“From Web Accessibility To Web Adaptability”: A Summary

I recently announced that a paper on “From Web accessibility to Web adaptability” by myself, Liddy Nevile, Sotiris Fanou, Ruth Ellison, Lisa Herrod and David Sloan has been published. I also said that, due to copyright restrictions, access to this article will not be publicly available until next year, when it will be released from the embargo on the University of Bath institutional repository.

David Sloan, who also edited the special issue of the Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology journal which published the paper, has written a brief summary of the paper:

A review of web accessibility from an organisational and policymaker’s perspective. This paper focuses on ways to strike a balance between a policy that limits the chances of unjustified accessibility barriers being introduced in web design while also providing enough flexibility to allow the web in a way that provides the best possible user experience for disabled people by acknowledging and supporting the diversity of and the occasional conflicts between the needs of different groups.

In this post I will give a extended summary of the ideas and approaches outlined in our paper.

The paper begins by adopting the UN Convention’s view that “disability results from the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others“. Disability is therefore a social construct and not an attribute of an individual. In particular, resource accessibility is an the matching of a resource to an individual’s needs an preferences. – and is not an attribute of a resource.

From this perspective we see the limitations of the WAI’s approach to  accessibility, which regards accessibility as a characteristic of the resource (which should conform to WCAG guidelines) and the tools used to create the resource (which should conform to ATAG guidelines) and view the resource (which should conform to UAAG guidelines). In a previous paper we have described in more details the limitations of the WAI approach to accessibility (see Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World) and here we describe the limitations of what we call ‘Web accessibility 1.0‘  in the context of the UN Convention.

The paper reviews the holistic approach to Web accessibility which we have described in several papers previously (see Implementing A Holistic Approach To E-Learning Accessibility, Holistic Approaches to E-Learning Accessibility, Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes and Reflections on the Development of a Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility). The approach, which we refer to as ‘Web accessibility 2.0‘, explores accessibility in a number of areas which are more challenging than the simple provision of information, such as access to e-learning and cultural resources.

We then describe an approach which we call ‘Web accessibility 3.0‘ in which access to resources can be personalised to match an individual’s needs and preferences.  As described in our paper Accessibility 2.0: Next Steps For Web Accesibility instead of seeking to ensure that all resources are accessible to all potential users (an approach which the evidence suggests is not a realistic goal), this approach aims to provide resources and information about them that enables users or automated services to construct resources from components that satisfy the individual user’s accessibility needs and preferences.

The paper accepts that the labelling of these different approaches (which has parallels with the ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Web 3.0′ terms) can be confusing: for many it would imply that Web accessibility 1.0 and 2.0 are now obsolete. This is not the case: there will still be a need for certain types of informational resources (a bus timetable, for example) to conform with WCAG guidelines and the Web accessibility 2.0 and 3.0 approaches describe different approaches which can complement each other.

We have therefore coined the term ‘Web adaptability‘ to described an approach which attempts to support the “interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others”.

The paper provides four case studies which illustrate how a Web adaptability approach is being used:

Support for users with learning disabilities:  An example is provided of a project at the University of West of England of an e-learning systems for people with learning disabilities. The approach taken is to engage the end users in the design and development of the system, rather than the application of WCAG guidelines. A decision was taken “not to try to create a system and content that are universally accessible, but rather to try to maximise the usefulness and usability for a specific audience of learning users with particular permanent disabilities“.

Adaptability for the deaf:  This example illustrates the inappropriateness of the medical model of disabilities which underpins the ‘Web accessibility 1.0′ approach. The deaf community itself recognises both the medical and cultural model of Deafness (and note that the capital D is used to distinguish them as an ethnic community, just as we would use a capital E for English). The case study (which is described in an article on Deafness and the User Experience published on A List Apart) reinforces the merits of the ‘Web adaptability’ approach which can apply a cultural rather than a medical definition of deafness.

Adaptability in a government context: The challenges of applying best practices when faced with limited resources and timescales form the basis of the third case study. This example considers the decisions taken in an Australian government organisation and how the challenges of addressing several constraints: government policies, budgetary measures specific deadlines to meet legislative requirements and availability of staff with the expertise to develop the accessible solutions. The ‘Web adaptability’ framework supported a holistic and pragmatic approach to the challenges by enabling both usability and accessibility issues to be addressed and appropriate solutions to be deployed on time and within the budget.

Adaptability and institutional repositories: Increasing numbers of universities are providing institutional repositories in order to enhance access to research publications and to preserve such resources for future generations. However many of the publications will be deposited as a PDF resource, which will often fail to conform with accessibility guidelines (e.g. images not being tagged for use with screen readers; text not necessarily being ‘linearised’ correctly for use with such devices, etc.). Rather than rejecting research publications which fail to conform with accessibility guidelines the Web adaptability approach would support the continued use and growth of institutional repositories, alongside an approach based on advocacy and education on ways of enhancing the accessibility of research publications, together with research into innovative ways of enhancing the accessibility of the resources.

The paper addresses some of the criticisms which may be made of the Web adaptability approach such as ‘doesn’t the Web adaptability approach allow organisations to disregard accessibility considerations?’ and ‘if WCAG conformance isn’t mandated in law, won’t organisation simply ignore accessibility issues?‘

How does one specify accessibility requirements in a tender document? How does an organisation audit its resources for accessibility?

We describe how we regard the WCAG 2.0 guidelines as a valuable resource for enhancing the accessibility of resources. The guidelines should be used in they can be used in a cost-effective way and if they do not detract from the core purpose of the service.

We also point out that legislation isn’t the only driver for implementing best practices – and indeed focusing on legal requirement can be counter-productive as if case law subsequently rejects WCAG conformance in a test case (after all the RNIB home page doesn’t conform with the guidelines) this would undermine WCAG as a key component for enhancing the accessibility of Web resources.

Rather than the threat of disability legislation for ensuring organisations enhance the accessibility of their Web services we describe a range of other drivers such as peer pressure, cultural pressure, user engagement, maximising business opportunities and corporate social responsibility and reputation management.

The paper concludes by describing the areas in which standardisation is beneficial. Since we have adopted the UN’s perspective on disability as a social construct and not an attribute of an individual or the resource, we feel that standardisation work should focus on the practices which facilitate the “interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others“.  The BSI PAS 78 on “Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites” provided a good example of a code of practice which documented best practices for the commissioning of accessible Web sites. The draft BSI PAS 8878 on “Web accessibility. Building accessible experiences for disabled people” has the potential to build on this, although, as I pointed out earlier this year, the initial draft provided too great an emphasis on the potential of the nearly arrived WCAG 2.0 guidelines, rather than documenting proven best practices.

I will conclude this summary of the paper by repeating the final paragraph of the paper:

[This paper] argues for the adoption of a Web adaptability approach which incorporates previous approaches and, perhaps more importantly, embraces the future, including technical innovations, differing perceptions of what is meant by accessibility and real world deployment challenges.

Your views and feedback are welcomed.

“From Web Accessibility to Web Adaptability” Paper Published

I’m pleased to report that a paper on From Web Accessibility to Web Adaptability has been published in the Disability and Rehability: Assistive Technology journal. The full citation details are:

From Web Accessibility to Web Adaptability, Kelly, B., Nevile, L., Sloan, D., Fanou, S., Ellison, R. and Herrod, L.
Disability and Rehability: Assistive Technology, Volume 4, Issue 4, July 2009, pages 212 – 226.
doi:10.1080/17483100902903408
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a912788469

I’ll summarise the contents of this paper in a subsequent post. For now I thought it would be worth describing how this paper came to be written.

I, along with other authors of paper published at the W4A 2009 event, was invited to submit an updated version of my paper, entitled “One World, One Web … But Great Diversity“, although there was a requirement that the requested paper would be substantially different.

I received this invitation in early January 2009, with the deadline of  early March. As I had been invited to give the opening plenary talk at the OzeWAI 2009 conference in January and was already thinking about further developments to the holistic approach to Web accessibility I had been involved in developing over the past 5 years or so, this invitation provided an ideal opportunity to put down in writing the approaches I intended to talk about at the OzeWAI conference.

As I have described previously, immediately following the talk I received tweets from two participants at the conference saying how valuable they found my talk and wished to have further discussions about the ideas I had described.

