Nearly every designer I’ve talked with about accessibility gets this look on their face like they’re waiting in line for the dentist. A little history will show that accessibility advocates have always been working to enable them to do their best, to the benefit of everyone. Here’s a reason to look forward to your next accessibility review.
For as long as it’s been a field, accessibility has been ahead of the technological curve. We owe inventions like optical character recognition and text-to-speech to pioneering accessibility work in the 1970s. More recently, the Find As You Type feature in Mozilla, which I consider to be the greatest addition to the browser in years, was implemented by a Mozilla accessibility engineer. For these reasons, I feel no irony whatsoever in being “the technology guy” at Blue Flavor: accessibility geeks destroy technical boundaries for a living.
In the web era, however, it seems we’ve gotten a bad rap. We were traffic cops, the folks who threw roadblocks in the way of the modern web designer. No, you can’t use Flash, we’d say. The fonts are too small, we’d say. You can’t use your triple-nested layout tables, we’d say. Though we had good reasons for a lot of that, we were often seen as Luddites when it came to the web, always pushing for fewer graphics, bigger text, and testing, testing, testing.
These days, though, there’s good news to report: designers are getting accessibility, and accessibility geeks are getting design. At nearly every level, from operating system to browser to coding to visual design, accessibility advocates, designers and developers are working together to build sites without compromise. Apple’s VoiceOver and GNOME‘s Gnopernicus are screen readers now embedded at no extra cost in Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris 10. IBM and others are pouring money into Mozilla not just to make it work with screen readers, but to let it interface more intelligently with JavaScript, the DOM, and new technologies like XForms. Flash has a built-in accessibility toolkit that is improving. And scripters are hard at work on Unobtrusive JavaScript and Ajax accessibility.
It feels good to be back in front of the technology again. Over the next year, we’ll be seeing a host of new techniques and technologies that will enable designers to create extraordinary experiences for users, regardless of ability or disability.
Now if we can just get all the users of older versions of the big screen readers to upgrade! A lot of the old constraints are still hanging around due to their usage.
Chris
That would be great. Now we all need to advocate for substantial government subsidies around the world (or develop creative solutions using the telecommunications equity funds like they are doing in couple of US states).
No one I know wants to be using an old screen reader with less features and less support for current web technologies. However screen reader technology is expensive and most people with disabilities have low incomes. The reality is that the web is surfed by people using a wide range of technology and we need to be aware of it try to make our work accessible despite this.
This is not a “do not use advanced technology” arguement, but a “be aware of the possible consequences of your decision arguement”
We need to think carefully about whether use of a technology that is not widely supported is the best business decision you can make for yourself or you customers. A lot of advanced technology we see on sites is there for no good business reason. The “because I can and its cool” approach to building sites is all too common. It provides a bad return an investment and creates accessibility problems.
I’m sorry, I still don’t get it.
A partially sighted person can’t sue a magazine because the layout or text is too small. Why should the Internet be any different?
Why don’t we are just do white backgrounds with huge text and then there would be no arguement at all…?
I still make 2 verions of sites, 1 for accessibility - then I can still go to town on my design version!