site featuring an anti-drugs campaign aimed at youths in the inner city may be more effective if it uses language likely to be understood by the target audience. But the danger is that such an approach would not be allowed, as the language would not be universally accessible.
• The failure to address change control in the policy. When, for example, the WCAG 2.0 guidelines are released which, based on the current draft, are more tolerant of proprietary formats, JavaScript and invalid HTML pages, how are Web site owners supposed to respond?

I fear the underlying rationale to this approach is based on the checklist approach which the government seems over-enamoured with. Sadly the requirements to comply with benchmark targets seems inevitably to lead to a fixation with addressing the targets themselves, and a failure to address the underlying issues. As I write the broadsheets are arguing that failures in hygiene standards are due to the NHS’s requirements to satisfy (and monitor) benchmark figures rather tackling the hygiene issues.

After a series of useful government services are withdrawn because of the concerns that they may break dated guidelines, I predict a government minister will face the wrath of Jeremy Paxman - and Jeremy will be able to make use of an anti-EU argument, as the consultation document does admit that “In 2002, the European Parliament set the minimum level of accessibility for all public sector websites at Level Double-A“. A good question for Jeremy will be “Do you have any evidence that compliance with these dated guidleines brinks any benefits to people with disabilities? “

It seems that political expediency (a Brown government seeking to make a statement, perhaps) has failed to acknowledge the limitations of the checklist approach. And this despite participation from the COI at the “Accessibility Summit II: A User-Focussed Approach to Web Accessibility” in November 2007. As described in a report on the event Kevin Carey, Vice-Chair of the Royal National Institute of the Blind and director of digital inclusion charity HumanITy argued that “At the moment the government is following highly specific [WCAG] points. Some work, some don’t“.

Sadly it seems that the recommendations of this group have been ignored. At least we’re not the only ones concerned about this new. In a comment on a post on New UK government web accessibility consultation on the Blether blo, Karls states that:

I’ve been reading this document today and I agree with Jack - it needs to lose the checklist mentality, extend the deadline (I understand that the author probably had to put some date there) and get every website tested by our friends at RNIB / AbilityNet / Shaw Trust / Nomensa using some kind of joined-up (consistent) testing scheme. I might have missed a few other big players out there but the point I really want to make is I don’t want to see .gov.uk sites get sucked in by snakeoil salesmen.

Your thoughts?

The Techshare 2007 Conference (2)

I mentioned previously my talk on “Beyond Compliance - A Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility” which I gave at the Techshare 2007 conference.

My talk was in complete contrast to the preceding talk on “EuraCERT“. This talk described the development of a European certification scheme for Web accessibility, which is based on the development of automated software which checks the compliance of a Web site with WCAG 1.0 guidelines.

This approach seems to be based on the “Unified Web Evaluation Methodology”. This is available in HTML and as a PDF document (152 pages). The document contains hundreds of descriptions of tests of HTML pages; passing such tests, it would seem, will ensure the Web site can be certified as complying with the accessibility guidelines. An example is:

5.11.3.2.15 Test 12.3_HTML_15

This test is targeted to check whether the table rows need grouping.

 

• Applicability criteria: Select the following combination of elements/attributes:

table[not(thead) or not(tfoot) or not(tbody)]

• Test procedure: Do the table rows need grouping?
• Confidence level: Medium.
• User testing procedures: Not Available.

The speaker described the WCAG 1.0 guidelines as “the bible”. During the questions I said that if this is the case, I must be a heretic :-) It seems that a European certificate is being developed based on a set of guidelines which are known to be flawed and are being replaced. And this is to say nothing of the issue of the purpose of the Web site which I described previously.

I have to say that I feel that accessibility is primarily about people, and that the emphasis being placed by techies on just the resource is counter-productive.

What do others things?

The Techshare 2007 Conference (1)

Last week I attended the first day of the Techshare 2007 conference.

