GENEVA (ILO News) – For most of us, surfing the Web has become almost second nature. But for millions of people with disabilities, the Internet remains inhospitable territory.

This does not need to be so.

Huge strides have been made in technologies that help provide web accessibility for everyone. And many of the major companies that have adapted their websites say it was well worth the effort, in terms of good publicity, increased web traffic and, on many occasions, additional profits.

An accessible website is often the easiest way to do business with people with disabilities – for example, those who find it difficult to get to a physical store or cannot read printed material.

This is a huge potential market, considering that about one billion persons worldwide live with a disability.

And there are plenty of success stories.

Tesco, for example, implemented a fully accessible version of its British online grocery store. It cost £35,000 (USD 52,000) to develop and generates approximately £1.6 million in annual revenue, according to a case study cited by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Another British company, the Legal & General Group, says that after implementing accessibility changes in 2005, its website received almost double the number of visitors seeking quotes or buying financial products. The changes also cut maintenance costs by two thirds, according to the company.

Some of the technologies that make the web more accessible include:

• Speech-to-text, which enables people who are hard of hearing to read audio output from the computer.
• Voice input as an alternative to a mouse for people with mobility impairments.
• Screen reader software and text-to-Braille hardware, which make it possible for blind people to operate computers.

“Access to technology and telecommunications is vital to our success as a society and as a country,” says Jennah Bedrosian, of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD).

Long road ahead

Despite recent advances, there is still a long way to go before the Internet becomes a truly accessible place for everyone.

According to Nigel Lewis, CEO of AbilityNet – a UK-based charity that helps disabled people use computers and the Internet – “apart from a small number of good examples, many digital systems and content are inaccessible to the majority of disabled and older people.”

While accessible IT (information technology) and ICT (information and communication technology) are critical for people with disabilities to effectively use computers, they also benefit others.

As the population ages, for example, increasing numbers of people will need larger fonts on their laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Accessibility often overlaps with functions used by the general public. Magnifying, for example, is a function that is particularly useful for a person with limited eyesight, but also helps someone working with a handheld device, such as an airline maintenance technician.

A study conducted by Microsoft Research in 2003, showed that 57 per cent of US computer users in the 18 to 64 age group, or over 74 million people, were likely to benefit from accessible technology.

“Having accessible websites creates a level playing field for people with disabilities when it comes to information access, job-finding, social interaction and access to the marketplace — to name a few crucial areas of online participation,” says Debra Perry, ILO Senior Specialist in Disability Inclusion. “Through accessible websites, companies demonstrate their commitment to equality and their understanding of the business case for accessibility in all realms.”

The ILO Global Business and Disability Network recently co-sponsored a webinar on the issue, in collaboration with the UN Global Compact and the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs (G3ict).

“Businesses can achieve greater scale and realize significant cost savings by shifting content and services to the Web. However, it is essential they do so in a way that ensures full accessibility to all of their customers – regardless of their age, ability or preferred device,” says Rob Sinclair, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft. “In addition to considering the impact on their customers, businesses need to pay attention to increasing legislation, regulation and procurement requirements that can punish or reward businesses for their decisions in this area.”

In the United States and the United Kingdom, there have been several high-profile court cases against companies accused of failing to make their public websites accessible to people with disabilities.

For Nicola Palmarini, Europe Director of IBM’s Human Centric Solutions team, accessibility is not just about profits or the law. “The web is very much embedded in our daily lives. Making it accessible is like making our lives accessible.”

And it should not be an afterthought. “It’s not a tool you add on, it’s something that has to be embedded right from the start.

Reproduced from http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/features/WCMS_206049/lang–en/index.htm

Today the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Joint Technical Committee JTC 1, Information Technology of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), announced approval of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 as an ISO/IEC International Standard (ISO/IEC 40500:2012).

“This important accessibility standard, which is already widely deployed internationally, can now benefit from additional formal recognition from ISO/IEC national bodies,” noted Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. “Such recognition is expected to increase internationally harmonized uptake of WCAG 2.0 by governments, business, and the broader Web community.”

“ISO/IEC JTC 1 is very pleased to bring on board this most important of W3C accessibility standards, given the increased interest in accessibility among JTC 1 National Bodies in recent years,” said Karen Higginbottom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1. “We also expect that ISO/IEC recognition will encourage greater convergence around WCAG 2.0, further driving development of supporting tools and software.”

