Do I need to ‘do’ accessibility?

The short answer is yes, you do, and for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s a basic part of being a good web citizen. You wouldn’t ignore someone who came up to you in the street because they were blind or missing an arm, so why build your web site in a way that they can’t get access to?

The reality for most businesses (including in the UK), is that basic web site accessibility is a legal requirement. That said, the UK law is a bit muddy. By building your website to make it accessible on a broader range of devices, and via a broader range of tools and presentations, you give yourself a bigger audience. That’s just plain good business sense.

Accessibility leads to better design

The process of thinking through accessibility requirements leads to better design. When most people talk about website design, they tend to talk about visual design – the static appearance of the site. However, websites aren’t a static visual. We interact with them, resize them, view them on different browsers and discover them via search engines that view them as raw text. A basic accessibility check list deals with all of these things, and that means better design (in a broader sense, including interaction design) and also inherently includes search engine optimisation.

80/20 Beats 100/0 – Every time

There is a danger that in striving for 100% perfection, we end up doing nothing. When it comes to accessibility, I’d rather see people do something, and get it 90% or 80% (or even 10%!) right, than do nothing at all. That may mean some of what I say here offends the purists, but here’s the thing: When I first started looking at accessibility, those purists were the ones that put me off. The dogmatic demand for 100% perfection can result in people deciding that dealing with accessibility is too hard, or too expensive, and that is tragic. Basic accessibility is quick, easy and very rewarding.

Many Dimensions – No One Answer

Disabilities take many many different forms. From visual impairment encountered in old age, to motor issues from birth. Each has their own unique requirements. Sight, hearing, learning, cognitive, motor and mobility impairements occur with a range of severities, and in different combinations. My own experience is through dyslexia. There are many websites that I simply can’t “get a fix on” – the layout and design makes it challenging for me to read them and hard to understand how I am meant to interact with them.

There are many different assistive tools to help, from screen readers and text magnification tools, to input devices. As well as third party tools, most operating systems include universal access technologies. If you’ve never tested them out, fire up systems preferences or control panel and give them a spin. You’ll find screen magnification, black and white / text inversion settings, contrast controls, speech technologies and keyboard for mouse controls.

Em don’t Err

When websites are built, there are a number of different ways of specifying the sizes of fonts and devisions on the page. For many years web designers used pixels, but pixels are fickle things. They vary in size from machine to machine, and while it makes it easy to align text to graphics (which are sized in pixels), it means that you loose the ability to let the user’s view make smart choices about how to display your page. Enter ‘em’s, which are more flexible and the preferred alternative these days. Building a page with ratios, rather than absolute sizes, enables users to use large fonts without breaking your site. Open up your favourite site and use the browser’s view settings to display it in a larger font. Does it still look ok? Then all’s good and well, but if the text goes off screen, or starts to overlap with graphics on the page, all is not well.

Choose Your colo(u)rs wisely

Colour blindness affects a huge portion of the population. Poorly contrasting, over opposing primary colour foreground/background combinations don’t only look poor, they are poor. Choose a sensible palette of colours that are discernible, even in black and white. Then stick to them.

Is a Text-Only Site the Answer?

The short answer is: No. While a text-only page can help, it is far from a full solution. In some cases, removing the images can make this worse. Well designed images can make navigation more intuitive, and provide important cues for people with reading difficulties. Good web-design separates decorative and functional images and places them in the style sheets or page HTML as appropriate.

Flash is Evil?

Apple’s Steve Jobs might like you to think so, but while the whizzy Adobe Flash animations slapped onto the front page of many sites have been an accessibility (and usability) nightmare, there is no reason for this to be the case. Adobe provide an excellent set of guidelines and tools to make Flash applications that are very accessible. It’s simply a matter of using them. Please make sure that you, or whoever you hire, does. Apple’s HTML 5 fuelled crusade against Flash is going to do little to improve accessibility – you are still embedding video, and still need to provide accessible controls and alternative content.

Run the Race Twice – Or Run it Once Well

There is a camp that argues for building a completely separate instance of your site to deal with accessibility issues. Personally I think that is a dangerous road. Firstly, it instantly doubles the amount of work involved in keeping your site up to date. Your site is completely up to date, right? Secondly, the result almost inevitably ends up with web pages that are trying to cater to Dave, with a reading age of 8, who is passionate about your products, and Sue who has a double first from Oxford and is partially sighted. It’s a result that is inevitably downright insulting to everyone involved.

