W3C Finalizes Disability Guidelines

AltImage writes "Bringing a five-year project to a significant milestone, the World Wide Web Consortium finalized guidelines for building browsers and media players that work better for people with disabilities. Read the full story here."

Comments

Re:pfft..

[Hard_Code]

As long as people pay Microsoft for these features Microsoft will give a fuck.

Guidelines will have other uses

[bbonnn]

"One of the things that has been both intriguing and promising from early on is that accessibility solutions didn't just help solve the problems they were created to solve," said Judy Brewer, director of the WAI. "We encourage the use of Web graphics. But someone accessing the Web through a PDA can't see a graphic, table or chart that well. For accessibility, you'd want someone to be able to visually scan it if they could, query it, run through it in a linear mode. Those flexibility user choices are precisely the things that people accessing the Web through alternate devices need as well."

She brings up a very good point. Like the products that were initially developed for space flight but found their way into general consumer use (Velcro, etc.), general web accessibility has a number of other benefits besides making the web accessible to people with disabilities.

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Re:Guidelines will have other uses

[Jon-o]

Very true. Getting more web designers to follow these guidelines is good for EVERYONE, not just those with disabilities. If disabled people are able to view the page the way they *need* to, then everyone else is also able to view it the way they *want* to. The more the web is held up to the ideals of flexibility and customizability the better.

I personally almost always send a note to the owners of web pages that don't follow these guidelines - I don't think it often has much impact, but if more people did it, maybe it would. In any case, people making these bad web pages deserver to be bothered by people complaining about them! Whether it's because you need to be able to access it through a screen-reader, or you can't handle a mouse, or you just hate annoying javascript, guidelines like this can help you set up your browser to display the information and manipulate it in the way you choose, which is a good thing.

Re:Guidelines will have other uses

[ManxStef]

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

By using these characters he encourages you to put yourself in their shoes, and therefore be more considerate.

If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

Cheers,

Re:pfft..

[Fweeky]

Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these standards. If you look at the acknowledgments you'll see Microsoft is actually a member of the working group responsible for these guidelines.

Re:pfft..

[Noodlenose]

Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these standards.

..when has their membership of the W3C ever stopped them to develop their own standards and do what they like?

Re:pfft..

[jilles]

Well it is easy to point the finger at MS when even this open source safe haven called slashdot does not meet any w3c standard. If standards are so important, why can't this site adhere to them?

Re:pfft..

[ManxStef]

Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these standards. If you look at the acknowledgments [w3.org] you'll see Microsoft is actually a member of the working group responsible for these guidelines.

Haahahaa (sorry, I couldn't help myself). This explains why hugely respected accessibility expert Mark Pilgrim slated the MS site redesign in October then (as did Zeldman)? See the news post over at the Web Standards Project (scroll to the bottom of the page).

In summary: Invalid. Inaccessible. Undecipherable in a text-only browser.

Don't get me wrong, Microsoft have some fantastic employees such as Tantek Çelik (who's site kicks major ass BTW) who care passionately about standards, but MS doesn't seem to want to listen most of the time...

Focusing on the wrong thing.

[AltImage]

I strongly believe that the path to better accessability lies in the creation of better screen reader technology. There is absolutely no way that the billions of pages online are going to be retouched to make them accessable. The battle has, to a large degree, already been lost. Don't get me wrong...I'm all in favor of producing compliant pages, but I wonder what percentage of the Internet is compliant today? We're never going to clean up the mess. There are too many mediocre and amateure web developers out there who don't even know what the W3C is. Forget converting the developers and instead focus on efforts to create the uber-screenreader. Something capabale of navigating through the web applications we're using today. I do lots of work for hotels and with their reservation systems in particular. Do you have any idea how hard it is to book a hotel room with a screen reader? or a plane ticket, or anything. It's a joke.

This is the perfect area for open source software. I also think that this would be the perfect place for the goverment to get involved. Not in legislation but in funding. The government seems very interested in passing laws to ensure equal access but isn't it about time they write a check to make equal access on the Internet a reality. One perfect piece of software will solve this entire problem for everybody.

Re:Focusing on the wrong thing.

[JohanV]

Like screen readers are the solution to all problems. How are better screenreaders going to help deaf people? How are screen readers going to help people with a physical dysability that prevents them from using a mouse? How are screen readers going to help those with ADHD? How usefull is a screenreader if the navigation is on the bottom of 200 lines of text?

Accessibility is not about reading webpages aloud to the blind.

Re:pfft..

[Fweeky]

This explains why hugely respected accessibility expert Mark Pilgrim slated the MS site redesign

Yes. Microsoft's web team leaves quite a lot to be desired. But then, so do most other so called "professional" web developers who wouldn't know a standard if it jumped up and down screaming "I'm a standard! I'm a standard!".

Tantek Çelik [tantek.com] (who's site kicks major ass BTW)

Tantek's website is awful. It does at least degrade well when I turn off CSS, but it's not very nice to use. He even has a splash page ffs :)

but MS doesn't seem to want to listen most of the time...

But Tantek is Microsoft. So is Tim Lacy, and Chris Wilson, and Ed Tecot, and Laurie Anna Kaplan, and David Meltzer, and Stephen Waters, and Scott Isaacs, and.. well, you get the point. Microsoft are not a single entity out to be incompetent and ignorant, it's a whole bunch of people, mostly incompetent and ignorant. Just like any other random collection of 50,000 people ;)

UAAG and HTTP_ACCEPT

[AShocka]

Hopefully this initiative will drive the production of better browsers (user agents) and web development that will facilitate services to users.

User agents are improving on the implementation of the HTTP_ACCEPT header for determining MIME types the user agent will accept. This great potential was missed with Netscape Navigator 2 because, in the rush to get it to market, they just defaulted to using *.* (this browser accepts everything), when it didn't. If this was implemented correctly it would allow the developer to deliver media according to the user agents capacity.

Also see User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the UAAG discussion list.

Other Web Accessibility Initiatives

[AShocka]

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG) are in draft form and are trying to improve on WCAG 1.0. If you really what to contribute to them, or can contribute in anyway through writing parsers, etc, go ahead and join the WCAG GL

Also of interest in the same area are;

• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (Wombat)
• Authoring Tool Conformance Evaluations
• Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0

UAAG Compliance and Test Suites

[AShocka]

• Summary implementation report for UAAG 1.0 (this chart shows how the various user agents do or do not comply with the UAAG)
• User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group Test Suites

Re:Velcro

[John Hasler]

Probably because he is confusing it with Teflon, which was developed in the 1940s by the US nuclear weapons program.

Even those products that _were_ developed as part of the space program would have been developed anyway, at an appropriate time. The notion of net benefits to society from government program "spinoff" is nonsense.