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Joe Clark is one of the world's leading experts on web accessibility, author of the best-selling Building Accessible Websites and also an extremely funny guy. On day one of @media 2005 he presented the first presentation, entitled Accessibility: Simple Facts About a Tricky Subject.

One of the things Joe wanted to point out first was that in the field of accessibility, being cut and dried isn't enough. There are a variety of automated processes that check for accessibility on a web page but there are too many things that they simply can't test or can't test accurately. He emphasizes the need for human testing, but notes that just human testing won't really cut it, either.

Perhaps the biggest problem accessibility on the web is facing right now is that accessibility itself is too complicated. Joe demonstrates this by explaining how even experts on accessibility can fiercely disagree with each other on certain guidelines. Something that the @media conference itself displayed as well, as there were many questions about how to define accessibility all throughout the two days.

How does one define accessibility?

Joe discussed it for a while, but for him it generally always came down to a very simple principle: Accessibility is making allowances for that which you can't change or can't change easily. Using that as a basis it becomes much easier working in a mindset that allows you to understand accessibility better.

Accessibility is about the audience, about the people. When the Internet first came to be, it was a place for excited geeks with 2800 baud modems. Over time the Web grew and grew, and the more people entered the digital highway the more purposes the web started having. The web geek of before has been completely replaced by the ordinary human, today. The Internet is about everyone, which means that everyone should be able to make use of it. Important keywords: should be able to.

The painful reality of the web today is that it's far from accessible to all audiences, even though everyone is targetted. Accessibility is about making world wide websites that are usable all over the world, by anyone in the world. Accessibility is making the web consist of websites and not Internet Explorer-sites.

Why should you be accessible?

Some people would answer that question with "because it's the sensible thing to do" - and they'd be right. But Joe debated that there is much more to it.

Because you can! The web may seem like a tricky place, but documents on the web are accessible by nature. It's both inexpensive and easy to create an accessible site, as long as you're conscious about it throughout the entire process. More on that in my article on Derek Featherstone's presentation, however.

Getting back to Joe (it's his presentation after all), accessibility is also good public service. Sometimes, it's even enforced good public service, considering the laws of some countries, which dictate that any government website has to be compliant with at least a certain amount of Accessibility Guidelines.

At this point, I feel the need to point out that in my own country (The Netherlands) we have various laws on this; legislations that seem to dictate that government sites are to be accessible (with the necessary set of rules and guidelines to go with) but are apparently thusly open to wild interpretation that, in the end, it's more of a "please comply, okay?" than actual requirement.

Now, if laws on accessibility are so lenient, should we be surprised about the lack of accessibility found in websites? Not really, right? It might just be that on the other end of the stick, web accessibility is such a tricky concept because nobody (at least, nobody here) is really pushing it in place. It's like the last piece of the puzzle and it won't go in because you can't figure out how to turn it. In the end you realize painfully that the piece is simply too large and complex to fit at all.

Accessibility isn't a separate version

Joe stressed that having a text only version of your website does not make it accessible. It's not even desirable. They lack multimedia and they are a pain in the arse to maintain, something that has caused for many an outdated text-only version of sites. I can't even remember encountering a site with a text-only version that was kept up to date.

Sites that are custom made to target specific audiences (such as blind-friendly sites) are also not accessible, Joe continues. "They are ghettos," he points out. Likewise, device-specific websites are also not accessible sites. Simply put, if you want to make an accessible website, think about the people using the website first (and foremost), and only worry about the technology second.

Statistics and Standards

Joe warns us to rely only on statistics put together by official and impartial sources. Advocacy groups have a tendency to inflate figures and, as much as they might have good intentions in doing so, are therefore unreliable and impractical sources of information.

Then there is the WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. WCAG 1.0 is a dinosaur as far as standards go, and is in fact so old that there are more and more people ignoring it and instead producing their own accessibility disclaimers. Joe mentions that WCAG 2.0 might be completed by the end of the year, "if we're lucky." Whether we should really feel lucky, however, is debatable. The guidelines from 2.0 still need a lot of work; Joe even asked the audience that if they want to help, they should contact him because their help might be of great importance.

Which leads us back to where we were earlier, discussing the problem of web accessibility. After all, if there is no clear new guideline being produced by the W3C itself, it's obviously a complex issue. Of course, you can argue that accessibility, being something that takes into account literally all people and thus all of their combined problems, is inherently impossible to define in any clear or concise manner. When you have to cater to 6 billion people, it's inevitable that some people just won't like what they're getting.

So where does that leave us? Well, in anxious and impatient state for the presentations to come, of course, as almost every one of them discussed means to create more accessible websites. Question rounds followed wherein a lot was discussed about accessibility and how to sell it to businesses, what to do concerning Content Management Systems, and so forth. There was far too little time to get into it fully, however, Joe's presentation whetted our appetites and provided a very solid basis of information on what web accessibility is all about.

One thing we can be certain about, however: as easy as web accessibility may be at times, it is still a constraint and it can be challenging to meet - no matter how exactly you wish to do that.

For a transcription of the entire presentation, please see Isolani.co.uk.

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