Web accessibility myths 2011 – a call for accessibility advocates to be more business-minded

Wonderful to see the topics of so many conversations presented so clearly. Feels like a stepping stone to the next generation of thinking around inclusive design. Bravo!

One reason for the alleged myth that accessibility is about blind people is that the web is a visual medium and becoming more visual every day. There is assistive technology for blind people but it consistently lags behind web advances. While I agree that accessibility us not only about blind people, way more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which making things more accessible for some excludes others.

Great blog Jonathan. All points rang true with me and I found myself nodding in agreement infront of my laptop.

Myth 2 is something I am an advocate for. Audits are great to help developers, providing solutions for code. However, there needs to be a wider reaching way to get the point across to other job roles. In my experience, task based user testing does this. I think that whatever website you are doing user testing with, make sure the client gets sight of the sessions. Often the client might be time starved, so creating a collection of video clips is a solution to bring the results to a wider audience. This also really helps with getting buy-in from senior levels.

Jonathan – good post. I agree with many of the points you make.
 
In particular, even though I’m a lawyer, I agree that legal compliance is a lower priority driver – as we’ve discussed, adverse media coverage arising out of an alleged discrimination claim is the bigger driver for many organisations.

I read the post and found myself thinking that I would have written something very similar, given the same title 🙂

It’s nice to see Matt May’s advice on “myths about myths” being heeded, and seeing some new myths being presented for accessibility advocates to reflect on. I especially like #6 – questioning the assumption that disabled people will flock to a site just because of the presence of (say) a WCAG-AAA icon. Though, addressing the myth of “the disabled and elderly communities” might be #7?

In answer to the ROI case, there is the Microsoft and Forrester research from a few years back that at least gave us a number for people who benefited from accessibility features. I can’t imagine that number will have decreased since 2004; but it still doesn’t quantify the return resulting from implementing accessibility on a particular site. There’s the Exclusion Calculator from Cambridge – but this a tool to tell you how many people you are potentially excluding (and possibly decide to justify excluding), rather than understanding who has definitely benefited from your efforts:
http://www.inclusivedesigntoolkit.com/betterdesign2/exclusioncalc/exclusioncalc.html

Thanks for writing – and sharing – this, Jonathan.

Hi. Good challenging stuff.

But one fundamental question (to which I don’t have answers but for me focusses the discussion on a crunch issue): if it is true that return on investment and rankings are the things that make website owners wnat to deliver better sites, and if it is true that by providing appropriate stats around likely take up by “the disability community” is a winning argument, but if it is also true that there is no “community”, and true that in order to deliver the kind of marketing data envisaged we need users to self-identify or in some way be identifiable as having specific requirements, and yet we know that most disabled people resist wanting to identify themselves as being “disabled” as a primary identifier, that raises a bit of a conundrum?

In my experience in this and related areas, users want to use sites, or anything else, like every-one else; they know they don’t want barriers to access the things they are interested in doing. Additionally people with disabilities have an amazing ability as a rule to find ways of getting where they need to get to; it’s only when people can’t seem to find alternative options to what they want to do that “accessibility” comes up. And of course, not being a community and uniform means that “accessibility for disabled people” is almost meaningless.

Stuff that we might hold up as real step changes in accessibility (for example Apple’s integration of screenreading technology) is difficult to assess in terms of roi – the Apple approach is a truely integrative one and so understanding specifically who bought Ipads for what reason is virtually impossible to establish currently; it may be possible that Apple knows through usage style data but …

And finally, on the legal argument – my view is that it’s too difficult to use any one catch-all blanket statement to capture this issue (and particularly around the power of the law). For example, if inaccessibility affected your right as a citizen to vote, i would argue there is a clear role for legislation. Or if you cannot engage with Government or authority provided services, for me there is legislation.

