Oh, the inaccessible humanity!

Background

I've recently started a new position as an accessibility tester. This means testing web-based software and web pages against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/).

An obsession???

I've been told by my lovely other half that I'm a bit obsessed by WCAG. It's hardly surprising, really... many of the guidelines in WCAG are applicable to me in one manner or another! (I should point out that by no means all of them, and some of them that are applicable you might be surprised by!).

It's all about the audience!

But it's also a question of caring for others. If a web designer fails to take into account people with various access issues, they're effectively cutting off those people from using your site, meaning that what you want to convey to them is missed - but just to those people.

Exclusion is a pretty big experience that many people with disabilities have, frequently, regularly and often very subtly. Consider a wheelchair user, who has to use a "side" entrance to access a ramp to enter a building. It might take them an extra couple of minutes when this happens... but if this happens many times in the course of a day, that time adds up. And that's time these people are (in our terms) "unproductive" - but this isn't their fault (it's ours because our culture did not consider just putting said ramps in place at the front of buildings to begin with!)

The same is true of web-based information. If your site comes at the top of google rankings for a particular set of search terms, but some users can't use your site, these users have to go back and find other resources (probably the second-top ranking site). If that site also suffers from the same problem of inaccessibility, that can be repeated.

If no-one bothers, then how do these people access that information? Given the big shift to on-line publication, these people will end up with the digital equivalent of stairs at the front of a building!

OK, it's about you, too!

You can see from this, that it's about you, the web author, as well. If you have a pay-per-view site, but some users can't use your site, you're cutting off a portion of your potential revenue stream.

Some think this is not a big deal. But apparently it is, as this example demonstrates (for the record, I neither endorse nor dis-endorse any of the companies listed).

An example: Paypal and "bootstrap"

The people at Twitter make a web page framework called "bootstrap". Out-of-the-box bootstrap is not WCAG compliant... and while it can be made kind-of compliant, it is difficult to do so (lots of things to override, modify, etc., for it all to happen).

Paypal wanted to use bootstrap. Most of their competitors also use bootstrap. This means that the vast majority of on-line sales are not able to be accessed by, for example, vision-impaired people.

Paypal have created their own bootstrap "fix". It is mostly WCAG compliant - it has some bits needing to be ironed out, but it is considerably better than native bootstrap. It's cost them a considerable amount of investment to do so... but their sales projections are about 10% higher than would otherwise be the case: this system gives them a significant competitive advantage! The investment will pay for itself in about a year or so.

On-line examples

I often make use of code from the net in my projects. If someone has solved the problem already - and is freely making their code available for use! - why re-invent the wheel?

However, a very large proportion of these examples don't include accessibility considerations (I'm talking PHP, JavaScript, CSS and HTML in particular here). Which means they haven't really solved the problem.

My response?

I'm going to re-invent the wheel. With accessibility considered.

I'm going to start publishing some updated examples and some (in particular PHP) modules that will help make sites to not be inaccessible.

Note I'm not saying that it will make your site accessible! Some guideline rules (e.g. 2.1.2: "no keyboard trap") cover the entirety of the page, so just dropping a module or two into the middle of it won't make the page accessible.

What these modules will do is to ensure that the places where they are used will meet the requirements as much as possible.

Oh, and each module will also have a list of sufficient techniques that they satisfy (in case you wish to make a conformance claim).