Web Accessibility Myths – A Call for Accessibility Advocates to be More Business-Minded

By Professor Jonathan Hassell

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/