I gave a talk on Beyond Compliance - A Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility, which reviewed the work on Web accessibility policies which has been published at the W4A 2005, W4A 2006 and W4A 2007 conferences. This work has described the limitations of the WAI approach to Web accessibility, with the flaws in the WCAG 1.0 guidelines becoming increasingly apparent over the years. In addition we (my co-authors have included Professors Helen Petrie and Stephen Brown, Lawrie Phipps, David Sloan, Patrick Lauke and Simon Ball) have argued that there’s a need to address the context of use - and that the approaches taken to ensure accessibility of informational resources are not necessarily relevant in cases in which the Web is used to deliver learning, provide access to a cultural experience, enable a user to assert their identity or simply, to have fun. Examples I’ve used to illustrate this include include surrealist paintings (how do you make a Salvador Dali painting understandable, for example) and my favourite sports headline “Super Cali Go Ballistic, Celtic were Atrocious’ - which brings a smile to many people’s faces, but not if Mary Poppins hasn’t been part of your cultural upbringing - in short, it’s not universally accessible.

At the conference I described such ‘edge cases’ and explained why these needed to be considered (to avoid, as I’ve heard has happened, resources being removed from Web sites as they can’t be made accessible to everyone). I described the approaches we’ve developed, based on a holistic approach to accessibility, a stakeholder model and a tangram metaphor for describing the approaches.

I was pleased at the response I received to the talk: despite it being the final talk of the day, several people came up to me afterwards and thanked me for the talk and described how useful they felt this user-focussed (as opposed to a checklist) approach was. I was especially pleased that a couple of people from the RNIB felt that this approach echoes their thinking.

Accessibility and Innovation

“I’m looking into the potential of Web 2.0 / mashups / Second Life / … for our museum’s Web site. What do others think about this?“

This, in various guises, is a question which surfaces from time to time on the MCG JISCMail list - and I’m sure the question will be raised in other sectors.

A common response seems to be “We believe in complying with Web accessibility guidelines and we won’t let ourselves be distracted by use of technologies for this own sake.“

But what if this actually means “We can’t be bothered trying anything new“, “We don’t understand any of this new stuff, but we feel uncomfortable admitting this” or “We’ve just deployed an expensive new CMS which doesn’t provide such functionality, so I feel threatened by any suggestions that we’ve missed out on an important alternative service.

It would be difficult to make such suggestions on a mailing list, especially as such a response would seem to avoid the accessibility issue. But what if many of the new technologies can be demonstrated to enhance accessibility? What if the Web Accessibility Initiative’s new draft version of their guidelines recognises this and removes some the outdated guidelines. And what if a holistic approach to accessibility can be taken which can help museums to engage with new audiences?

This was the message I gave in a talk on The Accessible Web at the Web Adept: Museums and the Web 2007 conference which was held on Friday at the University of Leicester.

I pointed out the flaws in WAI’s model and the WCAG 1.0 guidelines and described how the WCAG 2.0 draft guidelines have been updated to remove some of the flaws in the original version of the guidelines and to embrace many new approaches provided by Web 2.0 technologies.

I also pointed out that, as I’ve described previously, the limitations of WAI’s approach had been admitted by Michael Cooper in his paper at the W4A 2007 conference.

And finally I argued that museums should take a holistic approach to accessibility, which covers the range of services provided by an organisation rather than focussing on individual services. Michael Twidale, who gave a talk on Second Life at the conference, provided a great example of this approach when he described how a paraplegic user, who may not be able to walk or control a computer could, with the help or a carer, be able to fly in an immersive environment such as Second Life. This example, taken from a book on Second Life, provided a great example of how Second Life may be empowering for some, and why simplistic approaches to Web accessibility, based on a hard-line interpretation of accessibility guidelines, can do more harm than good.

There seemed to be general agreement at the conference that this is an approach which would appear to be of particular relevance to the museums’ community. And it embraces many of the ideas which were described by other speakers at the conference, which are summarised in blog postings about the conference written by Mike Ellis and Seb Chan.

We do need to move on in our thinking about accessibility - and, I feel, we should stop using dated views on accessibility guidelines as an excuse for failing to engage with innovation.

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W4A 2007

About The W4A 2007 Conference

I recently attended the W4A 2007 conference (the 4th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility), which was held in Banff, Canada prior to the International World Wide Web 2007 conference (WWW 2007) which I have posted about previously. The theme of the conference (which is now a fully-fledged international conference.) was Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web: Hindrance or Opportunity?

Please note that this is a long report.

Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes

I’m pleased to report that a paper on “Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes” has been accepted by the W4A conference which will he held in Banff, Canada on 7-8th May 2007 (the conference runs in parallel with the International WWW 2007 conference).

My co-authors are David Sloan, Professor Stephen Brown, Jane Seale, Professor Helen Petrie, Patrick Lauke and Simon Ball, all of whom are active accessibility practitioners or researchers in the UK higher education community.

The paper is the latest in a series which has addressed the challenges of providing accessible services in the ‘edge cases’ of e-learning and cultural heritage services. Initially, back in 2004, myself, Lawrie Phipps and Elaine Swift had a paper published in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology on Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility. Several papers followed and in 2005 myself, Lawrie, David Sloan and others had a paper on “Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World” accepted at the W4A 2005 conference. This paper argued that “the context of the Web resource in question and other factors surrounding its use are [needed] to shape an approach to accessible design“. At W4A 2006 our paper on “Contextual Web Accessibility - Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility Guidelines” followed up on this theme.

Our latest paper is available online, as are the slides. In this post I give a brief summary of our work:

• Accessibility is foremost about people. Accessibility guidelines are useful as guidelines, but there are real dangers in treating them as infallible and in Web developers thinking that there job is to ensure compliance with the guidelines, rather than in ensuring they provide accessible services.
• We should therefore regard Web services as ways of delivering services, but not as the final thing in itself. In e-learning, for example, the important aspect is the accessibility of the learning outcomes, and not necessarily the e-learning resources. This leads to the notion of ‘blended accessibility‘ which has parallels with ‘blended learning‘.
• There is a context to accessibility, which includes the context of use (e.g. informational services, learning services, cultural resources, games, entertainment, etc.). The approaches developed to enhance the accessibility of informational resources do not necessarily apply in other contexts. In learning, for example, the new information (or knowledge) which a learner gains is the result of a particular pedagogical approach which is likely to be somewhat more sophisticated than the ‘pouring of information into empty vessels’ than can result from a simplistic application of WCAG guidelines for e-learning resources. Similar issues are relevant for cultural resources: why is Mona Lisa smiling and what does that painting by Salvadore Dali ‘mean’?
• There is a need for documented policies, but these policies should be developed according to the context of use (which will also reflect institutional contexts, such as the resources which are available).
• There will be a need for processes which implement agreed policies. And for the policies and procedures to become embedded, there is a need to engage all relevant stakeholders in their development and deployment.
• Within the UK, in particular, an approach based on ‘widening participation‘ and ‘social inclusion‘ can be used to describe this approach in ways which resonate with wider political developments within the public sector. This phrase also avoids the implications that there is a single, universal solution to accessibility, within corresponding imperialistic undertones.
• Our approach would appear to work well within the UK legal system which requires organisations to take ‘reasonable measures’ to ensure that services are accessible.
• The ‘Cathedral and the Bazaar’ analogy developed to contrast open source development with that taken by proprietary software developers can also be applied to accessibility: the authors feel we should encourage development of a diversity of solutions, rather than the slow-moving centralised edifice we see with WAI and WCAG.
• We shouldn’t, though, throw away WAI’s successes. Rather, in our paper we promote the term Accessibility 2.0 as a way of building on WAI’s political successes and high profile and the valuable set of guidelines which WAI have developed which, although not universally applicable, can be valuable in many areas.

Your comments on our paper are welcomed.

And, for the sake of completeness and to ensure all authors are credited, here is a full list of my peer-reviewed papers in this area:

• Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes
  Kelly, B., Sloan, D., Brown, S., Seale, J, Petrie, H., Lauke, P. and Ball, S. W4A 2007, Banff, Canada, 7-11 May 2007. <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/w4a-2007/>
• Using Context To Support Effective Application Of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
  Sloan, D., Kelly, B. Phipps, L., Petrie, H. and Fraser, H. Journal of Web Engineering, Issue 4. Vol. 5, 2006. <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/jwe-2006/>
• Contextual Web Accessibility - Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility Guidelines
  Sloan, D, Kelly, B., Heath, A., Petrie, H., Hamilton, F and Phipps, L. WWW 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland 22-26 May 2006. Conference Proceedings, Special Interest Tracks, Posters and Workshops (CD ROM). <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/w4a-2006/>
• Personalization and Accessibility: Integration of Library and Web Approaches
  Chapman, A., Kelly, B., Nevile, L. and Heath, A. WWW 2006 Edinburgh, Scotland 22-26 May 2006. Conference Proceedings, Special Interest Tracks, Posters and Workshops (CD ROM). <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/publications/www2006/>
• Holistic Approaches to E-Learning Accessibility
  Phipps, L. and Kelly, B. ALT-J Research in Learning Technology, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2006, pp. 69-78. <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/alt-j-2006/>
• Implementing A Holistic Approach To E-Learning Accessibility
  Kelly, B., Phipps, L. and Howell, C. ALT-C 2005 Conference Proceedings. <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/alt-c-2005/>
• Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World
  Kelly, B., Sloan, D., Phipps, L., Petrie, H. and Hamilton, F. Proceedings of the 2005 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A). ISBN: 1-59593-036-1. <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/w4a-2005/>
• Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility
  Kelly, B., Phipps, L. and Swift, E. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2004, Vol. 30, Issue 3. <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/cjtl-2004/>

Technorati Tags: accessibility2.0

Accessibility and User-Generated Content

I met Jacco van Ossenbruggen from CWI, Netherlands at the Museums and the Web conference. I’d seen Jacco at previous international WWW conferences, but this was the first time we spoken - and Jacco provided valuable contributions to the UK Museum’s Semantic Web Thinktank meeting.

After the conference I wanted to email Jacco about another area of mutual interest (URIschemes). A Google search for “Jacco CWI” quickly found a page containing Jacco’s email address - and the page I found, a Web-based record of an IRC chat - raised some interesting issues related to accessibility.

The page on MMSEM XG First Face to face meeting in Amsterdam, held on 10 July 2006 contained a transcript of the IRC channel, which was used by remote participants at the meeting:

<jacco> A use case from, for example, the MESH project, could be on news.
<jacco> Giovanni: MUSCLE is working on music use cases
<jacco> AXMEDIS is a big player in this
<jacco> Massimo, could you say something on MUSCLE
<jacco> ?
<giovannit> http://www.axmedis.org/
<jacco> within the MPEG-7 standard actually using the description schemes is really difficult

Now I suspect that the Web accessibility hardliners would tell us that this infringes accessibility guidelines, with the various project acronyms and technical standards not being expanded (e.g. through use of the <abbr> or <acronym> elements) and possibly on the difficulty in understanding.

Interestingly enough a similar example came up in the Accessibility 2.0 Professional Forum at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference which I’ve mentioned previously. How should institutions address accessibility issues when end users add comments to a blog posting or contribute to discussion board? As we can’t expect that they’ll provide the necessary semantic markup (and, in many cases, the software doesn’t allow them to do this) does this mean we can’t deploy systems for users to create their own content?

The example given above, taken from the W3C Web, illustrates that W3C itself takes a pragmatic approach to this problem. They will take ‘reasonable measures’ to ensure resources on their Web site are accessible - but if that can’t be done, they don’y take the approach that they can’t provide the service at all. And the IRC channel itself provides a valuable aaccessibility aid, especially for participants who are ‘geographically-challenged’ and can’t attend the meeting.

So if your accessibility hardliners are using accessibility issues as an argument for not providing such services, feel free to use this as example.

Accessibility of MW 2007 Papers

Papers from the Museums and the Web 2007 conference are available online on the MW 2007 Web site. That’s great - but are the papers accessible, one might ask. And are they available in a variety of formats, to suit the end users preferences - including, perhaps, as a MP3 file?

The papers may comply with Web accessibility guidelines, but in general the answer to this question will be ‘no’ - and for perfectly understandable reasons: there is a cost associated with converting documents into a variety of formats, and there is probably no great demand for this.

But what if such conversion could be done easily, including conversion to MP3 format? And what if the he effort in doing this was devolved to the authors, rather than expecting the conference organisers to take responsibility for yet another task?

