Oh, I forgot to state what the "Kynn Challenge" is.
I've stated this elsewhere and nobody wants to take me up on it. I have proposed that any site you give me, I could make it accessible with a small amount of work, and without destroying the cool features and general look and feel of the site.
LONGDESC really should only be used in cases where there is more info in the picture than just what's in the ALT text. In most cases, this means you don't need to use LONGDESC, and ALT will suffice just fine. Very few sites have images that require LONGDESC; Bobby may be a bit confusing when it suggests otherwise.
Priority 1, 2, and 3 conform to "MUST", "SHOULD", and "MAY." In other words, for minimal accessibility, you "have to" do the priority one requirements. The rest can be considered recommendations of varying import, and it's really up to you to make your choice on what's most important to you to do, based on your time and ability to do them.
Bobby presents several "manual check" options that you quoted above. In my opinion, you have passed all the manual checks for priority one. This means your page can be considered "accessible." You are able to answer all the questions with an "affirmative" answer, and therefore you pass. (Well, I'm assuming that you'll add ALT text to your AREA hotspots, etc.)
(By the way, using tables for layout is okay -- and since you're not using them for tabular data, you don't have to worry about that particular Bobby question.)
I hope this helps you understand what Bobby can do for you -- it's identified where you need to add essentials, and it gave you a set of questions to consider.
--Kynn
PS: One confusing thing about web accessibility is that it's not an on-off switch. You can't say easily, "this is not accessible, now it is." Rather, you can talk about the continuum, and about striving to make the site as accessible as you can. If you can't make it any more accessible than you have -- and "can't" may include "not enough time" or "not enough funding" -- but you've given it the old college try, then you've done your best and that's all that can be asked of you.
Accessibility definitions can be found at the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative. Unlike some of the other W3C activities, the WAI is pretty much open, so if you want to get involved in the process of increasing accessibility for everyone (including users with disabilities), you might want to get involved, by at least joining the W3C-WAI-IG (interest group) list.
Apart from anti-Nielsen rants -- do you know what sort of "baggage" you're talking about for accessible sites?
As a way of bringing yourself up to speed on this topic -- since it seems that apart from disliking Jakob, you don't seem to know a whole lot about the subject -- you may want to read up on the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are certainly the web industry standard (de facto or otherwise) for accessibility.
Reading those over would help you know a little what you're ranting against. You can find the WCAG linked from the Web Accessibility Initiative homepage.
ajs, this sounds like an excellent dream to pursue. These days I've been involved with the development of CC/PP -- Composite Capabilities/Preferences Profiles -- which will make it possible for future web servers to spit out markup customized for the end user's browser and preferences from content stored in an XML-based information storage system.
This allows for a lot of flexibility and optimization to meet everyone's needs, including users with disabilities, plus PDAs, phones, and more. Neat stuff!
You're simply wrong when you say that making a site accessible means "no FONT tags, limited use of tables, no frames, limited use of CSS, limited use of images..."
Accessibility is about inclusion not limitations. As such, you can use anything you like as long as you do it correctly and provide accessible alternatives.
If anyone ever tells you that to make a site accessible, you have to remove something -- send 'em to me! I will set them straight. They're simply wrong.
There's nothing special that needs to be done to accomodate blind people on web sites so they can use the site, if you're a decent web designer and understand the principles of interoperability and platform-independence that are the cornerstone of the World Wide Web and the HTML specifications.
In other words, if you're an incompetent web designer, yeah, it might be hard for you to make a good web page. By definition, an inaccessible page is a broken web page.
I agree 100%, schon. The HTML Writers Guild established the AWARE Center to fight this kind of ignorance. It's a hard fight, though, and we could use the help of slashdotters to spread the word.
Hi, E-Rock, you're the kind of person who I consider my target audience at the HTML Writers Guild's Accessible Web Authoring and Resources (AWARE) Center.
You're obviously intelligent and articulate, but through no fault of your own, you're ignorant about the existence of blind web users, and you don't have any concept of how to create web sites that can be used by them.
You say that you wish there were a way they could use the web -- and it turns out that way exists. The specifications that make the web work are actually a form of enabling technology, that make the content available to everyone if used properly.
E-Rock, could you (or anyone else who feels as you do) do me a favor and investigate the Guild's AWARE Center website? I'd like your opinion on the content and how it's presented; I have had little feedback from someone in your situation, and would therefore like to know what you think about the issues raised and the way the techniques for accessible web page creation are presented.