Following those further discussions I invited Ruth Ellison and Lisa Herrod to provide case studies based on their involvement in Web accessibility work in Australia as examples of the ‘Web adaptability’ approach which the paper describes.

Although I was a bit grumpy at having to submit the final edits to the paper over Easter, I’m pleased that our paper has been published. And the ideas described in the paper were strengthened by the concrete examples provided by Ruth and Lisa. A good example of how Twitter can help in bringing together people with shared interests who can then engage in publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed journal :-)

The other aspect of the process which I was pleased with was the two pages of comments we received from the anonymous reviewer of the first draft of our paper. The reviewer pointed out a number of weaknesses in our arguments, challenged us to justify a number of our assertions and queried whether our criticisms of the traditional approaches to Web accessibility could be interpretted as suggesting that institutions could ignore accessibility considerations. Our responses to these comments helped us to submit a much-improved final version to the publisher – and we were pleased when the reviewer warmly endorsed the final version.

The paper is available on the publisher’s Web site. In addition my version of the paper is available on the University of Bath Institutional Repository.  Unfortunately, due to copyright restriction, access to this version is embargoed until next year :-(

The European Council Plans an Accessible Information Society

The European Council has recently announced a set of conclusions on how to deliver an accessible information society. In the announcement the Council welcomes the European Commission’s communication on “Towards an accessible information Society” and acknowledges that ICT is “crucial in today’s society and economy and they can greatly improve personal autonomy and quality of life, particularly for people with disabilities or elderly” .

I too welcome such principles. However the document goes on to underline that “The adoption of the second version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides the necessary technical specifications“.

Hmm. So the answer to the delivery of an accessible information society is to be found in the WCAG 2.0 guidelines, is it? Well not according to Wendy Chisholm who, in a talk on “Interdependent Components of Web Accessibility” at the W4A 2005 conference described “how Web accessibility depends on several components of Web development and interaction working together” (namely ATAG and UAAG as well as WCAG). So even people who have worked on the development of WAI guidelines wouldn’t, I suspect, agree that WCAG  “provides the necessary technical specifications“.

And what evidence do we have that WCAG 2.0 by itself will “greatly improve personal autonomy and quality of life, particularly for people with disabilities or elderly” . What about accessibility issues which aren’t addressed in WCAG? What about the different definitions of accessibility (on 1^st January 2009, for example, the definition of ‘disability’ was changed drastically in the Americans with Disabilities Act)? What about accessibility solutions which can be provided in ways not covered by WCAG guidelines? What about blended solutions to Web accessibility? What about the danger that the communication only covers access to Web resources and not other uses of IT by people with disabilities? What about the lack of evidence to support the positioning of WCAG guidelines as the only solution mentioned in the document?

The document could have focussed on a different part of the WAI model – it could have supported a requirement that member countries enact legislation that organisations must provide UAAG-conforming Web browsers, for example. This would be a more achievable goal, focusing on the small number of browser vendors rather than the much larger number of Web authors and Web publishing tools and work-flow systems.

Although I suspect many accessibility evangelists will welcome the publication of this document I fear that it is based on flawed underlying assumptions and will be ultimately counter-productive.  We need more open discussions about the limitations of the WAI’s approaches to Web accessibility and of ways of enhancing accessibility for people with disabilities in the complex environment in which we live. Where are the Critical Friends, I wonder?

Guerilla Accessibility Researchers

The recent Dev8D Developer Happiness Days provided an environment for developers in the JISC development community (and more widely) to engage in rapid software development. As the “Dev8D produces rapid results” post described “Day three of Developer Happiness Days is only just beginning but two ideas have already been made real by the keen coders here“.

As I attended only for parts of the first two days of the event I’ll not blog about the event – if you’d like to hear more about what happened I suggest you look at some of the search results for the ‘dev8d’ tag. However the enthusiasm I came across from developers who could see tangible outputs being produced over a period of a few days (although the more significant outputs will probably have been finalised over the following week) I’ve recently seen echoed in another context.

David Sloan, a researcher based at the University of Dundee (and co-author of several of our joint papers on Web accessibility)  recently announced, on Twitter, the launch of his blog. And in a post entitled “Sad Professors” David described his frustration with “the slow process of peer reviewing” and went on to add that “If I find accessing the research I need can be challenging what about the people who are making day to day decisions that might affect the accessibility of the resources they produce, and who could benefit from the results of research?” This is a heart-felt plea from someone who sees clearly the tangible benefits that his accessibility research can have for people with disabilities.

Coincidentally a few days after reading David’s blog post in which he criticised slow peer-reviewing processes, I received an email saying that  a paper on “Accessibility 2.0: Next Steps For Web Accessibility” authored by myself, David and several others had been published in the Journal of Access Services, Vol.6 Issues 1 & 2, 2009, pp. 265-294. That was the good news – the bad news was that the deadline for submissions was 30 September 2007:-(

However rather than simply complaining about the seemingly glacial processes of engaging in publishing research findings in peer-reviewed publications David has decided to engage in  guerilla accessibility research. This is “work typically done in a short period of time, to answer a very specific question, or target a very particular group of web users and published online in a (usually) easy to find place, such as a blog“.

David goes on to add that:

As a bonus … research written for the web is generally easier to read than an academic paper, and easy to extract the key points. It will be peer-reviewed, but after publication. If the work is good, people talk about it; if it’s of poor quality, reaction in the blogosphere will be swift. And more and more often, the results of this work are referenced in academic literature, yet I’ll bet is of more direct impact to the people it aims to inform – web designers and developers, assistive technologists, policy makers and anyone else who needs accessibility information quickly.

In David’s first post on his blog he admitted: “I succumbed! After resisting a blog for years, joining Twitter made me realise that I do actually have things to say on a fairly regular basis, things that other people just might be interested in reading” He went on to confess that “Yep, I work in a university, where there is a culture of publishing information at conferences and peer-reviewed journal papers – not always the easiest (or quickest) way to share information. This means we sometimes neglect more direct (and to be honest, probably more effective) routes – such as blogs like this“.

Perhaps we could say, to paraphrase a recent post, that in the research community “slowly, one by one, the lights are switching on“. David’s “The 58 Sound” blog should be a must read for anyone with interests in Web accessibility and usability.

Rethinking Web Accessibility for E-Learning

Why would we want to rethink Web accessibility in an elearning context? Surely application of WAI’s WCAG guidelines will provide universal accessibility? And the recently released WCAG 2.0 guidelines should improve things further.

As described in a paper on “Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility” the WAI approach is flawed when applied in an elearning context. The WCAG guidelines seek to ensure that information can be processed by people with disabilities using a variety of assistive technologies. But learning isn’t about the simple processing of information (effective learning isn’t provided by encylopedia!).

This was the core of our initial work. Further research described flaws in WAI guidelines and provided evidence that, although a political success, WCAG guidelines aren’t being implemented to any significant extent. The reason for this isn’t that educational institutions aren’t aware of the guidelines or don’t care about enhancing the quality of learning for students with disabilities. And although there are instances in which accessibility could be enhanced relatively simply, there is a need for an alternative approach which recognises the complexities of user needs and requirements, the rapidly changing technical environment, our understandings of what is meant by ‘accessibility’ and ‘disability’ and our ability to implement desirable solutions (and not just policies) within our institutions.

Our proposed approach (solution would be too bold a term) describes a Web Adaptability framework which builds on our holistic framework and focusses on the accessibility of learning outcomes rather than e-learning resources and the involvement of a broad spectrum of stakeholders.

And rather than a simplistic legal framework, institutions should deploy such approaches due to peer pressure, involvement of learners with disabilities in the design process, corporate reputation management, peer group pressure and sharing of solutions and failures.

Please join in the debate on how this goal can be realised!

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Please note that this post was submitted to the Edu Blogger Scholarship contest and has been shortlisted in the 20 finalists. For details on why I am entering this contest see my previous post.

Revisiting Web Accessibility Metadata

At the OzeWAI 2009 conference Liddy Nevile gave a talk on “AccessForAll Metadata for all Australian Resources”. I’ve known Liddy for over 10 years (I think we first met at a W3C working group meeting on PICS). Liddy has interests in both metadata and accessibility and has been working on the development of standards for accessibility metadata for some time. Liddy prefers the term ‘adaptability’ to ‘accessibility’ for reasons she explains in her paper on “Adaptability and Accessibility: a New Framework” – and I’m in broad agreement with her.