I’ve been looking at this recently, and have been evaluating the Scribd document repository service. As an experiment I have uploaded my papers on Addressing the Limitations of Open Standards and How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing Organisational Barriers to Scribd. What this provides is a nice interface to the document in a variety of formats including MS Word, PDF, plain text, HTML and even MP3. The service also provides n annotation services and various statistics for me, as the author. The paper can also be embedded in third party resources, thus helping to maximise the impact of the ideas in the paper by simply embedding the following HTML code into a page:

<object width=”450″ height=”500″><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”SameDomain” /><param name=”movie” value=”http://static.scribd.com/FlashPaperS3.swf?guid=fz90upfh93ql3&document_id=35035″ /><embed width=”450″ height=”500″ src=”http://static.scribd.com/FlashPaperS3.swf?guid=fz90upfh93ql3&document_id=35035″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”></embed> </object>

And although some may have reservations over the use of Flash as an interface to the resource, it should be noted that the MS Word, PDF and MP3 files can all be accessed directly.
All good stuff, I think.

So wouldn’t it be great if, at the MW 2008 conference, successful authors were invited to upload their paper to Scribd and to use the ‘MW2008′ tag to allow all papers to be easily found? It could be suggested that this process could be the responsibility of the conference organisers (and they might benefit from being able to include MP3 versions of papers to enrich the accessibility of the conference). But I feel that encouraging the authors to do this may help to embed an understanding of Web 2.0 technologies and the ease of use of such services more widely.

What do you think - potential authors of papers for MW 2008 conference, and perhaps the ichim07 conference? And, perhaps more importantly, what are the views of the conference organisers?

Technorati Tags: mw2007

Museums and the Web 2007 Conference: Day 2

Background

Day 2 of the Museums and the Web 2007 Conference (Friday 13 April, I need to remind myself) began with Birds-of-a-feather sessions which started at 08.00. I didn’t attend any of these session, partly as I’m not staying at the conference hotel, but more importantly Stephen Brown and I needed to sort out the final details for our Professional Forum on “Accessibility 2.0: A holistic and user-centred approach to Web accessibility“. And as this was the most challenging day for me (facilitating workshops can be much more mentally draining that giving talks, I find) I even missed out on a meal with fellow delegates last night, returning to my hotel at 9 pm last night and in bed soon afterwards.

Professional Forum: Accessibility 2.0

I’m pleased to say that the Professional Forum seemed to go down very well. About 50 people attended the session and they participated fully in the breakout groups, in which we asked them to discuss how the approaches they are taking to Web accessibility, the difficulties they are experiencing and any successes they have. Stephen facilitated the report back, while I kept notes in a wiki. Stephen did well in pulling about the various approaches which are being taken, from use of automated testing tools, provision of accessible HTML and CSS fragments for reuse across a web site through to user testing, including involvement by people with disabilities. During the feedback the issues of the rich content museums hold, the interactive services they are seeking to provide, the use of user-generated content and the limited resources smaller museums may have were raised. This provided an opportunity to describe the approaches to e-learning accessibility I have been involved in, with a focus on the accessibility of the learning outcomes, and not necessarily the e-learning resources - an approach which we have described as ‘blended accessibility’. We then described how we are seeking to build on this user-centred approach within a broader cultural heritage context, and also within an international context. An example I gave of the difficulties of addressing accessibility within a cultural context was of a Salvador Dali painting. This example was particularly appreciated by several people in the audience, who are faced with similar challenges, within a legal framework which is felt to mandate compliance with WCAG guidelines. However shortly before the workshop started I spoke to several attendees, and found that most were from the US, Canada, UK and the Netherlands, with one person from China. Stephen quickly found the legal requirements across a number of these countries, and found that in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK the legislations requires organisations to take reasonable measures. This is great, as the approach we have been developing is based on use of WCAG guidelines when they work, but a willingness to take alternative approaches when the guidelines either don’t work or compliance would require unreasonable measures to be taken.

We concluded by described the Accessibility Summit II and the manifesto we are developing. Several people expressed their willingness to become engaged in developing this manifesto further - and I’d extend an invitation to readers of this blog. Either add a comment to the blog, or send me an email.

Also note that my friends on the New Media Initiative blog have given their thoughts on the session and Majawat concluded that MW2007: Accessibility ain’t so hard.

Radical Trust: State of the Museum Blogosphere

After the Professional Forum I attended the session on Radical Trust: State of the Museum Blogosphere. This was a very popular session, illustrating the clear interests in the provision of blogs within a museums context. Again I’ll point to the New Media Initiatives blog entry for their thoughts on the session (there’s a team contributing to their blog, and they won’t be jet-lacked, I should add!)