Actually, I question your statement, reflector. In this case, by deliberately (one can only assume) using broken HTML on their web site, they are not following the industry specifications, apparently just to exclude a certain set of people (disabled folks) who are a protected minority under US civil rights laws.
Is it good for prices to go up because of the cost of web accessibility? No, I don't think so.
But in this case, following the standards (HTML 4.0, etc) of the industry leads to accessible pages. Not following them leads to lawsuits.
It seems to me that the actual cause of the cost is broken, faulty, non-standard code! Making the site accessible in the first place has no cost. It doesn't cost any more to put ALT text on an image (or most other accessibility considerations that are part of the HTML spec), and if you find someone who says otherwise, please send me their client list, I'm always looking for more work.
Well, you may think that ALT text is "as accessible as it's going to get", but do you know that most of the sites out there DON'T have proper ALT text?
An exercise I teach in my online course on web accessibility asks the students to turn off their images and surf around the web a bit. Nearly every site they visit is barred to them, even some sites by disability organizations!
You may want to try a similar exercise yourself. I sense from your posts that you don't know much about this issue, and this would be a good way to increase your knowledge base. You could also visit the AWARE Center site.
Hi, AC, you might want to try one of the browsers I just recommended, somewhere up this thread. In most cases, there are trial versions available that visual users can try out.
As for the black and white prints, the pictures themselves are obviously not going to be accessible to someone who can't see them. But you can make your site accessible in case someone with visual disabilities may have a reason to locate you. (For example, they may want to find a print about a specific subject -- say, Half Dome in Yosemite -- that their cousin, a rock climber, would like.)
Here's some links to web browsers that you (and other slashdotters) can install to "see" what the web sounds like. It's an "eye opening" experience, no pun intended.
I think it's odd that your blind relatives are not using the computer. You might want to introduce them to the net -- the web itself is an amazing enabling technology that can open up so many doors to them that they would have thought were permanently closed!
It's an amazing age we live in. A blind man, with no help from anyone else, can go shopping in a bookstore and find a birthday gift for his sighted niece. Before the Internet, that had never been possible for any blind man in the history of the world.
As much as the Internet improves your life or mine, it has at least that potential to reshape the world of your visually impaired relatives. You may want to see about getting 'em hooked up for the web!
Hi, BadERA, you have a wrong idea about how accessibility legislation is set up. The guiding principle for "how much is required" is "reasonable accommodation" and that ends when a large burden is encountered.
As we move into the future, though, all documents are now originally available as electronic formats, and will continue to be so. This means that the amount of work necessary to make that book or newspaper into an accessible format -- as well-formed markup that can be interpreted by a speech synthesizer or printed on a braille printer -- will be trivial.
C'mon, we're all slashdotters here, looking forward to the future -- this is part of it. Electronic delivery of content is something we should all support!
A text-only version of a site is actually not the best way to promote accessibility for blind users (and other users with disabilities).
The three biggest problems with text-only sites are:
They get out of date easily. It's been shown from experience that the fancy graphics version of a site gets more attention than the text version, and often the text version, once made, is very poorly maintained.
They're unnecessary. HTML is designed from the start to be accessible while still supporting high tech graphics, multimedia, and anything else you might like. So a separate version of the site shouldn't be needed in nearly all cases -- your graphical page should degrade nicely. That's the interoperability principle at work.
Text pages are not inherently more accessible than properly marked up pages. Images and javascript, when done properly, can enhance the accessibility of a site, and cutting them out can be a bad idea! Likewise, the specific accessibility features built into HTML 4.0 let you mark up a page with a lot more sophistication than mere text, and these enhancements for accessibility can contribute a lot to making a site universally accessible.
So, please, don't assume that an accessible site has to be a non-graphical one!
Actually, the Web is not a graphic oriented medium. I mean, heck, any good slashdotter should know that command lines have been with us for years.
Anyway, braille terminals do exist. Unfortunately, they tend to be prohibitively expensive these days -- around $5000 for a decent 40 or 80 character model, or so I've been told. Wed that with the 80%-90% unemployment rate among people with disabilities, and it turns out that for many blind people, braille terminals are something they experience on movies, just like the rest of us.