International harmonization of accessibility standards benefits all
WCAG 2.0 has been adopted or referenced by many governments and organizations. Following the passage of the United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, an increasing number of countries have been seeking solutions to address their treaty commitments for information technology accessibility for people with disabilities.

“The ISO/IEC imprimatur increases the avenues for adoption of W3C technology and guidelines,” noted Judy Brewer, Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative at W3C. “In some countries, policies require that nationally adopted technical standards must be ISO/IEC. Formal approval by JTC 1 of WCAG 2.0 will increase deployment, reduce fragmentation, and provide all users with greater interoperability on the web.”

WCAG 2.0 was first submitted to the ISO/IEC JTC 1 process for Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) in October 2011. W3C has been an approved JTC 1 PAS Submitter since November 2010, and is one of nine organizations that are currently approved. To learn more about W3C and the ISO/IEC JTC1 PAS Submission process, see the W3C PAS FAQ and the JTC 1 website.

WCAG 2.0 is a stable standard with extensive supporting resources
As an ISO/IEC JTC 1 Standard, WCAG 2.0 is now also available from ISO/IEC, while it remains a stable international W3C standard with extensive supporting resources. JTC 1 recognition neither changes nor supercedes the existing standard, which remains freely available from the W3C website along with multiple W3C authorized translations of WCAG 2.0.

W3C provides a number of supporting resources for managers, developers and policy-makers, in addition to the WCAG 2.0 standard, including WCAG 2.0 Overview, WCAG 2.0 at a Glance, How to Meet WCAG 2.0: A Customizable Quick Reference, Techniques for WCAG 2.0, and Understanding WCAG 2.0.

About the World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term growth for the Web. Over 375 organizations are Members of the Consortium. W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan, and has additional Offices worldwide. For more information see http://www.w3.org/

About the Web Accessibility Initiative

W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) works with organizations around the world to make the Web more accessible for people with disabilities and older users. WAI pursues accessibility of the Web by ensuring that Web technologies support accessibility; developing guidelines for Web content, browsers and media players, and authoring tools; developing resources to support improved evaluation tools; developing resources for education and outreach; and coordinating with research and development efforts that can affect future accessibility of the Web. WAI is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies Programme, HP and IBM. For more information see http://www.w3.org/WAI/

About JTC 1

The joint technical committee of ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, is the place where the basic building blocks of new technologies are defined and where the foundations of important ICT infrastructures are laid. With more than 2,400 standards and related documents developed by over 2,000 national body experts from around the world, ISO/IEC JTC 1 brings innovative solutions and best practice to the marketplace.

About ISO

ISO is the world’s largest developer and publisher of International Standards. ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of some 164 countries as of July 2012. More than 100 of ISO’s members are from developing countries. ISO has more than 18600 International Standards in its currents portfolio. ISO’s work programme ranges from standards for traditional activities, such as agriculture and construction, through mechanical engineering, manufacturing and distribution, to transport, medical devices, the environment, safety, information and communication technologies, and to standards for good practices and for services.

About IEC

The IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) is the world’s leading organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies – collectively known as “electrotechnology.” IEC International Standards cover a vast range of technologies from power generation, transmission and distribution to home appliances and office equipment, semiconductors, fibre optics, batteries, nanotechnologies, solar energy and marine energy converters, to mention just a few. Wherever you find electricity and electronics, you will find the IEC supporting safety and performance, the environment, electrical energy efficiency and renewable energies. The IEC also manages Conformity Assessment Systems that certify that equipment, systems or components conform to its International Standards. www.iec.ch

Media Contacts

Ian Jacobs, ij@w3.org, +1.718.260.9447

Roger Frost frost@iso.org

Visit the link below to access the many links in the article.

Reproduced from http://www.w3.org/2012/07/wcag2pas-pr.html

Too many businesses make the mistake of dismissing web accessibility as irrelevant, but the assumption that accessibility issues concern only a small segment of would-be customers is a potentially profit-damaging misstep.

Taking web accessibility seriously can save your business from major problems, some that possibly haven’t even occurred to you. What’s more, it can save you time and money, two things any business owner could always use more of. After all, by designing an adequately accessible website, you will not have to make a special effort to provide materials to disabled clients or customers in different formats, such as in physical large-print, or Braille.