The discussions on approaches to deploying blogs and ways of measuring, maximising and sustaining the impact of blogs reflect a number of the postings on this blog. And it was very interesting when one person commented that the museum community was way behind the library sector in making use of blogs - with one person responding by pointing out that the library sector is much larger than the museum sector.

So I would hope that the issues discussed on this blog will be of interest to the museum community - and I’ll try and contribute to blogs such as the Walker Arts Center’s Off Center museum blog (which has the wonderful byline “outside ideas from inside the walker”).

Technorati Tags: MW2007

Accessibility 2.0: A Holistic and User-centred Approach to Web Accessibility

Web accessibility, just like open standards may be regarded (like motherhood and apple pie) as concepts which one could not possibly argue against. But what if the traditional approach to Web accessibility, based on ensuring Web resources comply with WCAG 1.0 guidelines, doesn’t work? And perhaps one interpretation of the poor levels of conformance is the case with the SiteMorse automated survey of compliance with accessibility guidelines for various disability support bodies in the UK. SiteMorse’s news article, entitled How can everyone else be expected to achieve website accessibility, if the experts can’t?, focusses on the findings of an automated test and fails to acknowledge that accessibility may be more complex than that. As myself and colleagues at the JISC TechDis service pointed out in a response to SiteMorse’s news item, a more holistic approach to accessibility is needed which focusses on the importance of satisfying user needs rather than simply following a checklist.

In November 2006 UKOLN and TechDis organised the Accessibility Summit II meeting (which followed on from the first Accessibility Summit held in 2005). As described in a report on the meeting the participants called for the development of a holistisic approach to the development of Web services which addresses the broad set of issues which need to be addressed in order to provide quality Web services, including factors such as usability, the purpose of the Web site, interoperability, cultural and resource issues, as well as accessibility. The meeting also called for an evidence-based approach to demonstrating viable approaches for providing accessible Web services and for a clear recognition of the need to take into account various contextual factors.

Our work in this area continues and on 13^th April 2007 myself and Professor Stephen Brown from De Montfort University will be facilitating a professional forum on “Accessibility 2.0: A Holistic and User-centred Approach to Web Accessibility” at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference. The abstract for this session, a briefing document and the slides to be used in this forum are available online.

Technorati Tags: MW2007

Phong - it’s awful, isn’t it?

Lawrie Phipps (now working at the JISC but formerly of the JISC TechDis service) have worked together for several years and have published several peer-reviewed papers in which we have developed a model for addressing Web accessibility issues, which builds on the WAI WCAG approach, but seeks to address some of its limitations.

A while ago Lawrie emailed me the URL of the Phong Web site. He suggested that this would be a good replacement for the Flash King Web site, which we had used on a number of occasions to illustrate some of the problems with Web sites based on Flash (note the Flash King Web site is still available, but the links to the various projects we used in demonstrations are now disabled.)

Confusing? Poor usability, bad for accessibility? Yes. And when you get to a page, the interface is similarly flawed. But, OTOH, might this not be fun as a game? Mind this not be entertaining for children? Might not an interface in which animated links move as you try and chase them be fun for some people?

Or to put it another way, isn’t the goal of universal accessibility a pipe dream? In some cases (e.g. informational resources) this approach may be an appropriate one, but in others, it may result in pleasing solutions being discarded, even if, ironically, particular audiences may prefer them. The Peepo Web site provides an example of a very graphical user interface with interactive features - and this has been designed in this way by Jonathan Chetwynd, an accessibility consultant with an interest in accessibility for people with learning. At a CETIS Accessibility SIG meeting in 2004 he described the Web site as “a portal for people with learning difficulties, who were unable to read“. However commentators have reported that his interests have not been appreciated within WAI.

So if such sites can be accessible, usable and pleasurable to certain groups (I’m not saying Phoing is, BTW) , doesn’t this devalue an automated approach to accessibility checking. What then are the boundaries to automated checking? How should we go about developing or commissioning Web sites for such groups? And when is it legitimate to discard WAI guidelines?

Reflections On 2006 - Accessibility

Whither WCAG 2.0?