Liddy gave several reasons why the vision of making every digital resource universally accessible to all was flawed (but unfortunately her talk was not recorded, so you’ll have to take my word for that :-) .

Her talk reminded me of the ideas concerning accessibility and metadata which I had about 10 years go and presented in a talk in May 1999 on “Accessibility, Automation and Metadata” at a WAI meeting held in Toronto after the WWW 8 conference.

It’s funny looking back at a presentation like this after a period of almost 10 years. Sentiments such as those expressed by Julie Howell (who then worked at the RNIB):

“Rather than encouraging ’simplicity’ in Web design … we try to encourage ‘flexibility’, so that Web sites can be tailored to individual need ’simply’. Flexibility affords the personalisation which people with sight problems require.”

still do not seem to be accepted in some quarters (such as policy makers in the Government) where there still seems to be a culture of mandating a single approach rather than responding to a diversity of requirements.

I suspect that the (rather vague) ideas suggested in my talk haven’t yet really surfaced in widespread use not because of the lack of tools to implement such approaches, but because ideas based around personalisation weren’t popular back then.  But now that PLEs and PREs are in vogue, we need to be revisiting these issues – and not just at the application level, but also the metadata standards needed to implement this. But as Liddy and I admitted in a paper on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future” we also need to acknowledge that good ideas are not necessarily implemented.  There a need to learn from failures of the past and take into account the following when seeking to develop alternative approaches:

• The need for acceptance in the market place for tools which support the a personalisation vision for accessibility;
• The dangers of seeking to standardise too soon;
• The dangers of embedding technological decisions within legislation too soon;
• The need to ensure that solutions can scale to vast numbers of resources and users.

Are we, I wonder, now in a position in which such concerns can be addressed?

Are You Able?

There were two invited keynote speakers who travelled from Europe to speak at the OzeWAI 2009 conference. As well as my talk (which I described recently ) Dr. Eva M. Méndez (an Associate Professor in the Library and Information Science Department at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and not the American actor!) gave a talk entitled “I say accessibility when I want to say availability: misunderstandings of the accessibility in the other part of the world (EU and Spain)“.

Eva’s research focuses on metadata and web standards, digital information systems and services, accessibility and Semantic Web. She has also served as an independent expert in the evaluation and review of European projects since 2006, both for the eContentPlus program and the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) program and her talk was informed by her knowledge of the inner working of such development programmes funded by the EU.

Her talk explored the ways in which well-meaning policies may be agreed with the EU, although such policies may be misinterpreted or misunderstand and fail to be implemented, even by the EU itself.

I don’t have access to Eva’s slides, so I will give my own interpretation of Eva’s talk.

We might expect the EU to support the development of a networked environment across EU countries across a range of areas. These areas might include:

Available: Have resources been digitised? Are they available via the Web?

Reusable: Are the resources available for use by others?  Or they it trapped within a Web environment which makes reuse by others difficult?

Findable: Can the resources be easily found? Have SEO techniques been applied to allow the resource to be indexed by search engines such Google?

Exploitable: Are the resources available for others to reuse through, for example, use of Creative Commons licences?

Usable: Are the resources available in a usable environment?

Accessible: Are the resources accessible to people with disabilities?

Preservable: Can the resources be preserved for use by future generations?

Since the acronym ARFEUAP isn’t particularly memorable (and ARE-U-API would be too contrived) we might describe this as the Able approach to digitisation. But there is 0ne additional concept which I feel also needs to be included:

Feasible: Are the policies which are proposed (or perhaps mandated) feasible (or achievable)? We might ask are they actually possible (can we make all resources universally accessible to all?)  and can they be achieved with available budgets and with the standards and technologies which are currently available?

There is, of course, a question which tends to be forgotten question: is the proposed service of interest to people and will it be used?

The worrying aspect of Eva’s talk was that the EU don’t appear to be asking such questions – or even used the same vocabulary.  We need to have the bigger picture in order to address tensions between these different areas and the question (and power struggles) of how we prioritise achieving best practices – for example, should we be digitizing resources, even if we can’t make them accessible; should we regard access by people with disabilities as being of  importance than ensuring the resources can be preserved?  And let’s not fudge the issue by suggested that each is equally important and all can be achieved by use of open standards. That simply isn’t the case – and if you doubt this, ask managers of institutional repositories. They will probably say that they are addressing the available, reusable, findable, preservable and, perhaps, exploitable issues, but I suspect that the repository managers would probably admit that many of the PDFs in the repositories will not be accessible.

Web Accessibility Framework in 3 Words

Since 2005 I, in conjunction with a number of other accessibility researchers and practitioners in the UK and Australia, have sought to develop a framework for Web accessibility which addresses the shortcomings of the WAI model (which suggests that universal accessibility will be provided by a combination of guidelines for Web content, authoring tools and user agents).

This work began with a paper on “A Holistic Approach to E-Learning Accessibility” by myself, Lawrie Phipps and Elaine Swift published in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Research in 2005.  Ten further papers weres subsequently published which furter developed these ideas.

A fair amount of thinking and discussions have taken place in the past 5 years. However at the recent OzeWAI 2009 conference Lisa Harrod summarised our work in a Twitter post:

massive thanks and kudos to @briankelly for adding context & purpose to my accessibility methodology i.e. Accessibility isn’t binary.

Yes, that’s a great summary: “Accessibility isn’t binary“.  It’s not about following a set of rules to achieve universal accessibility.  It’s about shades of grey, differing interpretations, differing user requirements, differing scenarios, etc. And the advocacy, the policies and the appropriate areas for standardisation all arise from those three words.

Thanks to Lisa for spotting the key aspect – and for perhaps coming up with an appropriate title for my next talk on this topic.

From Web Accessibility 2.0 to Web Adaptability

OzeWAI 2009

The opportunity to escape the depths of a cold January in the UK to give the opening talk at the OzeWAI 2009 conference was too good to miss. So last week’s trip to La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia provided me with the opportunity to go into the mountains for a barbecue, go to the beach, take a ride along the Great Ocean Road, see the koalas and kangaroos and try the local Cooper’s IPA (which needs to be rolled before drinking, I discovered).

From Web Accessibility 2.0 to Web Adaptability (1.0)

But I had to earn my supper (the goat at the barbie)  and so as well as giving the presentation on  “From Web Accessibility 2.0 to Web Adaptability (1.0)” I took part actively in the conferences discussions (and drinking). I have also made the slides available on Slideshare (which is embedded below).

The talk seemed to go down well – and I was particularly pleased that when I sat down after my talk and refreshed the Twitterfon application on my iPod Touch it provided me with instant feedback on the talk from two of the participants at the conference.  RuthEllison told me that she “@briankelly enjoyed your presentation this morning about a holistic approach to accessibility #ozewai” and scenariogirl also showed some Australian warmth: “@briankelly Fantastic talk this morning, I will come up and say hi at lunch ;)“.

The talk was an update on recent papers and presentations and contains much of the material I used in a talk on “Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility” which I blogged about recently. I therefore won’t expand on the ideas and approaches which I explained in my talk. Rather I want to discuss the accessibility of the talk itself.

Accessibility of Talks at Conferences

As I’ve been doing for a couple of years now, the slides are made available under a Creative Commons licence.  In addition, as I’ve also been doing for some time the slides are available on Slideshare. These approaches provide a number of benefits:

Creative Commons Licence:

• The content can be reused by others by minimising legal barriers to their reuse.
• The content can be preserved by others by minimising legal barriers to their preservation.
• The content can be integrated with other content (e.g. ‘mashed up’)  by minimising legal barriers to their preservation.

Use of Slideshare:

• The content can be reused by others by using a service which allows the content to be embedded in third party services.
• The content can be commented on and annotated.
• The content can be tagged to facilitate discovery.

Over the past few months I have also been making use of a Flip video camera to record the talks I give at conferences.  A video of the talk is now available on Blip.TV and embedded below. The video can also be accessed from the UKOLN Web site, which also provides links to a variety of resources associated with the talk, including the PowerPoint slide, a HTML version of the slides, the AVI master of the video and links related to the presentation.

Discussion

But what benefits can the provision of videos of such talks provide? Using Web 2.0 video sharing services such as Blip.TV (or Google Video, Vimeo, etc.) can clearly provide similar benefits to those provided by Slideshare – and sharing a talk is often even more beneficial than simply sharing slides, I would argue. And if I reflect on the underlying purposes behind my talk I think I would suggest:

• To describe an approach (to Web accessibility) which I think addresses some of the limitations in current approaches.
• To seek to gain feedback on the ideas.
• To encourage others to make use of this approach.

