Is Web Accessibility Difficult Creating Accessible Web Pages

Is Web Accessibility Difficult? Creating Accessible Web Pages Is Easy The Case Against The Motion Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN B. Kelly@ukoln. ac. uk 1

Although W 3 C is an international consortium WAI Guidelines the driving force comes from US companies. Who would gain most from international standardisation of WAI guidelines: • IT industry in countries throughout the world • Microsoft, Sun, IBM, … 2

Background In Sep 2002 a survey of the accessibility of University home pages was published. The survey made use of Bobby and reported only on compliance with WAI features which can be measured in an automated way. Despite: • The culture in UK HEIs of wishing to do a good job • The SENDA legislation (Sept 2003) • The limits of the survey (only entry points We found: • Only 4 (3 really) pages complied with WAI AA • Only 70 complied with WAI A If Web accessibility is easy, why such poor results? 3

The Tools Creating Web pages is easy - my children can do it But: • It's easy because many Web authors (but not us) use tools such as MS Word, Power. Point, … and simply save as HTML • Users don't want to be forced to change tools – they are conservative (unlike many of us) • There are significant costs in migrating to better tools (licence costs, testing, training, …) – even for open source tools • There are even bigger costs in moving to a CMS environment (sorry Andrew) 4

The Browser • W 3 C guidelines generally seem to assume that software implementations of W 3 C standards will work correctly • Sadly, this isn't true • We should have instigated a large-scale search and destroy policy on Netscape 4 (with its very buggy support for CSS which greatly hindered deployment of CSS) • Instead we hate Microsoft more than we wish to support accessibility and so we didn't do this 5

Accessibility and E-Learning Accessibility of e-Learning is probably the most difficult challenge facing us How do we make this interactive exercise interactive? Can we design a single system as usable as this? Isn't it expensive to do this? And what about graphical quizzes in which we 'obscure' answers in order to assist learning; 3 D visualisations, … 6

Workflow • I have a dozen or so Power. Point files from speakers at the workshop • I wish to make them available on the Web in an open and accessible format • I store the file & the MS-derived HTML • I can use a (currently clunky) tool to produce accessible & compliant HTML • But I'm asked for ALT tags for every image – and the software won't let me save the file until I've done this • If it's difficult for me I think it's clear this approach won't scale 7

Conclusions 8 To conclude: • Universal Web accessibility is a great idea • World peace and harmony is another great idea • But it's a myth that either ideal can be implemented simply and without cost • There is therefore a need to make priorities, make compromises and carry out risk assessment • These are legitimate issues to raise – saying them doesn't make you an uncaring Thatcherite!