Additionally, accessible websites make it easier for those clients or customers to place their order with you. While you may have been happy to provide those individuals with special service, the fact may be that they don’t ask you for that opportunity; they may simply find your interface unusable, and begin to look elsewhere. You don’t want that to happen, and here are five additional reasons your business should take web accessibility seriously.

1. Customer Loyalty

If any user, disabled or not, finds your site slow, confusing or hard to navigate, you’ve just lost a potential customer. Web users have millions of sites to choose from, and they aren’t willing to find out if yours is worth the wait while your high-bandwidth images struggle to load. Even worse, if your site only functions well on one browser, you may have just lost a large share of web users, consumers who will make the switch to a competitor rather than deal with an inferior experience.

2. Credibility

By ensuring your site accommodates and satisfies users of all levels of ability and access you’ll establish and build the one currency that means the most in the business world— credibility. If a consumer knows they can come to your site and easily navigate pages, forms and links, they’re much more likely to return, refer others, and speak well of your brand in general.

3. Staying Ahead

In the digital world, being even one step behind current technology makes you a dinosaur. Working to create the most accessible site will ensure that you stay at the forefront of your industry, and empower your consumer to feel in control of their web experience. If re-coding your forms or updating your graphics seems daunting, remember that programs at local or online IT schools can easily get you up to speed on any tech tricks necessary to avoid accessibility issues and revamp an outdated site format.

4. Progress

Web accessibility can be a moving target, but the consistent self-evaluation necessary to keep your site accessible for any user will benefit your business as a whole. Business awareness and accommodation of individual needs and desires was the top concern for 83% of consumers in a 2010 Experian poll, and you’ll be a go-to guy for these customers if you keep accessibility at the top of the list of priorities.

5. Lawsuits

Web accessibility traditionally refers to site accommodation of users with visual, cognitive, auditory or physical disabilities. Sites that fail to feature alternative descriptions for images, transcription for videos, and the appropriate HTML code that makes the site usable by keyboard-only, screen reader and other users of adaptive technology, set themselves up to not only alienate disabled consumers, but also to invoke lawsuits for failure to comply with accessibility standards. Check state and national law and policy to avoid leaving your site exposed to legal action. In the U.S., if your website is even partially federally funded, it must comply with Section 508, so make sure you’re well familiar with it, and in full compliance.

As time goes on, web accessibility will only become more of an urgent issue. If you build accessibility into your plan from the beginning, you won’t always have to be playing catch up. And if you’re playing catch up, well, make sure you get to work!

For further reading and information, please see this overview assembled by W3C.
Reproduced from http://webaxe.blogspot.ca/2012/08/5-reasons-businesses-should-take-web.html

Disabled users are users.

This might seem like a straightforward or even a trite statement, but its a point worth making since Usability (or UX – User Experience) is a growing field which has the fantastic goal (and one very close to my heart) of making websites, or pretty much you interact with, less annoying, more intuitive and generally just work better. Usability, however, is rarely seen by its experts as being linked to the accessibility concerns of disabled users.

Disabled users are a big segment of the population, however. The Australian Bureau of Statistics states that in Australia 18.5%, or 4.0 million people, reported having a disability in 2009. And since valid usability testing should discover the usage patterns of valid demographic groups, ignoring up to 18.5% of the population doesn’t sound like good representative sampling to me.

User testing is a part of usability testing, but user testing with disabled users also adds accessibility findings to the normal usability findings.

This post is about the advantages and special considerations for doing user testing with disabled testers.

A bit more about user testing

User testing is part of usability testing and is designed to bring out any problems your website audience has when trying to find information, buy things or complete any other action that’s essential on a site.

This involves developing realistic scenarios of tasks that your users would normally do on your website, for example, sign up to the mailing list.

People are then recruited who match your website audience demographics to work through the scenarios while recording any issues they have and note areas for improvement.

There are two broad approaches to user testing:

• Qualitative: one on one testing involving observing people trying to complete tasks on a website to find specific issues they have doing them.
• Quantitative: running workshops with larger numbers of people to get more generalised findings from more people.

User testing is different from accessibility testing which normally involves doing an accessibility audit against the WCAG 2.0 guidelines using automatic and manual testing by an accessibility specialist.

Testing with disabled usersAs I said at the start of this post, disabled users are users too. But as well as the ethical reasons for including them in user testing, gathering data from disabled testers is good practice because of the rich demographic data they bring to the findings as well.