Formal Guide Lines and certifications

The initial Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 1.0 received a mixed welcome.  The 2.0 contribution is a heavy read: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/, you could start with: http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/, although I read the “understanding WCAG20″ document, and didn’t understand that either the first time! You could also try: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/. The documents are a challenging read and feel quite onerous. In the UK we have the Disability Rights Commission (DRC): Pas 78. It used to be a paid for document, but now you can download it for free via that link. Don’t lose the will to live when you read these things! I’ll come back to some easy first steps that you can take, the guidelines are for when you get serious about accessibility – which I strongly urge you to do!

LWOAM

“Life without a mouse” – from mobile phones to office workers with RSI, it isn’t just cats that are chasing the mice away. Understanding what it feels like to interact with your site without a mouse is a solid way to improve your site’s layout and navigation structure. Make sure you have access keys set (Twitter does!), that web forms have tab indexes, and that your site isn’t over reliant on hovers.

Some Simple Heuristics

As a very basic, minimal set of checks, here is what you can do in less than five minutes for your site or sites that you build:

• View it at your lowest screen resolution
• View it in black and white
• View it without stylesheets turned on
• View the page source

If viewing in any of those modes leaves you perplexed, then you probably need to fix it. Make sure your images have ALT text, and that the fonts on the web page scale sensibly and you’ll be making the web experience. There are some on-line testing tools (for example T.A.W.), although none of them are perfect or instant magic..

Coming up in Part II Web 2.0, HTML 5, AJAX and building for accessibility from the start…

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This has happened before, but this ‘goops‘ is rather timely. What’s a ‘goops’? It’s my favourite term for semantic/contextual errors: Searching without sufficient attention to context.

Let’s say I’m looking for information on Birmingham. I might head over to Google and do a search on ‘Birmingham’. If I’m after a picture, I could click on image search and find myself one. So far so good. Hold that thought for a minute.

I met up with the London-based WordCamp UK crew last night (upcoming meet details). We talked about next year’s WordCamp event, forming a legal entity and how to best build the WordPress community in the UK. Tony Scott, Jeff Van Campen, Hugh Fraser and others were there – as you can just about see from my slightly over ambitious, dark venue, self-timer-taken photo.

Events are a key component of building communities (as in the OU’s community model), but it is a good social software platform that creates the bridge between those physical events and the on-line world. That bridging is key in order to keep the community going. That was a big part of last night’s discussion and a topic for a later post.

Back to looking for pictures of Birmingham. Attendees of the WordCamp event might remember that there are two Birmingham’s. The Birmingham where we had WordCamp UK, unsurprisingly in the UK. Then there is Birmingham Alabama, where folks had “WordCamp Birmingham” in the US. A little confusing in the run up to both events! That is a little detail that seems to have slipped by someone in Birmingham city council.

In choosing a picture for a recent promotional leaflet, over half a million copies printed, they managed to use a picture of the Birmingham Alabahama, US skyline, rather than their own Birmingham. A classic “goops” – a search based error. Just to add to this little PR stumble, they initially denied the error and claimed they had used an image of a ‘generic skyline’ (which just happened to be of the US Birmingham, of course).

That’s also a proof point for a good PR tip: “go ugly early” – if you’ve made a mistake, best to come clean about it quickly. In today’s high speed, search engine driven world, it’s all too easy to make a goops. A good job we have communities to keep us on the straight and narrow.

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WordCamp UK, of course. It was a great event, with The Studio far exceeding my expectations as a venue. It is a fantastic place to hold events in Birmingham, centrally located and suitably post modern. WordCamp gave me lots to think about:

• The technology side of WordPress.
• The content side of blogging (and moblogging).
• And, of course, putting faces and voices to fellow bloggers I have been reading.

It was well worth the travel up to Birmingham – somewhat confusingly, there will also be a WordCamp in Birmingham, USA. This was the Birmingam UK event (we don’t want people getting confused)! I even got to meet both Chris Garretts in one place at the same time (this one and this one).

Now I have no excuse for getting them confused. The links are in the order of the photo, which I promise isn’t photoshopped – check out the full flickr stream to get a feel for the event: WordCampUK photos.

During a break on my journey home I Qik’d a video journal – By the way, Qik is now in public beta, so if you have the right phone, you can sign up and try it out for yourself. You’ll need a good data plan (a large data limit, and watch out for per MB charges). It was a brain dump that turned into a 20 minute monologue, but at least I have captured it all. The video covers the different pieces of WordCamp UK, you can watch it here if you want to hear a full run through of the weekend.:

Video is a surprisingly nice medium for spontaneously dumping thoughts. When you listen back you have the choice of listening to just the audio, or watching the video too. Capturing the facial expressions and seeing what is physically happening adds to the communication – you’ll find out what I mean it you watch the video.