The video helps with all of these purposes: the video can help to provide a better understanding than would be provided by simply viewing the slides. And despite the hard work which has gone into the various peer-reviewed papers which underpins the presentation, I’d be the first to admit that papers written for scholarly publications aren’t necessarily easy to understand.

And Web 2.0 video sharing services can also facilitate feedback and reuse of the content.  So if anyone would like to embed the video in their own Web resources (to share with others; to comment on; to critique; etc.) then I would encourage this.

But, and there is a but, is the video itself accessible? In the final panel session at OzeWAI 2009 I argued that the OzeWAI 2010 conference should be an’ amplified conference’,  with the talks being recorded and made freely available for use (and reuse) by others. And in response to a question as to whether it would be affordable to provide captioning for such videos, I argued that this may not also be needed.  In UK legislation, for example, we are required to take reasonable measures to ensure that people with disabilities aren’t differentiated against unfairly.  I feel that providing slides, audio and videos at conferences can now be done reasonably easily, but captioning is an expensive process. And providing a variety of alternatives (slides, videos, links to papers, links to resources) can enrich the impact of and access to the underling ideas  of talks given at conferences, including access for people with a range of disabilities.

Lisa Herod (scenariogirl) summarised the discussions on the Twitter back-channel thus:

Is it better to have some content or no content at all if some content == partial accessibility? Discuss. #ozewai09 4:43 AM Jan 23rd

What’s your view?  Should I remove the embedded Slideshare and Blip.TV resources from this post as they don’t conform with accessibility guidelines? Or should my organisation request that I remove them as they could be liable?

What I Would Like From The BS8878 Accessibility Code of Practice

I recently expressed reservations about the approaches being taken in the BS 8878 draft code of practice on Building Accessible Experiences for Disabled People. But I do feel that such a Code of Practice is desirable.  However rather than the current approach which places the main emphasis on conformance with WCAG, together with an inappropriate reliance on UAAG tools (which organisations providing Web sites have no control over) and a reliance on use of ATAG-conformant tools (which ignores the complexity of workflows, the increasing diversity of file formats and the growth in importance of user-generate content) I feel the Code of Practice should provide a framework for a user-focussed approach to accessibility, which provides a content for use of good practices for developing widely accessible Web sites, such as WCAG guidelines, usability guidelines, etc.

The BS 8878 draft code of practice already includes much valuable advice, especially on the need to engage users with disabilities in both the design and testing phases of Web site development and on the need for organisations to provide accessibility policies. These sections should be provided at the start of the document and not relegated towards the end, as they currently are.

Once the need to include people with disabilities in the planning and development stages and the need for organisations to explicitly state their accessibility policies, only then should the code of practice include implementation details. And rather than repeat the advice included in WCAG, I feel the document should require that such recommendations should only be used if they are proven to work in their intended context of use and they can be implemented and maintained with reasonable levels of expenditure of resources.

And finally I feel that the code of practice should seek to be future-proofed, and recognise that technical innovations are likely to take place which may enhance accessibility of services although infringing guidelines developed in the past.

What Is A Web Site?

What is a Web site? Strange question, you many feel – surely everyone knows what a Web site is. Why would we want to try and define what a Web site is?

And yet if you consider last year’s announcement that all Government Web sites must comply with WCAG AA guidelines by December 2009, I think it becomes clear that a clear unambiguous and agreed definition is needed. Otherwise how will the Government know which Web sites – the ones which don’t comply with accessibility guidelines – should be closed down (as they have threatened to do).

Here are some thoughts as to may be meant by an organisation’s Web site:

The domain name:  an organisation’s Web sites refers to Web sites for which the domain name is owned by the organisation. So www.bath.ac.uk and foo.bath.ac.uk are the University of Bath’s Web sites.

The Web server:  Or perhaps an organisation’s Web sites should refer to Web sites which are hosted on Web server hardware which are owned by the University.

But perhaps a organisation’s Web site may also need to be defined at a more detailed level.

The HTTP protocol: Perhaps an organisation’s Web site refers to resources which are served by the http: (and https:) protocol schemes.  If a resource is accessed via the ftp: protocol from an organisation’s FTP server, isn’t this on the FTP site rather than the Web site?  And clearly http protocol schemes such as mailto: don’t really related to Web resources. This was an argument made recently by “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” in a comment on this blog who felt that “Regarding the web as being “anything addressable with a URI” is not a reasonable definition. A URI might be used to address a file on an FTP server; do FTP servers now have to provide HTML versions of all their content? The FTP server in question may even have existed before Web!“.

The file formats: Or perhaps policies on a Web site should relate only to native Web formats, such as HTML.  This was another argument made by “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” in a comment on this blog when he argued “sticking content in a powerpoint file isn’t ‘putting it on the web’, it’s deciding not to put it on the web”.

Some further complications arise when we consider the different ways on which Web sites are now being used. Agreements on the meaning of the term ‘Web site’ might make sense if we are thinking about a Web site as an informational resource, but may break in the context of a Web site as an application (Web-based email services, for example). And what if a Web page contains resources which are embedded from third party Web sites (e.g. an embedded YouTube video or embedded RSS content). Should the resources embedded from elsewhere be regarded as part of the organisational Web site or not?

Now I intend to avoid falling into the trap of seeking to create another definition. Rather I’d point out that when standards bodies and institutions develop policies  which apply to Web sites, they need to appreciate that this term can mean different things to different people.

DO you haved a clear understanding of what you mean by a ‘Web site’?

BS 8878: Building Accessible Experiences for Disabled People

The BS 8878 Draft Code of Practice on Building Accessible Experiences for Disabled People

The draft BS 8878 code of practice on “Building Accessible Experiences for Disabled People” is currently open for review, with the deadline for comments being 31 January 2009 [Note link changed as the original resource is no longer available 19 July 2009].

That’s great, you may think, we do need to have an agreed set of national guidelines which can help organisations commissioning and developing accessible Web sites. And the tight deadline seems to indicate that the code of practice will be out quickly.

Limitations of The Reviewing Process

Sadly, I feel, this isn’t the case. If you register to access the draft document (that’s right, you need to register not only to give comments but also to view the document) you’ll see that the first set of comments (29 at the time of writing) are very critical of the usability of the processes for accessing, reading and commenting on the document:

“Given that this is a draft code of practice for web accessibility, it’s astounding the lengths to which BSI has gone to make this document inaccessible and difficult to follow.“

“it is appaling that the BSI should even think of publishing this information in a non-accessible format. Clearly the BSI has no moral authority to recommend accessibility standards to anyone else“

“Accessing this document was the hardest web related task i had to do today. Comical when the goal was reaching a web accessibility document.“

“Is this supposed to be a demonstration of how NOT to make web documents accessible?“

I had similar difficulties accessing the draft document – and I am an experienced Web user :-). But eventually I discovered that there were MS Word and PDF versions of the document available which I printed out for reading at home.

Flaws in the Content

Despite this draft Code of Practice supposedly being intended, I understand, to document agreed industry achievable best practices the document simply requires use of the WAI model (WCAG, ATAG and UAAG) despite the fact that, for example, the document itself acknowledging that “At the time of publication, no single authoring tool that supports all ATAG priority 1 checkpoints is known“.

The document also seems to have a view of the Web as it was in the late 1990s – there is no recognition of the diversity ways in which the Web is being used, the complex workflows, the importance of user generated content, etc. There is also a failure to take into account the work of the research community in gathering evidence and using such evidence to develop more achievable approaches to Web accessibility.

The latter part of the document is better, requiring organisations to develop and publicise accessibility policies and involve people with disabilities in the planning and testing processes.

Dangers in its Implementation

There’s a danger, I feel, that this document will end up being published with the expectations that public sector organisations, in particular, will be forced to implement such recommendations. And I am concerned that this will be counter-productive – if there’s one thing that is worse that a lack of standards or codes of practice it’s severly flawed standards and codes or practice, in my opinion.