• User with impairments fit into two broad demographic groups:
• Disabled users – who may be a non-specific group of disabled users or a grouped by specific impairments such as
• Visual impairments (blindness, low vision, colour blindness)
• Hearing impairments
• Motor skill impairments
• Cognitive impairments
• Impairments due to aging (some combination of any of the above)

Disabled users may also be included within other demographic groups for user testing where their profiles match the group being recruited.

Disabled users may be employed or unemployed; educated or under-educated; affluent or from poor socioeconomic backgrounds; native English speakers or ESL; technology ‘power users’ or computer illiterate.

The results of testing with these users can therefore add considerable depth and validity to accessibility audits and usability research projects to show hidden accessibility and usability problems.

What to test on a website

Typically, the areas of a site that have the most usability problems are the ones involving the most interaction with users, for example completing a purchase, viewing videos, searching for information or filling out forms.

These are also exactly the same kinds of things that should be tested with disabled users since these features also typically turn up the most errors in accessibility audits against the WCAG guidelines.

Since solving the usability issues for these kinds of features involves the most amount of work, this is one really good reason to include user testing with disabled users in the process at the same time. How counterproductive would it be to solve the usability issues for some users but not the usability needs of disabled users for exactly the same website features? Or worse, to increase accessibility problems while improving usability (for some)?

The testing environmentDisabled users have specific needs from websites and correspondingly have Assistive Technology (AT) requirements to allow them the level of access they normally get. Assistive Technologies enable people to perform tasks that they would otherwise be unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing and include accessible keyboards and voice recognition software and screen readers.

Therefore to conduct user testing with disabled users, the test environment needs to be accessible for those particular users, otherwise the data that can be obtained from testing will be restricted.

This either means that the testing environment needs to be low tech – as in the case for workshop style testing – or set up for the particular impairments the testers have. As this can be difficult to manage, arranging one on one testing or remote in the tester’s home or office environment may be the only workable solution.

Recruiting for user testing normally requires that the level of technical savvy of the tester is known and documented. This is just as important with when testing with disabled users as difficulties they have with their assistive technology can be confused with difficulties they have with the site being tested.

Communicating user testing results

Presenting the results of user testing is excellent for showing the impact of usability and accessibility issues on real people. Summaries from testing sessions along with quotes from actual people can be very persuasive and make more of an impact than stating which WCAG checkpoints a site does or doesn’t comply with.

However, best is to have both. You can’t always test with the amount of users you’d like due to time and money restrictions., The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) page on user testing says, “This is where accessibility standards like WCAG really come into their own. By following such guidelines, you can increase your chances of getting a foundation of accessibility even for user groups you are not able to test.”

Also detailing how user testing results match up against the WCAG 2.0 guidelines is brings more validity to the findings because the guidelines are designed to meet the access needs of older users, users who have English as a second language (ESL), low literacy users and users with slow Internet connections as well as disabled users.

including findings against the WCAG 2.0 guidelines also means that the sufficient techniques listed for each of the checkpoints can be applied to give standardised guidance on the best approaches to fix accessibility issues that user testing turns up.

Therefore user testing with disabled users should be accompanied by an accessibility audit as well to ensure that the recommendations from user testing with disabled users don’t contradict accessibility guidelines. (That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?)

Summary

In summary, testing with disabled users adds richness to usability testing findings, highlights accessibility issues at the same time and ensures recommendations for fixing usability problems also fix accessibility problems.

Richard Corby is a web accessibility expert and is a partner at Webbism.

Reproduced from http://webbism.com/2012/07/06/the-benefits-of-user-testing-with-disabled-users/?goback=.gde_1796098_member_131178504

Read more at
http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/?goback=%2Egde_2484780_member_120522872

Links are like sign posts. They should tell you what you’ll find when you follow them. Writing good link text isn’t difficult, but there are a few things to be aware of when you do.

Link text should make sense

Links should stand out visibly from the surrounding page content. This makes it easy to scan a page looking for the link that will take you to the information you’re looking for. This strategy works best when the link text makes sense on its own.

Imagine a link that simply said “On the next page”. If you saw it, you’d almost certainly have to stop, look at the content surrounding the link, and then decide whether the link was worth following. It might only take a few seconds to do that, but its hassle you could live without.

If you use a screen reader, the act of scanning the content around a link is more difficult. Visually you can take in a large amount of information at a glance. With a screen reader it’s possible to explore the surrounding content, but it takes a little more time.