Assistive technology is not cheap for the end user. (On the other hand, making computer programs or web sites work with assistive technology is a mere fraction of the overall development effort's cost in resources, time, and money.)
Yes, I agree, that the legal system in the US is out of control. That would seem to be a separate issue, though, of whether or not this is something that should be done. I actually am not convinced that the lawyers in this case are planning to get rich. It's not the kind of law you go into if you want to make that much money, in my experience.
Abuse of the ADA sucks. All disability rights advocates will agree with you on this -- the misuse of these tools by selfish people weakens the public opinion of the good these laws do.
Suffice to say, your company's example is not typical, and disabled people are not somehow living high on the hog compared to the rest of us. In fact, unemployment and thus poverty is the rule of thumb among the disabled, and I think even staunch enemies of the Democratic party (how did they get involved anyway?) agree that the presence of a disability should, all things considered, not disqualify someone from educational or employment opportunities.
And that, in a nutshell, is what the ADA is all about. It's not a perfect law -- as you have noted from the abuses -- but when applied correctly it actually works quite well.
Kirk mentioned that he hopefully will never have to personally deal with disabilities.
I should point out that it's very very likely that all of us who are on slashdot now will at some time have some disability -- and if things continue as they have been going so far, that disability will likely make us unable to use the web in the future.
For starters, the web will be around when we're old and gray, in some form or another. You and I will be old veterans with 50 or 60 years of net experience under our belts when we are of retirement age. When we're 70 or 80 or 90 or older, the web (or its successor) will be vitally important to us, be it for delivery of our groceries, talking to our great grandkids, or managing our stock portfolios that date back to the wild dot-com IPO days of the previous millennium.
Or we could end up disabled before that. God knows we're all doing terrible things to our bodies now, by bombarding our eyes with radiation from monitors and cell phones, not to mention the terrible toll on our motor functions from days of nonstop typing and mouse use.
So, sometime in the future, you and I will certainly need "assistive technology" to use this here world wide web thing.
Wouldn't it be a shame if we couldn't do it? If we pioneers of the future found that we've created a utopia we'd soon find ourselves cut out from?
For that reason alone, it's important that we remember that it's just a quirk of fate that we're not disabled yet. (Remember that nobody planned on being disabled, and god forbid, you or I could get hit by a truck tomorrow and end up with motor disabilities. Would you be able to make a living if you couldn't move your hands?)
I don't mean to pick on you, Kirk, I just want to point out that it could very easily be you or I who are disabled. There for the grace of god...
The W3C's Web Accessibility Consortium creates technical specifications that are guidelines for web page authors, browser programmers, and authoring tool creators. (Warning: Dry and technical in that charming W3C manner.)
Actually, I disagree with the idea that text-only versions of sites should be provided. The HTML specification provides for adding new technologies without leaving people behind; as such, proper use of text equivalents (such as ALT) means that you can have as graphical and advanced of a web site as you want, including animation and java and shockwave and all that stuff, without necessarily excluding the disabled if you do it correctly.
In other words, text-only sites as an accommodation for the blind are almost always unnecessary; you can create one site that degrades gracefully and be used by everyone.
TheTomcat wrote that you don't see deaf people complaining about access to CD music. This is correct.
However, the medium of the web was designed so that when done properly, it can be accessible to everyone. Technologies that make it easy for the blind to use a computer are not hard. They're easy.
As such, not doing them pretty much amounts to a deliberate attempt to exclude these people.
It's not easy to make a CD that can be used by someone who can't hear. In fact, it's probably impossible. The accessibility of computing is far from impossible, though!
The visual medium that you see isn't part of the web, then, either. It's just one representation, lights turning off and on your screen.
The true representation of information on the web are electrical states that stand for 0s and 1s in succession. Your visual display is no more "the web" than a braille display.
Or do you think that 0s and 1s are visual information? You must have amazingly good vision to be able to peer into the depths of your motherboard and see 'em!
Slashdot Mirror
I've stated this elsewhere and nobody wants to take me up on it. I have proposed that any site you give me, I could make it accessible with a small amount of work, and without destroying the cool features and general look and feel of the site.
That's the Kynn Challenge.
--Kynn
LONGDESC really should only be used in cases where there is more info in the picture than just what's in the ALT text. In most cases, this means you don't need to use LONGDESC, and ALT will suffice just fine. Very few sites have images that require LONGDESC; Bobby may be a bit confusing when it suggests otherwise.