The downside of video is that you can’t skim read it. That was part of an answer I gave during the panel session – I love Q&A panels – always gets the brain going. Chris Garrett caught some of the discussion when he Qik’d from the event. You can hear me telling the story behind WOWNDADI on the video too (thank you Chris):

There are notes and links for some of the content on the WordCamp Wiki, a name check for the event in The Blog Herald and I now have a few hundred gigabytes of audio, video and photos which I will be editting down and posting. Although, embarrassingly, I can’t remember if I videod my own talk!

Special kudos to Sam Bauers of Automattic for flying all the way from Australia and being camera man 2 with a very nifty HDD video camera, as well as fielding a raft of questions. Check out the speakers’ sites to get a feel for a range of WordPress uses:

• My fellow presenters for the Blogging and Journalism session:
  • Bob Jones http://www.thedailynovel.com/ 
  • David Page http://www.expressandstar.com/
• Chris Garrett
• Gurbir Singh
• Ian Covey
• Jonnya
• Mike Little
• Nick Garner
• Peter Westwood
• Rich Boakes
• Richard Williams
• Sam Bauers
• Simon Dickson
• Simon Wheatley
• Tony Scott

Users of WordPress include eBay, The New York Times and the UK Government. More to follow in the coming weeks… It would be great to hear from more WordPress users and bloggers, especially if you are in the UK. Roll on WordCamp 2009!

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For the first time in the UK, the WordPress community is gathering. WordCamp UK will be held from Saturday July 19 to Sunday July 20, 2008 in Birmingham (Birmingham, UK that is). Tickets are on sale here. 

There will be presentations, workshops and the opportunity to socialize with other WordPress enthusiasts and developers. A great opportunity to learn and share knowledge and skills.

I’ll be there with my camera, capturing the moment (here are the pictures from MediaCamp and TechCrunch Pitch! in case you missed them). I’ll also be on the Q&A panel, as well as speaking from my experiences of the past few years.

Redcatco are supporting the event with sponsorship – it is great to be able to give something back to the community. You can find out much more on the WordCamp UK blog. Oh, and the event even has its own WordPress plugin: Linklove.

If you are a WordPress user in the UK (or know one, or can travel to the UK), come along and spread the word. I use WordPress everyday, and really appreciate its ease of use, flexibility and developer community.

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Most Popular Posts in the Last 30 Days

1. It’s the User Experience as much as the Technology!
2. Apple, iPhone and Business Productivity – Post Worldwide Developer Conference Keynote
3. Personality Sorters and Social Media – Part I
4. Personality Sorters and Social Media – Part II
5. Are You Paying Attention?

Top 5 links

1. Getting Organized by Mark of Productivity 501 featuring interviews with myself and a number of other productivity bloggers. An epic post with some gems in there.
2. Blogger Advocacy – Employ Yourself by Steve Lawson. A different mindset for solo workers.
3. Links of Interest  from Productivity 501 – featuring Speeding Your Email.
4. Karl Bunyan, who was on the marketing panel at the social media business: blog post about the event (glad you liked the photo Karl).
5. The Successful Blog Directory welcome to you if you found the blog this way.

Following on from Five Quid and a Crate of Beer – Starting the New New Business it was interesting to read the New York Times article yesterday: no flotations this quarter (US side at least). The world is changing. Speaking of which, check out this post to see how social media is getting in on the recruitment process works:  ”pick-me“ - and fill in the survey while you are there.  I think that interviewer is going to be in for a surprise, unless of course they’ve already read the post!

The coming month is busy from an events perspective, so just the highlights: On Saturday the 4th of July is MediaCampLondon. Registration is free and it is a great opportunity to experience an unconference first hand. I look forward to catching up with some familiar faces, as well as meeting some new ones. Then on July the 10th is TechCrunch Pitch, I’ll be there watching the 10 slides company pitches/presentations. Should be interesting.

Lastly, Saturday and Sunday 19-20 July 2008 in Birmingham is WordCamp UK. The first WordPress WordCamp in the UK and a great opportunity for the WordPress community to get together. Book yourself in quick (register here). Not only will I be at WordCamp UK, but redcatco are an event sponsor, as well as providing the audio setup, we’ll be producing some podcasts of the event, if all goes to plan.

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