Some screen readers have the ability to display a dialogue containing all the links on a page. This approach is useful because you can use first letter recognition to move quickly between links (for example hitting h to find the “Home” link). If the links on a page don’t make sense on their own though, this approach falls apart completely.

Don’t be device specific

Link text such as “Click here for more…” is a bad choice for another reason. It assumes you have a mouse. This has long been a mild point of irritation for people unable to use a mouse, but it’s now a very out dated assumption in general. Touch screen anyone?

Use link text wisely

It’s fairly common to find pages with several links that all start the same way. An example might be a news site, with links such as “Read more about the Eurozone crisis”, “Read more about Posh and Becks”, or “Read more about arrests at airport”.

The chances are that people scanning the page will rapidly start to ignore the “Read more” bit of each link. In fact it may as well not be there at all.

It could be argued that (in this specific case) not everyone will read the subsequent page at all. We’re getting into some very pedantic semantics here, but there’s a good chance people will be listening to the page as much as reading it. This is almost an incidental point, but worth acknowledging.

Using repetitive phrases at the start of every link text also makes things awkward for people using their screen reader to call up a list of links on a page. The ability to use first letter navigation to find a specific link is completely neutralised.

Include relevant information

Links don’t always lead to pages of course. It’s equally important to make this clear when you write your link text. There are few things more painful than activating a link on your mobile, only to realise it’s begun to download a 20Mb PDF!

Writing good link text

The trick to writing good link text is to ask yourself where the link leads. Focus on that piece of information, and write your link text to represent it as concisely and accurately as possible.

For example, if your link leads to a news story about a diamond robbery, the text might be “Diamond heist at De Beers”. If the link points to a report for download, your link text might be “Lloyds TSB annual report (PDF, 25Mb)”.

In this way you’re enhancing the experience for all visitors to your website. You’re making the process of scanning the page for links more efficient for sighted and blind people. You’re making it easier for people without a mouse, people on different devices, and people who consume information in different ways. You’re also making the best use of the space on the page, which might just make things easier for you too.

About the Author

Léonie Watson

Léonie is Director of Accessibility & Web Development at Nomensa, where she is responsible for accessibility standards, research and development. When not investigating how screen readers work with emerging technologies, Léonie is happiest cooking for friends, reading a good book, or dancing the night away.

Reproduced from http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2011/writing-good-link-text/?goback=%2Egde_41800_member_114847905

firm)
April 2012

Léonie Watson

There is a strong esprit de corps amongst the people who work in accessibility. It’s founded on the belief that the digital

world should be more inclusive, and it’s tempered by the shared experiences of championing that belief.

At its heart, accessibility is a grassroots movement. Today accessibility is part of global corporations and government

departments. There are agencies and consultants that provide accessibility services, and in almost every case, there is an

accessibility champion at the heart of the activity. Somebody, somewhere, who believed that the digital world should be an

inclusive place, and who decided to do something about it.

Accessibility champions have taken digital accessibility and evolved it into a growth industry. At a time of considerable

global economic challenge, people are beginning to recognise that maximising their digital budget makes sense. Accessibility

is a core part of that strategy, and there is a growing demand for people who can deliver the
benefits accessibility brings.

When any industry reaches this point, two things tend to happen. Demand outstrips capacity, and the opportunists move in to

fill the gap. This is the current state of play with accessibility.

There is a global skills shortage. Talk to any accessibility champion, and you’ll hear the same message: we need more people

with the right skills and expertise.

Herein lies a problem though. It isn’t easy to find the right people. Universities, colleges and schools are not turning out

people with accessibility skills. There is no recognised curriculum or body of knowledge to explain how accessibility relates

to procurement, project management, usability, design or development in a harmonised way.

Meanwhile, the opportunists are moving in. It’s increasingly common to hear of organisations being let down by the

“accessibility professionals” they brought in. People and agencies who add accessibility to their credentials because they

see the rise in demand and hope to capitalise on it.

As an industry we need to respond to these challenges. As accessibility champions, we have the ability to do so.

Imagine if we could take the professionalism that exists, and define it so that other people could recognise it and aspire to

it?

Imagine if we could take the knowledge that exists, and create a body of knowledge that people could learn from directly or

incorporate into mainstream tuition?