The document states that “Organizations wishing to claim conformance with BS 8878 should do so in hard copy, electronic media or any other medium“. Now although I don’t understand the structure of this sentence (organisations must claim conformance in any medium – how could they not do so?) it is clear that there is an expectation that organisations will state that they conform with the code of practice. Indeed the document goes on to mandate that “In making such a claim, a business or organization should address all of the provisions of BS 8878“. OK, so organisations can’t simply choose parts of the specification which they conform to (such as the reasonable and achievable parts of the document!)

What Next?

Now you may disagree with me. And whilst I would welcome further discussion on this topic, I would encourage you to read the document first, and give your feedback to the BSI.  You should bear in mind that the code of practice will be updated before publication to refer to the newly published WCAG 2.0 guidelines. And as that document makes it clear that the guidelines are format-independent, the principles will apply to, for example, MS Word and PDF documents on Web sites as well as HTML resources.  If you don’t feel it is likely that you’ll be providing accessible PDF and MS Word resources on your institutional Web sites (including institutional repositories) surely you should ask the BSI to revisit this document in order to describe more achievable goals.

Or to put it another way, is this code of practice intended to describe best practices which are achievable in the complex Web environment in which we now live or a set of well-meaning aspirations which are unlikely to be achievable in practice? And remember, if the code of practice is accepted in its current form the danger is that institutional conformance with the code of practice (in its entirety, remember) will be required.  And what will then happen if existing services fail to conform?  Will we see institutional repositories containing inaccessible PDF documents being removed from service in other that institutions can claim conformance?

WCAG 2.0 is Now An Official W3C Recommendation

The WCAG 2.0 guidelines for Web content accessibility were officially launched yesterday (11 December 2009).  Hurrah – the very dated and flawed WCAG 1.0 guidelines are no more!  And organisations which require Web resources to conform to WCAG 1.0 should be quickly updating their policies, their training course, their workflow process, etc.  Although as the WCAG 2.0 guidelines have been under development for several years (the first draft was published in January 2001!) with a number of iterations of towards the published version having been released over the past couple of years this should have given organisations plenty of time to plan their migration strategy.

The guidelines are much improved, with an emphasis on conformance with four key POUR principles (resources should be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust). And although it should be remembered that the guidelines have not yet been proven to demonstrably enhance accessibility and there is little experience in how the guidelines will be implemented in a real world context it should also be pointed out that the WCAG 1.0 guidelines have been shown to be flawed. So there is no excuse not to move on.

The challenge will be knowing how to apply WCAG 2.0, based on the experiences we’ve had in the past.  And as I learnt from the Designing For Disability event I spoke at last week, the Deaf together with those with learning disabilities do seem to find visually rich content more accessible – although I should hasten to add that these findings were described as feedback from particular case studies and should not be regarded as universal truths.  Indeed I would suggest that it is a truth which should be universally acknowledged that universal accessibility is a pipe dream, and that we should be seeking to enhance access and widening participation.

Designing for Disability Seminar

The Designing for Disability

A recent blog post by Neil Witt on The VC’s New VLE inspired me to provide a new introduction to a talk I gave at the “Designing for Disability” seminar held on  Friday 5^th December 2008 at the British Museum.

I was an invited speaker at this event was organised by the Museums Association and the Jodi Awards. The title of my talk, the final talk of the day, was “Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility“.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Let me tell you the tale, I began, of the benevolent emperor. He was kind and wished to do his best for his subjects.  So when he was told of a secret formulae produced by a wizard from a far-off land which would ensure that all of the subjects of his empire would be able to access all of his edicts, he wanted to know more. He was told that the secret formulae would ensure that the blind, the handicapped and the crippled of his land (this story, I should add, took place long ago, when,sadly, such politically incorrect words were the norm) were would all be able to read his edicts. “This sounds truly wonderful” the emperor announced (thinking that it would also be good if they could also read about the new taxes he intended to implement – for even in fairy tales, there is a need for financial prudence and long term sustainability).

And so the emperor announced that henceforth all official pronouncements, all new laws, all new taxes must comply with the WAI way (as the magic new approach became known. And so the lord chief justice issued the proclamation and the Knights of the Accessible Table rode through the kingdom to ensure that the magic was being used everywhere.  “Anyone for fails to comply with the magic will be banished“, it was announced.

Life was good, in the land. And when one of the knights who was made blind in a battle complained that he could read the edicts but couldn’t understand them, he was ignored. And when rumours appeared that there were places in the far-flung regions of the empire where the magic wasn’t being used, but people could still read the emperor’s edicts, this was dismissed.

“But it’s true!” said a little boy.  “There’s a new magic, that’s even better. It’s not the WAI way magic, it’s called ‘Inclusive design“.

And in my talk I described the story which the little boy told.

And this story is true, dear friends. For I was that little boy – and so, too, were David Sloan, Liddy Nevile, Jane Seale, EA Draffan, Helen Petrie, Caro Howell, Lawrie Phipps, Andy Heath, Hamilton Fraser, Elaine Swift and many others. For that little boy was a member of the Knights Who Gathered Evidence. And here is the tale I told, which is available on Google Video and Zentation and is also embedded below (note video was added on 9^th December 2008, after the post was originally published).

Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility 52:16 Talk on ‘Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility’

The Evidence From The Day

This tale introduced the talk I gave, in which I summarised the various peer0reviewed papers I’ve contributed to since 2004. I described the limitation of the WAI model and the WCAG guidelines, the evidence from a number of Web accessibility surveys which demonstrates that conforming with the guidelines does not necessarily provide accessible Web services and Web services which do not conform to the guidelines have been found to be very accessible.   I went on to describe some of the challenges to be faced in understanding what accessibility means in the context of learning and cultural appreciation.

I was particularly pleased that the holistic approach to Web accessibility which I described seemed to apply so closely to the various case studies which were described during the day.This included:

• Andy Minnion’s talk on “New Media for Access and Participation by People with Learning Disabilities“. He concluded that universal access with a single interface and minor changes of style and appearance do not meet the needs of this group. Content itself needs to be adapted and technical compliance, while important for other groups, is not in itserlf and accessibility solution.
• Linda Ellis’s talk on the use of  British Sign Language video guides to improve access for deaf visitors to Bantock House and Park. She argued that content aimed specifically for Deaf visitors was needed and that, as BSL is a language in its own right, information provided in BSL is needed, since Deaf visitors may find it difficult to understand information provided in English.
• Andrew Payne, The National Archives, on a project to maximise access to the Prisoner 4099 archives. Andrew mentioned how “Flash can be accessible, but you need to be careful”. Based on experiences such as this Andrew concluded by suggest that we “Don’t believe the box tickers”.

I very much agree with Andrew – don’t believe the box tickers. And don’t believe anyone who suggests there’s a simple solution to difficult and complex challenges – whether they be wicked elves or government policy makers!

Differences Between the WAI Standards Developer and User Perspectives

Back in September I presented a paper on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future” at the ADDW08 conference in which I described my criticisms of the WAI approach to Web accessibility and argued the need to explore alternative approaches. Shadi Abou-Zhara, who works for W3C WAI was in the audience and after I gave my talk he said that he didn’t disagree with many of the points I had made in my talk, but didn’t see what relevance they had to the WAI approach to Web accessibility. Shadi had made a similar point after I presented a paper on “Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes” at the W4A 2007 conference.

But if Shadi has no fundamental disagreements with the holistic approach to Web accessibility that myself, David Sloan, Lawrie Phipps and other have been developing over the years how does this relate to the ongoing work of Shadi, his colleagues in W3C WAI and those involved in WAI working group activities over the years?

Reflecting on the comments Shadi made and the discussions I had at the ADDW 2008 conference with David MacDonald, an invited expert to the WCAG 2.0 group it seems to my that there is a mismatch between the work being carried out by WAI and the expectations of users of the WAI guidelines.

In response to a question about the relationships between usability and accessibility it seems that WAI’s interest is in usability only as far as it affects users with disabilities significantly more than most users. And I think this view which focusses purely on the needs of users with disabilities results in an approach which is blind to real world complexities and to the actual take-up and effectiveness of their solutions.

The developers of WAI accessibility guidelines seem to have a narrowly defined scope for their work. This seems to cover the development of technical guidelines which will enhance accessibility for users with various types of disabilities. In is not in scope for people at WAI to address the resource implications of conforming with their guidelines, the complexities of implementing the guidelines or to consider alternatives ways in which accessibility challenges can be addressed.