Priority 1, 2, and 3 conform to "MUST", "SHOULD", and "MAY." In other words, for minimal accessibility, you "have to" do the priority one requirements. The rest can be considered recommendations of varying import, and it's really up to you to make your choice on what's most important to you to do, based on your time and ability to do them.
Bobby presents several "manual check" options that you quoted above. In my opinion, you have passed all the manual checks for priority one. This means your page can be considered "accessible." You are able to answer all the questions with an "affirmative" answer, and therefore you pass. (Well, I'm assuming that you'll add ALT text to your AREA hotspots, etc.)
(By the way, using tables for layout is okay -- and since you're not using them for tabular data, you don't have to worry about that particular Bobby question.)
I hope this helps you understand what Bobby can do for you -- it's identified where you need to add essentials, and it gave you a set of questions to consider.
--Kynn
PS: One confusing thing about web accessibility is that it's not an on-off switch. You can't say easily, "this is not accessible, now it is." Rather, you can talk about the continuum, and about striving to make the site as accessible as you can. If you can't make it any more accessible than you have -- and "can't" may include "not enough time" or "not enough funding" -- but you've given it the old college try, then you've done your best and that's all that can be asked of you.
--Kynn
As a way of bringing yourself up to speed on this topic -- since it seems that apart from disliking Jakob, you don't seem to know a whole lot about the subject -- you may want to read up on the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are certainly the web industry standard (de facto or otherwise) for accessibility.
Reading those over would help you know a little what you're ranting against. You can find the WCAG linked from the Web Accessibility Initiative homepage.
--Kynn
This allows for a lot of flexibility and optimization to meet everyone's needs, including users with disabilities, plus PDAs, phones, and more. Neat stuff!
--Kynn
Accessibility is about inclusion not limitations. As such, you can use anything you like as long as you do it correctly and provide accessible alternatives.
If anyone ever tells you that to make a site accessible, you have to remove something -- send 'em to me! I will set them straight. They're simply wrong.
--Kynn
In other words, if you're an incompetent web designer, yeah, it might be hard for you to make a good web page. By definition, an inaccessible page is a broken web page.
--Kynn
--Kynn
You're obviously intelligent and articulate, but through no fault of your own, you're ignorant about the existence of blind web users, and you don't have any concept of how to create web sites that can be used by them.
You say that you wish there were a way they could use the web -- and it turns out that way exists. The specifications that make the web work are actually a form of enabling technology, that make the content available to everyone if used properly.
E-Rock, could you (or anyone else who feels as you do) do me a favor and investigate the Guild's AWARE Center website? I'd like your opinion on the content and how it's presented; I have had little feedback from someone in your situation, and would therefore like to know what you think about the issues raised and the way the techniques for accessible web page creation are presented.
--Kynn
With every well-thought out technology, there's a way to account for those who can't use it.
Do you know how to do it for Shockwave? If not, please don't assume that your ignorance will result in vast restrictions on private businesses!
--Kynn
Is it good for prices to go up because of the cost of web accessibility? No, I don't think so.
But in this case, following the standards (HTML 4.0, etc) of the industry leads to accessible pages. Not following them leads to lawsuits.
It seems to me that the actual cause of the cost is broken, faulty, non-standard code! Making the site accessible in the first place has no cost. It doesn't cost any more to put ALT text on an image (or most other accessibility considerations that are part of the HTML spec), and if you find someone who says otherwise, please send me their client list, I'm always looking for more work.
--Kynn
An exercise I teach in my online course on web accessibility asks the students to turn off their images and surf around the web a bit. Nearly every site they visit is barred to them, even some sites by disability organizations!
You may want to try a similar exercise yourself. I sense from your posts that you don't know much about this issue, and this would be a good way to increase your knowledge base. You could also visit the AWARE Center site.
--Kynn
As for the black and white prints, the pictures themselves are obviously not going to be accessible to someone who can't see them. But you can make your site accessible in case someone with visual disabilities may have a reason to locate you. (For example, they may want to find a print about a specific subject -- say, Half Dome in Yosemite -- that their cousin, a rock climber, would like.)
--Kynn
Hope this helps!
--Kynn
It's an amazing age we live in. A blind man, with no help from anyone else, can go shopping in a bookstore and find a birthday gift for his sighted niece. Before the Internet, that had never been possible for any blind man in the history of the world.
