Joe Dolson: Accessible Web Design

This is not a technical article. You will not learn how to code AJAX by reading this; either in an accessible and usable fashion or otherwise. This is a conceptual article. It will run through basic user-interface issues with AJAX (and other rich media). These are the reasons that AJAX functionality can be a problem for users — - if you consider these issues carefully during development, it should greatly enhance the usability of your end product.

The basic limitations encountered with AJAX are threefold:

• Discoverability of Functionality
• Usability of said Function
• Discoverability of Function Feedback

Best practice in any rich media format should always ensure that these three limitations are dealt with for all users.

Read more: Accessibility and Usability issues with AJAX

The “instant viewing” program from Netflix — - streaming video for Netflix subscribers — - is supposed to be available to their entire subscriber network by June of 2007. I tried it out last night. It was awesome.

Netflix doesn’t yet have a particularly extensive collection in their instant viewing treasure trove, but it’s certainly substantial enough to provide items of interest for most audiences, with about 2,000 videos to watch across genres.

I watched a 45 minute television program at full screen on a monitor with 1400 by 900 pixel resolution. During the course of the viewing there were:

• 0 sound glitches
• 0 video glitches

The video quality was very acceptable for a TV sitcom. I’m not sure that I’d find something more exotically special-effects driven to be quite so satisfying, but that’ll have to be another test later! The relatively simple camera work and audio work of “Ballykissangel” were just fine.

The time between hitting “Play” and beginning to watch the video, including the download and install time for the Netflix video player was approximately 2 minutes.

Sweet. Now, if only Netflix.com were an accessible site…

IBM, a company which has long had a strong commitment to accessibility, is in the final stages of developing a new accessible web browsing product with a focus on multimedia.

From “IBM Helps Blind ‘See’ Video, BBC News:

Using the A-Browser, a vision-impaired person can control media content by using predefined shortcut keys, rather than having to look for the control buttons using a mouse.

The browser also allows video to be slowed down, speeded up and can accommodate an additional audio description or narration track that is often included to make films and television programmes more comprehensible to blind people.

The volume controls also allow the user to adjust the sound of various sources independently - for example the main audio track, an audio description track and output from a screen reader.

Obviously, the product isn’t yet unleashed for world-wide testing; but it is available for speculation! I’m not sure exactly how much extra functionality this will add when a user is encountering video without audio description or a narration track, but the simple fact of making existing resources more usable for users with visual impairments is a good start.

In our Web 2.0 times it seems like video sharing has become a social media giant. I can certainly see why - it’s exciting and novel to be able to transmit these magical moving images across time and space! Well, OK…if you put it that way, it’s not all that new. It is, however, spectacularly easy to do today — - and that is a major difference.

What isn’t so easy is to make these videos accessible. Video has a number of glaring accessibility problems. There’s nothing especially complicated about these issues — they should be obvious, after all — but accomplishing them at all seems to be beyond the pale at the moment. It’s not that it’s difficult to make video accessible. It’s not that the software to do it, at least in a limited manner, is expensive or difficult to use. It’s mostly two issues: laziness or ignorance.

What are the basic problems?

• The blind can’t see videos. Audio description of the events is required.
• The deaf can’t hear the audio tracks accompanying video. Text description of the audio content is required.
• Video content may feature flashing images or text: videos exhibiting these behaviors should carry warnings for individuals with epileptic photosensitivity or other related problems. (Not really the main focus of this article; but important to mention.)

I’m sure there are additional, more subtle issues that can be raised, as well, but if these three are dealt with we’ve accomplished the fundamental goals.

Why might people skip video accessibility?

The time involved in preparing transcripts and captioning can be substantial, and that may slow down some potential video creators. That’s laziness. I choose to believe that this is the lesser of the two issues: I’m optimistically hoping that most people who are aware of the accessibility issues and care about it will take the time and effort to make it happen. I think the awareness issue is far greater.

Some people will make the assumption that disabled populations won’t be interested in resources which feature aspects related to that person’s impairment. They are ignorant of what interest impaired populations may have in the aspects of that resource which they can access. A visually impaired person may never see you. Does this mean they won’t want to talk to you? No — just don’t expect pointing to be a useful to them. Pointing is a visual gesture: you need to provide audio description of your own actions in conversation. It’s the same in video. The visual elements may not convey any information to a person with a visual impairment, but appropriate audio description and the audio track may still convey all the information that person needs.

A lack of technological awareness is part of the problem: but I think that the greater issue is a lack of social awareness. Once a video resource creator can understand how important accessibility is, the technological barrier is minor. Information on captioning, audio description and transcribin is readily available.

I think I can understand when a site like YouTube fails to supply all of these accessibility options. The problem with user generated content in video is that the burden of responsibility for these accessibility features falls on the user. The average bedroom webcam self-recorder doesn’t have the knowledge or the capacity to prepare appropriate synchronized captioning or audio description.

But that doesn’t excuse it in other sites providing embedded video.

A few resources on Video Captioning:

• Steve Pugh: Video Accessibility
• University of Wisconsin at Madison: Accessibility Videos — A nice collection of videos on accessibility: transcripts provided and captioning included.
• WebAIM: Adding captioning in Quicktime
• WebAIM: Adding captioning in RealPlayer
• WebAIM: Adding captioning in Windows Media Player
• WebAIM: Video captioning software
• University of Washington: What is audio description?
• Joe Clark on Captioning