Imagine if we could take the experience that exists, and develop a mentorship programme that would enable newcomers to

flourish and grow in confidence?

Imagine if we could do all those things in a way that created trust, reliability and confidence in our profession?

The best way for us to achieve this is together. As accessibility champions we created a growth industry. As accessibility

professionals we need to make it a sustainable industry, and as a society of accessibility professionals, we can make sure it

is an industry that is reflected in every aspect of an inclusive digital world.

Léonie Watson

Reproduced from http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs029/1101838000635/archive/1109764101829.html

The survey will remain open through May 25, 2012.

Read more at
http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/

As nothing stays still on the web, and many of these blogs are rather old (other than Ian Pouncey’s great blog earlier this year), it’s important that our understanding of accessibility myths moves on too…

So, for Christmas 2011, and to hook-in with the user-research blogs in my series on implementing BS8878, here’s Part One of some accessibility myths I’d like to expose to clear out the cobwebs before 2012, based mostly on my experience and user-research from my time at the BBC.

And, yes, I’m going to be provocative. This isn’t for cheap effect, but aims to challenge some of the accepted assumptions many accessibility advocates hold which I believe are really not serving us, or the disabled and elderly people we are trying to help, well at all.

Read part 1 http://www.hassellinclusion.com/2011/12/accessibility-myths-2011/

Web Accessibility Myths 2011 part 2

At the end of 2011 I published the first part of my Web Accessibility Myths 2011 blog, detailing 6 myths that are holding back the effectiveness of the arguments of many accessibility advocates.

The response from the web accessibility community was excellent, with many expressions of support for my views, and much discussion around them, some of which has already improved this follow-up.

In today’s part two, I’m going to cover ten more important myths, around audience, personalisation, assistive technology use, and mobile website use, which also need puncturing for us to be more effective.

I hope this spurs us on to further discussion, and more success in 2012.

Read more at
http://www.hassellinclusion.com/2012/01/web-accessibility-myths-2011-part2/

What is Assistive Technology?

Having a product that doesn’t do much is one thing. Claiming that it can do things that it can’t is something different altogether. These things are like the penis enlargement pills of accessibility. Some customers are so desperate and ignorant that they are almost eager to be duped.

Assistive technology or adaptive technology (AT) is an umbrella term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities and also includes the process used in selecting, locating, and using them. AT promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to, or changing methods of interacting with, the technology needed to accomplish such tasks. Wikipedia

In the context of this discussion, we’re specifically referring to hardware or software devices that provide assistance to users with disabilities when using ICT products and services.

Typically when people think of assistive technology they often think of screen readers or screen magnifiers, though there are a wide array of assistive technologies in use. On the web, assistive technologies are employed by users to help them in navigating, interacting with, and understanding content and features.

One of the common misconceptions people tend to have about assistive technologies is that assistive technologies can “make things accessible”. The assumption in such cases seems based on an incomplete understanding of how assistive technologies work – specifically the belief that features like all of the special keystrokes available for JAWS users to access certain types of content will somehow bridge the gaps in a system’s accessibility.

The reality is that assistive technology types, features, and quality can vary quite significantly. Even in the best case scenario, assistive technologies can only render information to the user that is available from the system. In other words, if a page has a form on it, the ability of the assistive technology to provide information to the user about the controls in the form is dependent upon the form containing proper markup to convey that information.

For instance, if form controls don’t have labels then what is an assistive technology going to do, invent one? In some cases that’s exactly what happens. JAWS will “guess” at form controls for text inputs, with limited success.

This guessing about things like missing labels is rare in assistive technologies as a whole and is not consistent enough or reliable enough to count on it overcoming deficiencies in the system.

The only way to ensure a system works properly with assistive technologies is to build the system right.

In a web context, that means providing the most appropriate markup for the content and properly conveying structure, relationships and proper name, state, role, and values for controls. In other words, assistive technologies require proper web development in order for the user to truly be successful in using a system. This is exactly the opposite of what seems to drive the sentiment that assistive technologies can make things accessible.

Assistive technologies can not make a system accessible.

The Rise of Pseudo-Assistive Technologies

Recently there have been discussions surrounding what I call “pseudo-assistive technologies”. For reference, I’m speaking specifically of products like ReadSpeaker, eSSENTIAL Accessibility, and BrowseAloud. In the strictest semantic interpretation, one could argue that they’re still assistive technologies with the primary difference being that they are offered on a per site basis and provide text-to-speech functionality to read the site’s content aloud.