So, ultimately, my view is that there is complexity – and to deal with complexity requires a set of tools in an armoury of options; that we need to rethink some of those and that these challenges are ones that need addressing; and that in the final analysis I guess I tend to think in terms of cultural change. We need to bring about changes in the expectations of people with disabilities, we need simultaneously to bring about changes in supplier and provider thinking, to remind ourselves of what a Customer really means, and to provide game-changers that reveal new ways of dealing. Our role as advocates in my view translate as change agents who cause change by bringing about new experiences with new business cases and importantly show people how real delivery can be brought about in new ways.

… all good stuff.

So some points that come up in your answer:

Apple doesn’t do anything for non-blind people? I think it is very hard to talk about accessibility per se because inevitably the danger is that you get in to endless examples and actually begin watering down arguments. But Apple provide connectivity for specialist devices, and they provide a platform that deals with two key sensory inputs – hearing and sight – and it is the sensory stuff they can do something about given the look and feel of the product. Additionally though they allow plug-ins of all types for alternative input or output systems.

On public service issue: of course by definition people don’t tend to hang around local government sites in preference to doing virtually anything else – but the point is not around length of time or enjoyment; the example was around voting, or benefits claims, or bin collection, or pavement/lamp post repair; these are things that as citizens people with disabilities should expect unquestioned access to; and the point was really around multi-level approaches. The legal argument can be extremely powerful where there is complete intransigence and/or where there are rights/dignity/fair treatment/discrimination issues: banking and access, employment, access to education, are some examples. To some degree there is a relationship between purpose (of attempted access) and the product. In addition there are things we would consider to be Universal Services – telephony is an obvious one – or where a customer is getting a service with little or no relation to that which every-one else gets (even though they are paying for that service). My key issue is that of various tools for the job of bringing about better access, and that I think if nothing else, legal approaches can bring about change as a result of reputational risk. I’m advocating horses for courses – with an eye on a mix of longer term debate and cultural change, as well as on wins today.

On the issue of building sites and people with disabilities coming to them, and that element of the discussion, I guess my first challenge back is: how do you know they don’t come given the previous discussion? And secondly, I would argue entirely the opposite. Forget numbers for a moment, and forget proof: here are some thoughts… We know that access makes an enormous difference. For years, Microsoft has made “a difference” in people’s ability to hold down a job or be educated in delivering what it has around the Windows platform and working with third parties. I bet (again no proof), that amazon shares a similar level of popularity in the disability community compared to non-disabled users (because it can be accessed) – and similarly for other accessible popular sites. Equally, you will have seen traffic on lists around some of the sites that are popular but not accessible, or, a better example, a case study on an apple platform app that has been re-written because of the hostile reception to inaccessibility.

Thanks, Jonathan — excellent article, and we can never get too much attention to the non-technological factors that most often determine the success or failure of accessibility work.

Two points on using the law as a motivator. First, the major positive effect of legal action (at least here in the US) is to raise the issue’s overall priority status. The risk of getting sued or losing a sale becomes visible. Organizational sociologists say that large organizations are motivated to reduce their uncertainty — they spend a lot of time and money scanning their environment for anything that jeopardizes their freedom of action, then they spend more on reducing that threat. To the extent that we accessibility advocates can make our issue fit that frame, the law is our ally.

Second, the overall legal trend is a powerful argument that is too often omitted from our narrative. Organizational leaders often encounter accessibility as a single fire they must put out in order to return to their ‘real work’. We should be showing them the historical record — ever-advancing requirements and expectations — so that they realize they are in the accessibility business from now on. This will let them address it strategically, with planning foremost. That’s where we want them to be, where the law fades as a sole motivator.

