TW Blog :: Archives for July 2003

A Rant On Accessibility

Relates to Web Standards and Accessibility

A bit of blogging lethargy recently, after returning from a week's holiday in rainy old St Ives. Admittedly, work has kept me away from the more pleasurable side of the web through the last few days. Seems to have been lots going on in my time away, but with time currently short and sweet, I will fire off this post in similar vain.

Just really want to have a little rant about where things are (or are not) going in the realm of Accessibility. Just picked up on the formation of the EuroAccessibility Consortium from the (still below par) RNIB Press Centre. So, I though I'd delve a little deeper and had a look at the towers of strength that would be representing Ol Blighty in this very justified initiative.

1. Ability Net
2. Access in Mind
3. RNIB (Royal National institute of the Blind)
4. RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf People)

Well the RNIB rebuild has already been documented extensively, but I decided to have a quick reccie of the other sites, since they must surely represent pillars in the Accessibility community.

Didn't get very far since I got held up on the first page of the Access in Mind website. There are a number of very useful accessibility tools in Opera 7 which I enjoy running over numerous sites I visit around the web.

Test One: Validation

XHTML 1.0 Strict Passed. Great Start.

Test Two: Checkpoint 1.1, Kill Images

Shock, horror! Where did the nav bar go on the left? It appeared there was no alt text for the images. Well delving deeper, the alt text was there (which it surely had to be since the site claims AA Conformance), but the problem was a lack of size defintion for the images. Yet a one-for-all height/width declaration in the base stylesheet would resolve this.

Test Three: Structural Semantics

Test two actually lead me straight to this. The navigation bar is erroneously defined as a table - the 90's all over again!? Yet are we not using XHTML Strict here? In fact, surely for a site exemplifying accessibility, CSS designed text menus would be far more representable of the movement then the choice of false structured images.

At this point, the testing ground to a halt and I fired up my blogger. Ok, it can be argued there is the base menu to cover the failure in Test Two, but once the text is enlarged, this menu is not visible without scrolling, leaving no navigation readily available on screen. This hardly RNIB See it Right certifiable. Another quirk is the one-pixel defined skip navigation container visible in top left of screen. I am guessing this has probably been used to avoid JAWS missing it if declared display:none in the style sheet. But wait a minute….Doesn't CSS define alternative media types??? Surely this container could be hidden on screen media, while made accessible on a separate aural stylesheet. Alas, the AiM CSS file doesn't do it many more favours, with a lot of repetitious and redundant declarations. Again, maybe an accessibility guru would turn around and say these rules and this layout is necessary to support Screen Readers or Braille browsers, as has occurred in the RNIB debate over recent months. But it is this very thought that stirred a rant in me.

I feel this approach to accessibility is not resolving the issue, but simply turning it on it's head. Building websites for less-abled users at the expense of all other users. This is certainly not what the WAI and Web Standards is all about. The tools are readily available now to make a site that is accessible to all, offering the benefits to each user based on the agent they have chosen to use, or the abilities they have. Sometimes workarounds are required for more complex design issues, but this doesn't mean the basics should be ignored. While clearly important, blind, deaf and visually impaired users are not the only demographic that accessibility addresses. What about portables, low bandwidth users, text users, legacy users etc etc….?

Phew, I have had my say….

Posted on Thursday, Jul 31, 2003 at 18:46:14.