Joe Dolson: Accessible Web Design

So, I’ve been hard at work since Saturday getting this site redesigned. It’s not exactly a 100% new look: the fundamental structure is basically the same. Two columns, navigation on the right, etc. No huge changes from that perspective. But I’ve moved the site search to be more prominent (and repaired the search for the main site, which wasn’t really working right, as it turns out…I hadn’t known!)

At any rate, it’s still a work in progress - so I’m happy to hear any comments about anything broken, damaged, inaccessible, etc. I’m not claiming it’s perfect; but I’m hoping it’s better!

I was invited a couple weeks ago to redesign and contribute to Accessibility Blog, Matt Bailey’s blog on accessibility awareness and marketing. Today, I posted a brief article addressing the accessibility of college and university websites.

Read and enjoy!

From 456 Berea Street, Roger Johansson makes note of a EU declaration to "ensure that all public websites are accessible by 2010". This ministerial commitment is in fact quite broad in scope, including commitments to accessibility in the sense of access to an internet connection.

The official press release states:

Many Europeans still get too little benefit from information and communication technologies, and millions are at risk of being left behind. Enabling all Europeans to participate on equal terms in the information society is not only a social necessity – it is a huge economic opportunity for industry.

They also intend to increase the availability of broadband coverage to at least 90% in Europe by 2010. This doesn’t require any change to the current urban infrastructure, but would require the expansion of the rural infrastructure from its current 60% coverage.

This is a powerful commitment, and certainly raises hopes for the future of web accessibility.

After the less-than-positive reaction to the complexity of the WCAG 2.0 working draft released for last call comments on April 27th, the WAI appears to have responded with the release of a quick reference to the success criteria and how to meet them.

One of the main reasons that WCAG 2.0 is so difficult to understand is that it was written with the intention not to require reference to a particular technology. Thus, from a practical standpoint, it is a very difficult document to manage. This quick reference has been written explicitly to provide reference for currently used standard web technologies - CSS, scripting, Multimedia technologies and others. In addition, it allows the ability to disable technology references which have no bearing on your current project - if you aren’t using SMIL, then you can disable this option in the quick reference.

Although the content guidelines themselves still have problems, particularly in reference to cognitive impairments, at least it will now be noticeably easier to make relationships between your practical, day-to-day work with code and the new guidelines for content accessibility.

As an aside, the guidelines for WCAG 2 are in no way binding until WCAG 2 has been moved to full recommendation status. This will likely take quite some time yet - I don’t anticipate that the draft will move to recommendation until at least sometime late in 2007.

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Hello! This is just an announcement that Joe Dolson’s accessible design blog has changed platforms from Blogger to WordPress. All existing links to pages in the blog should continue to work, and I’m hoping to make certain everything is clean and dandy as I move forward. Today, all posts and comments were migrated over - there’s still a fair amount of clean up to be done, but the big steps went OK.

However, I do need to mention the whole blog feed issue - if you’ve been subscribing through Feedburner, you’re fine. Nothing will change, all is wonderful with the world. If you’re subscribed to the direct atom feed at http://www.joedolson.com/atom.xml, that feed is going the way of the dodo. I suggest you switch to the feedburner version for the sake of future consistency at http://feeds.feedburner.com/AccessibleDesign.

 Thanks!

I read an article today by Roger Johansson where he mentioned an interesting situation surrounding the use of high resolution screens. The impact of these newer screens is not something widely considered; but it’s certainly important!

Newer laptop screens are beginning to come available using higher than usual resolution - that is, they have more pixels crammed into a particular area of screen than the normal 72 or 96 DPI. This can have an unfortunate effect for websites, because all of a sudden you’ve got a minuscule interpretation of your elegant page design. Perhaps you can increase the text size, but there’s nothing you can do about the images.

This is not yet a wide-spread issue - but then, accessibility is not about dealing with issues only when they become common. The principle we want to strive for is universal accessibility - and that requires accommodation for high-end products, as well.

Accessibility is very frequently viewed as a means of making something available to those who have disabilities, or for devices with inferior capabilities. But that’s a very inaccurate description - accessibility is about providing equal access to all devices. Practically speaking, however, nobody can actually TEST for all devices. This is why accessibility is so closely tied to web standards.

By adhering to a common set of standards, we can strive to match a template for what will be commonly usable by all user agents. The burden of accessibility is shared between the device designers, user agent creators, and content creators. Only with a commitment to common standards can all information truly be granted equal accessibility.

One chronic problem in writing web development articles is keeping your writing readable. The world of web design, programming, and web accessibility is loaded with industry terminology which are undoubtedly not immediately obvious in meaning to someone who’s just begun researching the subject.

However, neither the option of excluding all industry terminology from an article nor the option of including a definition inline for every term is really palatable for me. With the first option, the article becomes simplified to a point of abstraction, and is less useful for the practically-minded designer trying to get a firmer grasp of the subject. Inline definitions, however, can easily interrupt the flow of the text, rendering the overall readability lower because of the extraneous information.

The fact is, a constant barrage of definitions is not the right choice for every audience; and neither is the assumption of too much or too little knowledge.

What I’ve done to attempt to tackle this sticky problem is begin work on a glossary of web accessibility terminology.
I will gradually be adding contextual links to these terms in articles where I deem it necessary or useful. Those who need the definition can follow the link, those who don’t won’t need to. I’ll also be implementing an alternate look for links to these definitions, to attempt to make it clear that these links are different from the normal, run-of-the-mill outbound links.

Why write my own definitions? So I can have continuous control over the definition of a term, and so I’m not dependent on some other authority site remaining authoritative or, for that matter, failing to include all the terms I may want to refer to.

The glossary has a long way to go - only 26 terms so far, but I’ll keep plugging away as time allows. Feel free to suggest terms I may want to define, as well…