Many good points that I agree to – however I have recently been thinking if addressing accessibility at all is the right approach. It should not be necessary to do that, accessibility is not one aspect of a web-design, or one aspect of an ICT system. Accessibility should be embedded everywhere. Accessibility is something that should not be addressed as one specific topic, implementing accessibility affects the whole infrastructure stack, accessibility should be a part of all elements of the application infrastructure, from the database design to the API’s to the servlets to the front end to the interaction to the experience.
I would argue that the reason we have these “accessibility myths” is that we regard accessibility as one specific aspect of our applications – and it should not be!
E.g. if we have a database driven image repository and we need to provide alternative descriptions of an image, the database of the images also need to store the alternative text, and the long-description of the image, to provide the long-description we need a service that provides this information as an URL. If we have a multilingual web-site, we need to provide an alternative and long-description of the image in all the languages of the web-site. To meet accessibility requirements we need to understand the implications of this throughout the application, we need to know how this is embedded in all aspects of our application.
However the problem is that addressing blind users, and If you ask any web-developer or any web-manager how many blind people they know, or how many blind people they have seen the last few days – the usual answer is nil… And that does not make a good business case. We need to address a bigger audience, and then make sure that it also fits the blind.

Usually when we address accessibility we address the needs of groups or we address needs by disability; this is a bad idea, the way forward is personalization.
To treat people equally, we need to realize that people are different, and therefore to treat them equally we need to treat them differently.

Jonathan,

These are all great and necessary topics to get the accessibility community discussing in today’s multi-media multi-platform multi-everything world. As professionals we should be well prepared to explain the reasoning and benefit behind accessibility and all be on the same page. I’ve run into situations where there has been a disconnect, partly due to the uncertainty of proper accessibility implementation in today’s technology.

One quick comment on “5. We won’t get enough Return on Investment”. I agree this is a crucial point/myth. However, I don’t think the following answer is so simple or appropriate depending on the circumstance.

“What would work is the answer to this question: how many disabled people are using the websites you’ve provided accessibility help for?”

What interests me concerning ROI and accessibility is how accessibility will improve and contribute to the overall user experience in today’s ever changing and improving technology market. With so much competition, being different and appealing to users now and into the future is now necessary to compete as a technology provider. How do we ensure we are different and appealing? That’s right, proper user experience. The little user experience benefits can make all the difference and the industry has finally started to come to terms with the necessity to include user experience into the picture. What we have not done is to ensure accessibility is an important and necessary part of that UX picture. For example, ensuring when labels are touched on IOS touch devices, their corresponding inputs are focused, is not just about helping those with disabilities, but helping those without.

Accessibility… trust us, your USERS will love you for it.

Thank you for this post. Let’s keep talking!

Cheers,
Vincent

Hi,

Good to have a healthy discussion around the most basic Accessibility / Inclusion myths that we as accessibility advocates talk each day.

I don’t completely agree with the 6th myth: If you make it accessible they would come… Its a fact, over the years VI users in India used hotmail or rediff mail not because of their accessibility but they didn’t have a better choice. Today most of them have shifted to Yahoo mail & gmail purely due to their accessibility & better user experience. Given the choice, I would follow news on BBC website rather then CNN.

Yes its not stated in black & whitethat its because of the website’s accessibility but that does not mean accessibility doesn’t drive disable users to the website

There is no doubt that visitors would come to a website to perform their task: access some information or fill up a form, buy a product or service etc & that needs to be strong & appealing in the first place; and accessibility certainly improves the user experience of users with disabilities & drive them to a website

If we take Apple’s example here, the iPhone also does its basic phone functions well & has added accessibility to attract users with disabilities.

Would be interesting to know others opinion on this.

Always BPositive!
Priti Rohra
Accessibility Consultant
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/pritirohra

I need some ammunition to counter the “disabled people use assistive technology” argument. If our engineering team runs a discovery tool and finds, say, 50 users using specific AT. They use that as an argument against Section 508 compliance. Saying it is too costly to do all this work for a few, relative to the number of users at hq, users.

I have explained until I am blue in the face that many more people increase the font size. Many people benefit from good contrast and clear focus but without numbers to back me up they treat me like I am talking through my hat.

