The latest in my monthly column on accessibility at Practical eCommerce magazine is now available: Web Accessibility and the Law.
Although I’m not a lawyer, I do pay some attention to the nature of legal issues surrounding web accessibility. They’re murky, but this article attempts to shed some light on how the law covers accessibility issues on the internet.
Hope you’re able to get some value out of the article!
The United Kingdom-based Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) recently produced a nice mini-site entitled “10 Things You Should Know About Web Accessibility.” For the most part, it’s excellent — a friendly voice, a casual approach, elegant presentation, and good information.
It does, however, intimate one of my pet peeves in documents promoting web accessibility:
Hey good lookin’
“But accessibility always compromises the design, doesn’t it?”
Wrong. Your site can still look beautiful.
This doesn’t precisely say that compromise is not required for accessibility; but it’s certainly implied by the language chosen.
To suggest that compromise is not required is simply a mis-representation of the truth about accessible web design: you do have to make compromises. Whether they’re compromises concerning how information is presented, the color contrast between elements, the specific uses of language or technology, you have to make compromises.
The perception seems to be that making compromises for accessibility means that you create an unattractive web site or otherwise decrease the aesthetic value of your web creation. This is not true: but it’s inaccurate to say that you don’t make compromises.
Truth: Effective accessible design has requirements which will require compromise in many areas.
It’s important to educate all participants in a web design project on accessibility before any serious work is done, to help prevent problems. If the designer knows to check contrast levels before proposing a design, they’ll start by creating an aesthetically elegant design with the color palette available. If they aren’t aware of these problems, you’ll end up making compromises on colors — and, without extensive modifications, it is entirely possible that these compromises could have a damaging effect on the aesthetics of the site.
Compromise shouldn’t damage aesthetics or accessibility: but poor planning almost certainly will.
It’s now available: Part 4 of the New Accessibility Guidelines series at Practical eCommerce. Part IV: Robustness.
Wouldn’t have thought I had that much to say on the subject of being robust, but there you have it. Enjoy!
President Barack Obama’s approach to information transparency is admirable. His connection to the public through the major media channels of the digital age: the White House web site, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media methods is impressive. It’s a great way for the public to keep up to date on the activities of their government.
Unfortunately, the accessibility level of these web resources is — all in all — not really up to the levels one would hope for.
Obviously, the government has no control over the accessibility of the external resources they’re using to help promote their agenda and communicate with the public. These social media sharing sites are what they are, and regardless of their independent accessibility levels, I agree with the administrations choice to use them — to connect with their strong user bases — rather than attempt to build an expensive and potentially abandoned project to imitate the functionality.
However, the government does have direct and complete control over their own web presences, and would truly have wished to see a more thorough approach to web accessibility from the extensive network of new information-bearing web sites created by the Obama administration.
Another new article at Practical eCommerce: New Accessibility Guidelines Part III: Understandability.
It’s exactly what it says on the cover: a discussion of the “Understandable” guideline from the four principles laid out in WCAG 2. Enjoy!
The worst thing I can say about John Rhodes is that the writing coming from his usability blog has been alarmingly infrequent in the last couple of years. 13 posts in the last 12 months just doesn’t really cut it!
Thankfully, the reason for his blogging silence is pretty straightforward: he’s been writing a book. Sweet!
The book is entitled “Selling Usability,” which is a bit of a misnomer, since the subject of the book is perhaps more accurately described as “Making Usability Happen, Despite the Regrettable Lack of Understanding on the Part of Your Managers.” To be fair, that would be a pretty unusable title.
It’s clear within the first 20 pages that John and I share a core philosophy concerning the application of usability: as much as you’d like people to buy in to the core ideals of user experience, you need them to buy in to making the change. By hook or by crook, making the change is what needs to happen in the end.
You can only teach those who are willing to learn; but you can guide anybody to the right decision if you use the arguments they understand and care about.
Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics is a guide to convincing decision-makers towards user-experience focused decisions by using business-focused arguments and tactics.
“Selling Usability” is about communicating effectively.
John’s writing is frank and clear. He writes in a casually persuasive voice which quickly drives through the description of a problem into the analysis of why this is a problem — and how you might start to solve it.
This book is not about usability. You’ll learn a lot about understanding and communicating the user experience by reading this book, but it’s not going to teach you how to study user interaction.
Buy it now. You’ll learn more than you think you will, no matter your background.
So, part II of my series on WCAG 2 for Practical eCommerce magazine was published on Tuesday of last week. Obviously, I need to subscribe to the RSS feed for new articles at Practical eCommerce — because I didn’t even know this had been published!
Usually, I spend a day going back and forth with the editor before a new article is published — but I guess that this one just didn’t need that much editing.
At any rate, New Accessibility Guidelines, Part II: Operability, published on March 24th, 2009 at Practical eCommerce.
