Where has accessibility gone?
Comments on WCAG2.0 need to submitted by 1 February 2008, which is a good thing as I was beginning to wonder where accessibility had gone.
The uptake of accessibility with regard to web sites has in general been very slow, it being estimated that around 95% of all web sites are inaccessible, including big names such as Facebook and MySpace. This is a real shame as benefits of an accessible site go beyond making it available to those who have visual or hearing impairment, motor deficiency or cognitive deficiency.
This isn't the place to go into how web2.0, Flash or AJAX may have killed off accessibility, as they haven't. There's no reason why an AJAX-driven site cannot be accessible to priority 3, it just seems that it isn't interesting enough to program such things when there's fading in and out to be done, and making text appear as if by magic! The reason accessibility isn't more of a consideration is that it is customer-driven, be it a company requesting it from a design studio, or a social-network user requesting it from a social-network. If customers never demand accessibility to be taken into consideration then it never will be.
And, when you don't ask for accessibility you miss out on so much. With regard to your web public, you may be alienating a large number of potential customers:
- 200,000+ registered blind people may be excluded
- 8-12% of people may be excluded due to colour-blindness
- 50,000+ may not hear your great online presentation
- People who can't use a mouse may not be able to navigate your site
- People with cognitive disorders or dyslexia may not be able to understand your site
Alongside potential customers, your site is also going to suffer from:
- Search engines unable to crawl your navigation system
- Search engines unable to index your pages
If search engines can't index your site properly then you're making it almost impossible for your potential customers to find out that it exists. Never mind the inability to use it when they do eventually find it.
So, what can be done?
If you're having a site built for you, insist it meets web standards. If you want the best of the current best, then you need to accept no less than valid 'XHTML strict' and 'CSS'. This needs to be backed up by WCAG priority 2 at the very least.
You should make sure to install Firefox along with the Web developer extension. This enables you to easily switch off JavaScript, CSS and images so that you can see how your site will look without them. If your site works and makes sense with these switched off then that's much of the battle won.
To finish this short piece on accessibility, here's a quick list of things you shouldn't have on your site:
- Key actions that require JavaScript (ie submit buttons or navigation)
- Important items denoted simply by colour, images or by using Flash
- Text that blends into the background colour
- Links so densely packed together they need mouse-precision to click them
- Lots of hyperlinks that are all labelled with the same text
- Links that are labelled 'click here'
- Custom items (such as select boxes) that have no accessible alternative
- An 'accessible' version unless you really have to. There's no need to make people feel they're a different breed
- A 'who cares?' attitude
Well, that's the first article on the new site. I hope it's been of interest.