As much as the Internet improves your life or mine, it has at least that potential to reshape the world of your visually impaired relatives. You may want to see about getting 'em hooked up for the web!
--Kynn
As we move into the future, though, all documents are now originally available as electronic formats, and will continue to be so. This means that the amount of work necessary to make that book or newspaper into an accessible format -- as well-formed markup that can be interpreted by a speech synthesizer or printed on a braille printer -- will be trivial.
C'mon, we're all slashdotters here, looking forward to the future -- this is part of it. Electronic delivery of content is something we should all support!
--Kynn
The three biggest problems with text-only sites are:
So, please, don't assume that an accessible site has to be a non-graphical one!
--Kynn
Anyway, braille terminals do exist. Unfortunately, they tend to be prohibitively expensive these days -- around $5000 for a decent 40 or 80 character model, or so I've been told. Wed that with the 80%-90% unemployment rate among people with disabilities, and it turns out that for many blind people, braille terminals are something they experience on movies, just like the rest of us.
Assistive technology is not cheap for the end user. (On the other hand, making computer programs or web sites work with assistive technology is a mere fraction of the overall development effort's cost in resources, time, and money.)
--Kynn
--Kynn
Suffice to say, your company's example is not typical, and disabled people are not somehow living high on the hog compared to the rest of us. In fact, unemployment and thus poverty is the rule of thumb among the disabled, and I think even staunch enemies of the Democratic party (how did they get involved anyway?) agree that the presence of a disability should, all things considered, not disqualify someone from educational or employment opportunities.
And that, in a nutshell, is what the ADA is all about. It's not a perfect law -- as you have noted from the abuses -- but when applied correctly it actually works quite well.
--Kynn
I should point out that it's very very likely that all of us who are on slashdot now will at some time have some disability -- and if things continue as they have been going so far, that disability will likely make us unable to use the web in the future.
For starters, the web will be around when we're old and gray, in some form or another. You and I will be old veterans with 50 or 60 years of net experience under our belts when we are of retirement age. When we're 70 or 80 or 90 or older, the web (or its successor) will be vitally important to us, be it for delivery of our groceries, talking to our great grandkids, or managing our stock portfolios that date back to the wild dot-com IPO days of the previous millennium.
Or we could end up disabled before that. God knows we're all doing terrible things to our bodies now, by bombarding our eyes with radiation from monitors and cell phones, not to mention the terrible toll on our motor functions from days of nonstop typing and mouse use.
So, sometime in the future, you and I will certainly need "assistive technology" to use this here world wide web thing.
Wouldn't it be a shame if we couldn't do it? If we pioneers of the future found that we've created a utopia we'd soon find ourselves cut out from?
For that reason alone, it's important that we remember that it's just a quirk of fate that we're not disabled yet. (Remember that nobody planned on being disabled, and god forbid, you or I could get hit by a truck tomorrow and end up with motor disabilities. Would you be able to make a living if you couldn't move your hands?)
I don't mean to pick on you, Kirk, I just want to point out that it could very easily be you or I who are disabled. There for the grace of god...
--Kynn
The W3C's Web Accessibility Consortium creates technical specifications that are guidelines for web page authors, browser programmers, and authoring tool creators. (Warning: Dry and technical in that charming W3C manner.)
The HTML Writers Guild's AWARE Center is all about educating web designers on creating accessible pages. You may want to read the Common Myths about Web Accessibility article or the Selfish Reasons for Accessible Web Design. (Full disclosure: I maintain the AWARE center site and wrote both of the articles cited above.)
--Kynn
In other words, text-only sites as an accommodation for the blind are almost always unnecessary; you can create one site that degrades gracefully and be used by everyone.
--Kynn
However, the medium of the web was designed so that when done properly, it can be accessible to everyone. Technologies that make it easy for the blind to use a computer are not hard. They're easy.
As such, not doing them pretty much amounts to a deliberate attempt to exclude these people.
It's not easy to make a CD that can be used by someone who can't hear. In fact, it's probably impossible. The accessibility of computing is far from impossible, though!
--Kynn
The true representation of information on the web are electrical states that stand for 0s and 1s in succession. Your visual display is no more "the web" than a braille display.
Or do you think that 0s and 1s are visual information? You must have amazingly good vision to be able to peer into the depths of your motherboard and see 'em!
--Kynn