If these issues are out-of-scope for WAI, then there’s a need for the issues to be addressed by the user community.  And this will include addressing these difficult issues. It is the user community to decide when the WAI guidelines may be the best way of providing accessible services, when other solutions may be relevant and to ensure that cost-effective and sustainable solutions are provided.

The WAI guidelines have an important role to play in helping to enhance the accessibility of networked services – but the user organisations have to make the more challenging decisions of deciding when to make use of WAI guidelines and when other solutions may be relevant.

Videoing Talks As A Means Of Providing Equivalent Experiences

As I recently posted, a paper by myself and Liddy Nevile was accepted by the ADDW08 conference. In the paper we argued that the conventional wisdom regarding Web accessibility (just follow the WCAG guidelines and the Web environment will be universally accessible to all) has been shown to be flawed.  We argued that in a world of mass creation of digital objects, the hand-crafted approach which underpins the WCAG model doesn’t scale. We argued the need to embrace a diversity of approaches, including an exploration of the potential for exploiting the links between related resources in order to find equivalent resources.

Our paper is available (in MS Word, PDF and HTML formats) and our slides are also available (in MS PowerPoint and in (dodgy) HTML formats).  But in addition a video of the talk (which I took using a Flip video camera) is available on Google Video (and is embedded below).

And I’ve synched the video with the PowerPoint slides to provide an even richer experience. This is available on Zentation and a screen image is illustrated below.

Now although the HTML version of the paper should comply with WCAG guidelines (although as a peer-reviewed paper the language and writing style may mean that is is not necessarily  understandable by all), the MS Word, PDF, MS PowerPoint, HTML version of the slides and the .AVI video files will not.  Now I could make the resources conform to WCAG guidelines if I removed all but the HTML version of the paper.  But I would argue that this would diminish the impact of and accessibility of the underlying ideas I wish to communicate.  And seeking to make the various versions of the resources conform to the various checklists would be very time-consuming and would not, I would argue, provide an effective return on the tax-payers money.  And such consideration are, I suspect, informing policy decisions related to the provision of institutional repositories – although perhaps without the provision of links to related resources.

Now as devices such as a Flip can be purchased for less than £100 pounds, and uploading videos on Google Video can be done for free a question I would ask is “if conference organisers fail to make such alternatives for papers presented at conferences, could this be regarded as a failure to take reasonable measures to provide access to services for people with disabilities?”  Isn’t it unreasonable to fail to invest £100 to enhance the effectiveness of conferences along the lines I’ve suggested and demonstrated? And, indeed, doesn’t the informality used in talks provide a valuable alternative to people who may be put off by the nature of the language which is found in research publications.

Institutional Repositories and the Costs Of Doing It Right

There’s an interesting discussion taking place on the JISC-Repositories JISCMail list, following a post from Jenny Delasalle who asked:

Do any of you know how long it takes you to process a single item, before it is available as a live record in your repository? Please can you share that information with the list? 

Jenny provided details of her experiences:

Here at Warwick it takes at least 2 hours to process a single item. We are adding to our repository at a rate of about 15 items per week. I’m desperate to try to speed this up as we are receiving items faster than we can process them.

My colleague Pete Cliff somewhat tentatively suggested “why not put the items in the repository with minimal metadata“.

Pete and others seemed to feel that such compromises may be needed “in the current climate where quantity seems to have more impact than quality“. But this is where I would disagree.  This argument seems to be simply a cry for more resources in an area of interest to those making such a plea. But people will always be asking for more resources for their areas of interest – and, as there will always be limited resources, others will argue that their areas are more worthy of being allocated more resources.  And it strikes me as being somewhat disingenuous to have developed an approach which is known to be resource-intensive and then to make a plea for additional resources in order for the particular approach to be effective. A more honest approach would have been to develop a solution which was better suited for the available resources.

This was an argument I made last week in my talk on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future“. As I described in my talk (and note a 30 minute video of the talk is available). I pointed out that evidence suggests that Web accessibility policies based on conformance with WCAG AA have clearly failed, except in a small number of cases. And rather than calling for additional resources to be allocated to changing this we need to acknowledge that this won’t happen, and to explore alternative approaches.

And it is interesting to note that apprarent lack of interest on the JISC-Repositiories list in discussing the accessibility of resources in the repositories rather than the metadata requirements for aiding resource discover. Indeed when this topic was discussed a couple of year’s ago Les Carr, with a openness which I appreciated, argued that:

If accessibility is currently out of reach for journal articles, then it is another potential hindrance for OA. I think that if you go for OA first (get the literature online, change researchers’ working practices and expectations so that maximum dissemination is the normal state of affairs) THEN people will find they have a good reason to start to adapt their information dissemination behaviours towards better accessibility.

Here Les is arguing that the costs of providing accessibility resources in Institutional Repositories is too great, and can act as a barrier to maximising open access to institutional research activities. I would very much agree with Les that we need to argue priorities – as opposed to simply asking that someone (our institutions, the government – it’s never clear who) should give us more money to do the many good things we would like to do in our institutions.  

In the case of Institutional Repositories we then have competing pressures for resources for metadata creation and management and for enhancing the accessibility of the resources. In this context It should be noted that the WCAG 2.0 guidelines have reached the status of Candidate Recommendation, and that WAI Web site states quite clearly “We encourage you to start using WCAG 2.0 now“. And note that, unlike the WCAG 1.0 guidelines, WCAG 2.0 is format neutral. So you can provide resources on your Web site in a variety of formats, but such resources need to conform with the guidelines if it is your institutional policy to do so.

So shouldn’t institutions who have made public commitment to comply with WCAG guidelines ensure that this applies to content in their institutional repositories, even if this will require a redeployment of effort from other activities, such as metadata creation?

Or, alternatively, you may feel that complying with a set of rules, such as WCAG, without doing the cost-benefit analysis or exploring other approaches to achieving the intended goals is mis-guided. In which case perhaps Pete’s suggestion that you might wish to consider “put[ting] the items in the repository with minimal metadata” might actually be a sensible approach rather than an unfortunate compromise? And in response to Philip Hunter’s comment that “achieving interoperability through dumbing-down the metadata has a strange attractiveness in a world not overly crazy for quality” perhaps we should be arguing that “achieving interoperability and accessibility through labour-intensive manual efforts is a perverse solution in a public sector environment in which should be demonstrating that we can provide cost effective solutions“?

Web Accessibility 3.0

I previously mentioned a joint paper on “Redefining Accessibility for a Web 2.0 World” which has been accepted for the ADDW08 conference to be held at the University of York on 22-24^th September 2008. David Sloan, the lead author for the paper, will present this paper.

In addition to this paper Liddy Nevile and myself have had a paper on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future” also accepted at the ADDW08 conference. This paper describes three scenarios: it explores the limitations of a vision for Web accessibility based on use of the WAI approach to provide “universal accessibility” and then describes the limitations of the “holistic approach to Web accessibility” developed initially by myself, Lawrie Phipps and David Sloan. The paper describes how these approaches focus on, in the first scenario, on the accessibility of individual resources and, in the second scenario, on institutional approaches to enhancing the accessibility of the purposes of the Web services. However neither of these approaches seems to have much relevance to the accessibility of the globally popular Web 2.0 services. And if we are serious about Web accessibility we should be looking at the accessibility of the global World Wide Web, and not just individual resources or the resources managed within our institutions.

But how should be go about addressing such large-scale challenges? In the paper we suggest that we should be exploring how the relationships between resources might help to provide users with access to related resources and how personalisation approaches might provide users with access to resources which are accessible to the individual user, rather than being universally accessible. The vision, Liddy and I feel, can be regarded as an implementation of the W3C’s vision for the Semantic Web. But we also argue the need to have the scepticism which failed to be applied to WAI’s model for Web accessibility.  

The slides which will be presented at the conference are available on Slideshare and are embedded below.

And as we argued the need for a critical approach to proposals for Web accessibility (which we have taken in the past to the limitations of the WAI model and the WCAG guidelines) we invite your comments on our paper and this presentation.

On the Videos from the Repository Fringe 2008

On the The thoughts of a Code Gorilla blog a post on Videos from Repository Fringe 2008 provides a link to a number of videos of talks given at the Repository Fringe held recently in Edinburgh. The blog is written by a software developed who has been “identified as “a free thinker” by JISC“.

