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Robin Christopherson is an Accessibility consultant working for AbilityNet. Being blind, Robin is all too familiar with screenreaders and other assistive technologies. Robin presented Web Accessibility and Disability - A Practical Introduction on day one of @media 2005.

Robin threw us into the deep right away, getting back on what was discussed previously in Joe's session: what is the definition of accessibility? "Joe Clark did a much better one," he says, promptly moving on to what standard you should use for accessibility instead. Robin explains that it's very important to go all the way when doing usability testing and, in particular, disabled user testing.

Usability testing is often done using a grandmother and her dog, but it would be better if you have a grandmother with mild vision problems. A dog that has difficulty using a mouse would be beneficial.

One of the problems of Accessibility is that in most cases, the testing comes at the end and is done insufficiently. Not only is that - obviously - a poor way of taking care of accessibility, it's also a shame. A DRC report showed an interesting and important aspect to accessibility: it improves usability for non-disabled people, too.

Keeping accessibility in mind from the start of development greatly helps make the end result be more usable for all visitors, not just disabled ones. The DRC report showed a 35% usability bonus, even. Test groups were able to complete tasks in 36 seconds on average on accessible websites, as opposed to 52 seconds on inaccessible sites.

Practical accessibility

Being blind, Robin gave us the most valuable display of practical accessibility, or rather, what you get when you're blind and go to inaccessible sites.

Arsenal.com

The first example was text scaling, and the target was Arsenal.com. The fonts were specified in pixels and as a result, users of Internet Explorer have become unable to resize the text. Visually impaired people have no means of scaling it up to make things easier to read.

Something that visually impaired people prefer is a high-contrast Windows theme, as it makes text easier to read for them. However, using such a theme on the Arsenal site made all links dark blue on black, thus very difficult to read.

Disney.co.uk

The second example was the British Disney website, Disney.co.uk. One technique that visually impaired people often use is magnification. Screen magnifiers take a portion of the screen and display it at twice the size (for instance). A problem you'll encounter with such techniques was sampled well on the Disney site. The menu consisted of small images with anti-aliased text, but when using a magnifier on them, the text was still very hard to read. The big problem with images containing text as opposed to text itself is that users of the site cannot change them. They can't turn them into larger, high-contrast images, something that they can and often want to do with normal text.

The same problems occur when using flash for text. But Flash has innumerable accessibility issues, which we'll cover later.

Amazon.co.uk

The Amazon website has a large focus on usability. They put great effort into making it a very easy to use and easy to navigate website, even though they absolutely stuff it with information. However, when it comes to accessibility for screenreaders, Amazon is a great example of how it should not be done.

The site makes use of images for the main sections of the site, but they're done in such a poor way that they are completely useless to any blind person. Navigating through the menu, Robin turned up the volume of his screenreader so that the audience could hear the result. Instead of hearing the labels for what all of us were seeing (books, electronics, music, and so forth) we heard completely incomprehensible babbling. What happened was this: the images used for the menu had no alt="" attribute specified, which should have contained the information these images represented, and as a result the screenreader chose to read out the actual link itself. These links are dreadful, to say the least, and convey no useful information whatsoever.

Robin then showed us the same page but with proper alt="..." attributes specified on the images, and suddenly things were read out normally: books, electronics, music... it was something you could actually use.

This demonstrated perfectly how even the most simple things that you can do for accessibility can make a world of difference. In this case, it took only a single alt attribute to fix a severe navigational problem. Accessibility is easy, it's not rocket science.

The hearing impaired

People who have been born without useful hearing use sign language, such as the British Sign Language. The BSL has a different vocabulary, however, resulting in words being used that the BSL doesn't have. An example that Robin highlighted in their working with the BBC was "marinade." For such situations, glossaries are the answer.

Guidelines for accessible practices

For visually impaired users:

Avoid using graphics for text

Avoid using Flash for text

Use non-serif fonts for text. Exceptions are very large headings, which work well with serif fonts

Use simple, uncomplicated layouts. Too much information makes everything hard to find

Don't use only color to convey important information (such as links). Users may have their own colors specified, which override yours

Offer a high-contrast version of the site. For more details, see Zoom layouts by Joe Clark

For blind users:

Add proper alternative text to images via the alt attribute

Warn about unusual behaviour: Using "opens in new window" title attributes will inform users of what's going to happen. The same applies for links to content that isn't a standard document (such as a ZIP or PDF file)

Provide accessible alternatives for Flash content

Provide transcripts of video

Use Javascript only to enhance behaviour for those who can use it, without making it inaccessible to those who can't. More on this in Ian Lloyd's and Jeremy Keith's presentations

For deaf users:

Provide a glossary of uncommon terms that may well not exist in the BSL

Caption video and/or provide transcripts

At this point, Curt Holst was given the floor for a demonstration of assistive technologies of all kinds.

Disability beyond sight or hearing

A lot of people have motor difficulties, not to a great extent but problematic enough when using a computer. Ordinary keyboards and mice can prove to be very frustrating or painful to use (in general, even, not just for people with motor difficulties). A large range of alternative devices have been made to aid these people. One such technology is voice recognition, which is becoming more and more popular.

Curt showed us the Disney site again and tried to navigate through the menu using only a keyboard. This proved horribly difficult as there was no logical tab order on the links. After two menu items, the focus jumped to a search form, thereafter back to the menu again. So instead of using the keyboard, he activated voice recognition and summoned up a mouse grid. This is effectively a grid of 9 sections, 3 by 3, and by calling out the number the mouse grid focuses onto the appropriate area. You will then receive a new grid inside the chosen section, again containing 3 by 3 blocks, and on it goes. Eventually, when you've narrowed it down satisfactory, you can say "Click" and the software will perform a mouse click for you on the specified location.

While effective, it's obvious that this technique is very slow. Additionally, it points out how large clickable areas for links are more accessible. Not just for people using a mousegrid or people who have difficulty holding a mouse still when clicking, but for everyone - larger areas are just more convenient. Curt showed this very effectively via a "text only" link that was very hard to click even for someone without any disabilities.

A real eye-opener. Err...

In the end, Robin's presentation was probably the most enlightening of the entire conference. Given the high expertise in the audience, I think people learned most from this one by far.

Knowing about accessibility is one thing, so is using web standards to the best of your extent and keeping accessibility in mind when using techniques such as image replacement. Seeing the difficulties that disabled people have with websites and knowing that they have to go through that on an everyday basis is, suffice to say, totally different.

Everyone was completely captivated during the entire presentation. It was inspiring to see so much focused interest on the subject. And when Robin's screenreader failed to read out the labels of a submenu (The Text size submenu in Internet Explorer), all of the audience was thinking out loud "That's the one, Robin, hit enter now!" but everybody was too wrapped up in the presentation to actually say anything. Incredible!

The most important message from the presentation, along with the Question round's answers and discussions, is that accessibility is truly important to incorporate, but it should not come at the cost of usability for non-disabled people. Basically, don't reverse the roles of disabled and not-disabled, but make sure that both groups can use your site equally well.

For a transcript of the session, please see isolani.co.uk.

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