These products are actually not new and some of them are nearly a decade old. Despite this, the criticisms levied against such products are the same today as they were almost a decade ago. The problem I have, personally, with such products is twofold: first is what they’re capable of doing and the second is how they are marketed.

On a technical level these products essentially all work the same: They read the content of the page via text-to-speech. Though the features of each product differ slightly, the end result is the same: text becomes read aloud. The value you place upon the text-to-speech capability I guess depends upon your perspective. I will concede that there may be instances where this is useful. For example, I sometimes turn on ReadAloud on long PDF documents. To this end, these products are potentially useful for people with reading disorders or attention disorders. But here’s the thing: People who require text-to-speech in order to gain access to content will need it on all websites and, indeed, on all software applications they use, not just their browser. This is important to understand: These per-site text-to-speech services are, at best, a mere convenience for persons who prefer to hear the content – not a legitimate assistance for those who need to hear the content.

This takes me to my second concern.

Deceptive Marketing

The technical limitations of these products are, in my opinion, not enough to warrant the rather severe negative reaction they often receive. To be honest, there are a lot of products out there – even assistive technologies – which don’t really do much or at least don’t do it well. If this were the only issue I had with these products, it would hardly warrant a blog post, especially when others have covered the issue well already.

What I take issue with is the highly deceptive marketing of these products. Try these quotes on for size (emphases mine) which come directly from the materials on these vendors’ sites:

“Effectively, it ensure that anyone with a physical disability can easily access any website that carries this mark.” (eSSENTIAL Accessibility)

“eSSENTIAL Accessibility allows any user to overcome any physical limitation to access a web site.” (eSSENTIAL Accessibility user’s guide)

“Instituto de Mayores y Servicios Sociales (Imserso) and 22 of its websites integrate ReadSpeaker’s industry-leading online text-to-speech service to provide better web accessibility to its users.” (ReadSpeaker)

These claims are demonstrably false for the exact reasons I specified earlier in this post. On March 12, 2012, Denis Boudreau performed an audit (PDF) on a site which uses eSSENTIAL accessibility. Here are a few of the things he found:

• Missing, incomplete, or uninformative alt attributes for images, including actionable items
• Missing label elements for form fields
• Poor color contrast
• Poor keyboard accessibility and focus control

All of these items can present significant and, in some cases, insurmountable accessibility barriers for persons with disabilities regardless of what assistive technology is used. To put it more succinctly: Not one of these issues can be addressed by software which merely reads text aloud. Interactive features on these pages are inoperable by users with disabilities. Even worse: The ReadSpeaker widget is, itself, inaccessible. In other words, the net outlook on accessibility for a site that carries this product is that the site becomes less accessible for featuring the item, not better.

Why this is bad for accessibility

Having a product that doesn’t do much is one thing. Claiming that it can do things that it can’t is something different altogether. These things are like the penis enlargement pills of accessibility. Some customers are so desperate and ignorant that they are almost eager to be duped.

Just a little over a month ago, the Co-operators (the site Denis Boudreau assessed, by the way) issued a press release that proudly pronounced: The Co-operators website now more accessible merely by featuring a link to eSSENTIAL accessibility.

Another press release issued just yesterday by the Ontario Medical Association says Almost one in five Canadians are living with disability. The OMA recognizes the importance of serving this demographic properly.

But the really amazing one is this: Miratel Solutions Expands Their CSR Business Initiatives with Launch of Fully Accessible Website Clearly, these are organizations who have been led to believe that these services can remediate existing accessibility problems on their website. That is bad for accessibility. It is bad for users who need an accessible site because these products give organizations a false sense of security and the belief that they’ve done what it takes to serve people with disabilities.

There is only one place where accessibility happens: The code.

This goes for any assistive technology. If the markup is used improperly, if the proper controls aren’t used in the proper ways, if the client-side scripting doesn’t manage focus properly and if the controls aren’t discoverable and actionable by keyboard, no assistive technology product, service, or device will matter. The code is where accessibility happens and so long as companies’ budgets are being diverted to ineffective products, these budget dollars are not being used on things that matter, like training developers and remediating their sites.

To access referenced information in the above article visit the link below.

Reproduced from http://www.karlgroves.com/2012/04/19/can-assistive-technology-make-a-website-accessible/