The post states that the videos “will be made available via a Streaming Server at some point, however this is a microsoft-specific platform, so non-windows/non-Internet Explorer users struggle to access the data“. In order to maximise the access to the videos Code Gorilla has “uploaded them to google video“.

As I mentioned in post on the Open Standards and the JISC IErecently at one stage there was a fairly hard line view that open standards must be adopted in order to provide device independence – in the case of multimedia, W3C’s SMIL standard wold seem to be particularly relevant for synching audio, video and other resources such as presentation files. However as we see in this example, the vision that we had several years ago has failed to have any significant impact, as instead it is the popular services such as Google Video and YouTube which are being used to deliver such resources, as well as providing additional functionality, such as user comments and the ability to embedded the resources in other pages, as illustrated below.

It is also interesting to note that this also provides a good example of a pragmatic approach to the accessibility of such resources. At one stage, when the SENDA legislation was being deployed, there was a feeling in some circles that institutions would need to remove videos from their services unless they could provide full captioning. We now, however, widely accept the view that we need to take ‘reasonable measures’ to provide accessible alternatives – and that removing resources does not improve their accessibility.

So my congratulations to the ‘free thinker’ who has so clearly demonstrated that the naive views that we used to have can, in circumstances such as this, be ignored in order to maximise benefits to the user and provide cost-effective solutions.

It is appropriate to embed this video of Dorothea Salo’s keynote talk at the Repository Fringe 2008, with her comments that “idealism isn’t enough” and “programmers are moving towards flexibility”.

And finally I should add that at the end of this video clip (45 minutes in) Dorothea mentions the impacts that both Paul Walk and Andy Powell are having in questioning some of the assumptions which have been made in the past regarding the technical approaches taken to institutional repositories.

We do need more ‘free thinkers’, I feel.

Over Ten Years Of Accessibility Work

David Sloan and myself have had a paper on  “Reflections on the Development of a Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility” (initially entitled “Redefining Accessibility for a Web 2.0 World“) accepted for the ADDW08 (Accessible Design in the Digital World) conference which will be held at the University of York on 23-24^th September 2008. The paper reviews our work in Web accessibility from the early days of promoting the WAI model and use of WCAG guidelines  through to our realisation of the limitations of this approach, initially in the content of e-learning  accessibility and then more wider concerns. This work led to the development of alternative approaches to enhancing the accessibility of Web resources which were published in eight peer-reviewed papers (not included the two papers which have been accepted for the ADDW08 conference).

I order to collate the historical data for the paper I created a Dipity time line of my involvement in accessibility work since attending the WAI launch meeting in July 1997.  This is illustrated below.

I found the timeline very useful in giving me a bigger picture of my work in this area and provides me with fresh insights which I was unaware of from just looking at my lists of papers and presentations. In particular I can spot several different phases in my work which are summarised in the table below.

Date	Phase	Comments
1997-1999	Naivity	The first few year were based on learning more about the WAI approach to Web accessibility, including the WCAG, ATAG and UAAG guidelines. Advice was provided based of this approach. During this time I was also a member of the DISinHE Steering Group.
2000-2001	Silence	The timeline indicates little activity in this period. Perhaps there was little new to say, as the view then was that WCAG  conformance was all that  Web developers need concern themselves with. In this case, best practices would primarily be a training issue to be carried out by bodies such as Netskills, rather than a development/innovative activity which is a key aspect of UKOLN’s work.
2002	Evidence-gathering	During 2002 a number of automated accessibility surveys were carried out in order to gather evidence of institutional adoption of WCAG guidelines. The findings showed low levels of conformance, and as further manual testing would be needed in order to provide proof of conformance with the WCAG guidelines, it was starting to become clear that the WCAG approach was failing to have impact amongst practitioners, despite its clear political success.
2003	Debating alternative approaches	Panel sessions on “Web Site Accessibility: Too Difficult To Implement?” at the ILI 2003 conference and ”Web Accessibility: Will WCAG 2.0 Better Meet Today’s Challenges?” at the WWW 2003 conference and a debate on “Web accessibility is difficult to implement” provide opportunities to raise doubts over the effectiveness of the WAI approach.
2004-	Alternative approaches for e-learning accesibility published	Lawrie Phipps (then at TechDis) and I discuss alternative approaches for e-learning accessibility and, together with Elaine Swift (then an e-learning developer at the University of Bath) have a paper on Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility published in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. These ideas are further developed for a prize-winning paper on “Implementing A Holistic Approach To E-Learning Accessibility” presented at the ALT-C 2005 conference and a paper on “Holistic Approaches to E-Learning Accessibility” published in the ALT-J journal in 2006.
2006-	Alternative approaches to Web accessibility framework published	A paper on “Forcing Standardization or AccommodatingDiversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World” was presented at the W4A 2005 conference. This paper was co-authored by myself, Lawrie Phipps and David Sloan, who have been the main driving force behind this work. Further papers which further developed our holistic framework for accessibility and applied the approach beyond e-learning accessibility were published at the W4A 2006 (”Contextual Web Accessibility – Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility Guidelines“), W4A 2007 (”Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes“) and W4A 2008 (”One World, One Web … But Great Diversity“) conferences.
2006-	Alternative approaches to Web accessibility disseminated	From 2006 to date the alternative approaches to Web accessibility have been disseminated to UKOLN’s core communities, including the UK’s higher and further education communities, the library, museum and the public sector organisations. This work has included taking part in a panel session on “Web and Access” at the “e-Access’06 Conference“, chairing a Public Sector Conference on Accessibility, helping to organise the Accessibility Summit II, giving a talk on “The Accessible Web” at the “Web Adept: Museums and the Web 2007 conference”, facilitating a session on “What Does Accessibility Mean To The Blogging Community?” at the blogs.ac.uk conference, 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, giving an online interview on “Web Accessibility” in an Access to Experts interview organised by CHIN, contributing a chapter on “Accessibility in the Future for book on “Web Accessibility: Practical Advice for the Library and Information Professional” as well as writing a series of posts on accessibility on this blog.

The timeline has helped me to gain a better understanding of my work in Web accessibility over the past decade and how this work, led initially by myself and Lawrie Phipps and later supported by David Sloan) has been furthered developed and refined by ever-growing numbers of accessibility practitioners and researchers in the UK and Australia.  So I would like to take this opportunity to thank the co-authors of my peer-reviewed papers for their contribution to this work: in order of date of publication these are: Lawrie Phipps, Elaine Swift, David Sloan, Helen Petrie, Fraser Hamilton, Caro Howell, Liddy Nevile, Ann Chapman, Andy Heath, Stephen Brown, Jane Seale, Patrick Lauke, Simon Ball, EA Draffan and Sotiris Fanou, not forgetting Stuart Smith, although the publication of that paper has been delayed.

What lies ahead, I wonder? The release of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines should provide an opportunity for institutions to rethink their approaches to Web accessibility as these guidelines remove some of the more flawed of the WCAG1.0 checkpoints and are, I’m pleased to say, format-agnostic.  But what of the implications of the popularity of many Social Web and Web 2.0 services?  And can the Semantic Web finally start to provide useful benefits to the user community, including accessibility benefits?  These are some of the questions which Liddy Nevile and myself will be raising in our paper on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future” which will also be presented at the ADDW08 conference. More of that work in a later post.

EDINA And Web 2.0

I was recently reading the EDINA Newsletter. EDINA, a JISC-funded national datacentre based at the University of Edinburgh, has announced its strategic plan for 2008-2011(PDF) and amongst its priorities are “improving engagement with our user communities” and “appropriate use of Web 2.0 social media and collaboration tools“.

It seems that EDINA has already started implementing these plans, as the newsletter also describes the EDINA Digimap blog which has been launched as a way of “exploring alternatives to email for distributing information about the service“. It is interesting to note that the blog is hosted on Blogspot. This strikes me as a sensible – rather than having to find technical expertise in-house to install and maintain blog software EDINA are using a well-established and mature externally-hosted service. It was also interesting to note that they are using Blogspot rather than WordPress. I suspect that, after lagging behind a few years ago, Blogspot may have caught up with WordPress in its functionality and ease-of-use.

The newsletter also mentioned that the Suncat service (the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK research community) now has a “search application that anyone on Facebook can easily add to their profile, enabling them to search for journals held in over 60 UK research libraries” – and if you have a Facebook account you may wish to try the application.