It had been expected that the WCAG 2.0 guidelines would be released by W3C WAI this year, to replace WCAG 1.0 which came out way back in 1999. However the reviewing process for WCAG 2.0 seems to have slowed down (if not stopped) due, I suspect, to the huge influx of comments received after Joe Clark published his “To Hell With WCAG 2.0” article published in May on A List Apart. Joe’s posting generated much debate from commentators such as The Pickards, Stephen Downes, Joe Dolson and contributors to Accessify Forum as well as follow up articles and discussions on Joe’s own Blog.

Accessibility and Institutional Repositories

There has been some discussion on the JISC-Repositories JISCMail list (under the confusing subject line of “PLoS business models, global village”) on the issue of file formats for depositing scholary papers. Some people (including myself) feel that open formats such as XHTML should be the preferred format; others feel that the effort required in creating XHTML can be a barrier to populating digital repositories, and that use of PDF can provide a simple low-effort solution, especially if authors are expected to take responsibility for uploading their papers to an institutional repository.

An issue I raised was the accessibility of resources in digital repositories. There are well established guidelines developed by WAI which can help to ensure that HTML content can be accessible to people with disabilities. Myself and others have argued that the guidelines and the WAI model is flawed, but many of the guidelines are helpful and institutions should seek to implement them (indeed there are legal requirements to ensure that services do not discriminate against people with disabilities).

WCAG 1 has the following requirements:
3.2 Create documents that validate to published formal grammars. [Priority 2]
11.1 Use W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a task and use the latest versions when supported. [Priority 2]
11.4 If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as often as the inaccessible (original) page. [Priority 1].

This seems to be pretty unfriendly towards PDFs, I would argue. WCAG 2.0 (which is in draft form) is, however, neutral regarding file formats - a development I welcome (although the guidelines still have their limitations). However the guidelines still require that content is accessible; and as well as the requirement in the guidelines, there are also legal and ethical requirements to address such issues.

Proprietary formats such as PDF can be made accessible. However I am uncertain as to how alternative text for images and providing structure to PDF documents will happen in a distributed workflow environment.

Rather than dwelling on this (technical) issue, I would like to focus on the policy issues, which should be independent of particular file formats. UK legislation requirements organisations to take reasonable measures to ensure that people with disabilities are not discriminated against unfairly. One could argue that it would be unreasonable to expect hundreds in not thousands of legacy resources to have accessibility metadata and document structures applied to them, if this could be demonstrated to be an expensive exercise of only very limited potential benefit. However if we seek to explore what may be regarded as ‘unreasonable’ we then need to define ‘reasonable’ actions which institutions providing institutional repositories would be expected to take.

One approach would be for the institution to ensure that it provides appropriate training and staff development for authors who are expected to upload documents to repositories. Linked to this may be tools which can flag problem areas to the authors, as documents are being prepared for uploading. There may then be auditing tools which can alert institutions to potential problems.

Related to policies to support the authors, are policies which address specific problems which users with disabilities may have. Clearly many scientific papers (containing formulae, for example) may be difficult to be processed by traditional assistive technologies. Perhaps this is where there is a need for just-in-time accessibility (as opposed to the traditional just-in case approach) or blended accessibility (real world alternatives to digital accessibility barriers).

On-the-fly use of networks at events

At the “Accessibility Summit II” meeting one of the invited participants failed to arrive at York due to difficulties with the trains at Bournemouth and Southampton. On hearing this, my initial response was “Is she a Skyper?” On hearing that she did have a Skype ID, we set about setting up a teleconference using Skype. As the PC used for the presentations was also running the Skype software we needed to use another PC to provide a chat facility. We made use of Gabbly, associated with a specific URL (to avoid chatters on the Gabbly home page. This on-the-fly use of technologies at an event worked well - and something I would advise others to be able to deploy if needed.

An additional approach I would suggest (and something I did at the “Exploiting The Potential Of Wikis” workshop) is to be able to easily upload PowerPoint files (if they are being used) to allow the remote participant to view them. I have used Slideshare.net to do this, which seems to work well.

It was particularly appropriate to do this at the Accessibility Summit, as it provided a good example of on-the-fly / just-in-time accessibility for a user who couldn’t otherwise hear and take part in the discussions or view the presentations.