Looking forward to your article. How do I subscribe?

Alice

Jonathan, thanks for this thoughtful discussion of many of the issues accessibility advocates should be considering today.

I must point out, though, that Priti has a point about “If you build it, they will come…”: This assertion is more fact than myth. I would add Easy Chirp, an accessible app for using Twitter, to Priti’s list of instances in which it’s clear that the audience for a feature has increased simply because an accessible path to that feature has been created. Still, it’s unfortunately hard to quantify that impact, so we’re left with more hand-waving rather than incontrovertible support for designing for accessibility.

I’m glad you’ll be talking about images and alt text. (Perhaps you have already and I missed it.) Unfortunately for Erlend and others who would like to build a systematic solution to associating all the necessary attributes with each image used, there just isn’t a way to know before an image is used what its alt text should be. Take an image of a heart, for example, which I will represent as “[heart image]”:
– “[heart image][heart image] I love you [heart image][heart image].” I would argue that these images are purely decorative, so their alt attributes should be empty—in other words, no alt text. You might have a different opinion, and you might suggest a different implementation of this effect. Still, my approach is valid.
– “I [heart image] you.” I think we would all agree that the alt text should be “love.”
– “Start a [heart image]: Learn CPR.” (CPR is cardiopulmonary resuscitation.) Clearly, we don’t mean “love” here. Instead, the alt text should be “heart.”

So the same image in three different contexts requires three different treatments of its alt attribute. So our database might *suggest* alt text for each image, but it must let the person creating the content override that suggestion when necessary.

Which leaves us with a clear message: “Accessibility is easy. Except when it isn’t.”

What a really interesting read and whilst pondering on some of the comments, I have been looking at the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapist’s ‘Matrix Report’ (http://www.rcslt.org/giving_voice/news/matrix_report). It aims to show the economic case for speech and language therapy (with 4 very different communication impairments). I just wish I could explore a similar process for the use of Assistive Technology and I am wondering whether we could try to apply similar principles to accessibility and inclusive design for web services? The authors of the Martrix Report considered a series of benefits including “health and social care cost savings, quality of life, and productivity gains”. The authors go on to say that: “The value of economic analysis to decision making has been demonstrated elsewhere (Chalfin et al, 2008).” But as has been noted by yourself Jonathan and others “a policy or intervention that generates a positive effect may still not represent an efficient use of resources if it does so at a high cost. It is, thus, important to consider both the cost of an intervention and the value of the effect it generates.” The way accessibility and inclusive design are implemented varies depending on many factors including the environment and tools used, so could the Matrix approach with a series of case studies perhaps achieve a suitable Cost Benefit Analysis?

There is not much I can disagree with on this we definitely need to shift the model away from the technocratic towards the people and profit centred model as far as possible if inclusion is to progress.

I agree, true ROI is the ticket to bringing accessibility mainstream. I don’t pull out the “legal” argument first. But, I’ll tell you, I’m crazy busy helping people who are under legal pressure. So, while you may not be seeing much legal action in the UK, there is quite a bit of pressure in other countries.

I always tell folks about the SEO benefit and agree…that is the one that leaves them realizing, oh….accessibility that benefits SEO is good for my business. But my new fav is that accessibility thought patterns based on the open web lead to true universal design. Design so thoughtful it works for everyone from the start.

If you want to keep up in this marketplace, you need to be thinking about universal design…or you are gonna get left in the dust.

You are so right and I couldn’t agree more.

In fact I’m tired of trying to explain to people the usability portion of the whole deal and yet all I hear is that it’s not legislation so who cares. So you have the people who live by the WCAG 2.0 guidelines to the point where they see nothing else.

I can’t even begin to tell you the amount of people I met who try to sell products or applications only focusing on the blind until I asked them about everybody else and that’s normally where the conversation ends, almost like the word inclusive doesn’t exist in their dictionary.

Thank you for this post, i’ve forwarded it to many!