Externally-hosted blogs and Facebook applications – it does seem that EDINA is embracing Web 2.0. And reading the strategic plan for 2008-2011 (PDF format) it seems this decision was made in order to enhance accessibility of its services.  The plan describes how “EDINA recognises the growing user-base arising from delivery of service to a widening client community and integration with other environments, especially those using mobile technologies. In addition, the growth in popularity of Web 2.0 social media and collaboration tools is important for the support of learning and research activity.” I was also pleased to read that although EDINA is committed to improving the utility and usability of its services for “the full range of its users, including those with disabilities” EDINA has acknowledged that

“adopting too conservative an approach risks disenfranchising many users and therefore EDINA will evaluate how its services can be presented and personalised to address changing information-seeking and user practices, including access through devices other than computer screens, such as PDAs and mobile phones.“

It is good to see a national JISC service such as EDINA embracing Web 2.0 and making a commitment to enhancing the accessibility of its services by providing personalised services and supporting a variety of devices (and it is noticeable that no reference is made in the plan to achieving such accessibility be simply mandating WAI-compliance).

Government Web Sites MUST Be WCAG AA Compliant!

I commented previously on the Public consultation on Delivering Inclusive Websites (TG102) which proposed that “all government websites must meet Level Double-A of the W3C guidelines by December 20082009“. It seems that this proposal has now been implemented. Some may feel that this is to be welcomed, but as I have argued previously, mandating use of a dated set of Web accessibility guidelines which have been shown to be flawed will, I believe, be counter-productive. And judging by an article by Julie Howell (formerly of the RNIB and currently Director of Accessibility at Fortune Cookie and chair of the British Standards Institution’s committee on web accessibility) entitled Web Accessibility. Life In the Post-Guideline Age I don’t think I’m alone in my views.

The updated Chapter 2.4 to the Guidelines for UK Government Websites document is now available as a document on Delivering inclusive websites (MS Word format; a PDF version but no HTML and HTML versions are also available) states that:

The Delivering inclusive websites document (issued on 12 June 2008) states that:

1. The minimum level of accessibility for all Government websites is Level Double-A of the W3C guidelines. Any new site approved by the Cabinet Sub-Committee on Public Engagement and the Delivery of Service (DA(PED)) must conform to these guidelines from the point of publication. All new websites must conform to these guidelines from the point of publication.
2. Continuing standalone sites must achieve this level of accessibility by December 2008. Websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names, as set out in Naming and Registering Websites (TG101).

 

3. Websites owned by central government departments must be Double-A conformant by December 2009. This includes websites due to converge on Directgov or BusinessLink, unless convergence is scheduled before this date.

 

That’s right – if Government Web sites don’t achieve WCAG AA compliance by December 2009, their domain name may be withdrawn. That’s bound to enhance the accessibility of the service, isn’t it?

I wondered about the accessibility of the 10 Downing Street Web site. Putting this through a HTML validator I find mutiple validation errors. And as HTML compliance is mandatory (in WCAG 1.0), this means that the Web site fails to pass the Government minimum standards for accessibility. And if this is still the case in December, the No 10 Downing Street Web site will be forced to shut down – with processes for shutting down Government Web sites have already been documented (in MS Word and PDF formats).

Coincidentally (or perhaps not) the accessibility auditing company SiteMorse have just published a Website Survey June 2008 – UK Central Government report. This survey (based on SiteMorse’s automated accessibility checking tool) reports that only 11.3% of the government Web sites surveyed pass the WCAG AA tests which their automated software can detect! A table showing the rankings of Government Web sites for a range of criteria including accessibility is available on the SiteMorse Web site and the Top 11 Web sites, which comply with WCAG AA according to the automated test are shown (there is one other Web site , labelled as ‘London Councils’ which passes the automated accessibility compliance test).

Will we see a drastic pruning of the Central Government Web sites which aren’t included in the table at the start of the 2009? Or will we see vast amounts of tax-payer’s money being spend on ensuring that the Web sites manage to pass the automated tests? Or perhaps we’ll simply see a withdrawal of the services.

What we can’t say is that the Web sites which fail the automated tests are necessarily inaccessible to people with disabilities. And we also can’t say that the Web sites which pass the automated tests are necessarily accessible to people with disabilities. This approach is all about passing artificial benchmarks, not addressing the needs of citizens with disabilities.

An unfortunate aspect of this new policy is that when the JISC TechDis Service together with UKOLN organised the Accessibility Summit II event on A User-Focussed Approach to Web Accessibility we ensured that as well as inviting accessibility researchers and representatives form the disability community (including Kevin Carey founder of HumanITy and Robin Christoperson, head of Accessibility Services, AbilityNet) we also invited a representative form the central Government. The participants at the meeting agreed on the need “to call on the public sector to rethink policy and guidelines on accessibility of the web to people with a disability“. As David Sloan, Research Assistant at the School of Computing at the University of Dundee and co-founder of the summit reported in a article published in the E-Government Bulletin “the meeting unanimously agreed the WCAG were inadequate“.

What is to be done? The cynic, disillusioned by the current Government, might relish the embarrassment Gordon Brown and his Cabinet colleagues may face when the implications of this decision become more widely known. And we can expect opposition Shadow Cabinet Ministers and papers such as the Daily Mail using this as an opportunity to undermine the Government, with initial questions of “Will the minister explain why almost 90% of Government Web sites can’t be accessed by people with disabilities?” to be followed by “Will the minister give the costs of changing Government Web sites to comply with WCAG accessibility standards which are now obsolete?” or “Will the minister explain why the Government has caved in to European demands to implement a set of politically-correct guidelines which researchers have shown to be flawed?”“. And if the Government does carry out its promise to shut down non-compliance Web sites: “Why has the Government shut down its Web sites? This is political correctness gone mad“.

But to take satisfaction in such embarrassment is to miss the point. Implementation of this policy is likely to result in a deterioration of the quality of Government services to all:-)

Can You Be Sued For Not Upgrading Your Browsers?

A blog post on the Justin Thorp’s Oatmeal blog informs me that “all the major browsers are now doing something to support [WAI-ARIA]“. And I quickly find that the Paciello Group confirms IE 8’s support for ARIA: their blog posts describes the Microsoft’s announcement that “Internet Explorer 8 uses ARIA role, state, and property information to communicate with assistive technologies” as “amazing news in terms of WAI ARIA implementation!“.

And, as might be expected, the Firefox browser also supports ARIA (Accessibility Rich Internet Applications) – W3C WAI’s guideline for ensuring that richly interactive Web services which make use of technologies such as JavaScript to enhance their accessibility, usability and functionality can be used by a variety of client devices, including assistive technologies.

The support for ARIA by mainstream browsers is clearly good news and, with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines now available as a Candidate Recommendation, it is now timely for institutions to begin planning how they will respond to these pleasing developments – especially for those in the educational sector who should be in the process of planning upgrades to their technlcal environment and corresponding policies, training, etc. during the summer vacation.

The simple response would be to suggest that institutions should migrate to the latest version of Firefox during the summer vacation (and note that the Firefox 3 Candidate Release was announced a few days ago). However when I suggested last year that Firefox was the researchers’ favourite application both Mark Sammons and Phil Wilson pointed out the difficulties of managing Firefox across the enterprise. And Mark has recently posted that the situation does not appear to have progressed significantly since then – indeed Mark, creator of the Firefox ADM enterprise administration tool in a post on The Firefox Enterprise Issue Hits the Media has argued that “the real problem with Firefox in the enterprise: Mozilla“.

But if Mark is correct and organisations are likely to find it difficult to manage the deployment and maintenance of Firefox across the enterprise at least IE 8 (and, also, I should add, Opera) are available which have support for the ARIA guidelines.

We also know that institutions have regarded support for WAI WCAG guidelines as important with many institutions making policy statements regarding their support for the guidelines. But as WAI have also regarded the WCAG guidelines as just one of a set of guidelines which need to be implemented in order to ensure that resources are widely accessible, surely it is clear that institutions should also be supporting the UAAG guidelines and ensure that the browsers deployed across the organisation support these guidelines. And surely that means upgrading to the latest version of IE, Firefox or, possibly, Opera.

Or to put it another way, if you fail to do this is your institution likely to be in breach of accessibility legislation which requires organisations to take reasonable measures to ensure that people with disabilities aren’t discriminated against unfairly?

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 and 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 accessibility 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 Management 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.