There seems to be a bit of buzz these days about accessibility: Andy Budd discusses legislating accessibility in
Accessibility and the Law; Malarky ponders the role of government in
Accessibility and a Society of Control. So I thought I'd chime in. I tend to agree with Joe Clark when he comments that "accessibility only happens in large quantity if you make people do it." It seems though that when we're creating the mental models of our users, we often tend to forget the accessiblity requirement. Where I work, that was also the case early on but the issue became front and centre as we have a faculty member and a few students who have accessibility requirements. To answer our needs we developed UNB's LUCI - a tool to work initially as a temporary measure to make our websites more accessibile, more readable to screen readers - but in fact we may just continue to use it as our overall accessibility solution. UNB's LUCI is more than text only, the interface allows the user to adjust their viewing preferences (larger text, greater contrast, increased line height). We released it as open source so feel free to try it and by all means use it if it can be of help to you.
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Can you give me three examples of how my "ideas are [a] little far away from the real world"?
Your Luci software would seem to be a nice way of selecting zoom layouts, for example. Since we seem to agree on that concept, how am I not "real-world"?
Joe,
First of all, I am all the way with you when it comes to accessibility. I write about accessibility myself. But sometime, we (designers, developers etc.) have very little control over what going around us. For instance,
* Prof. A is 55 years old. He’s been around for long time. He found out that he can "design" a website for his department with MS Frontpage. He loves sounds on his page and also things that fly around the page. When, WebTeam offers its service to the department (to fix the site), he gets really upset, he doesn't want us to touch it. We say OK and ask him if he at least put a link to LUCI (until he retires).
* Most "webmaster" don't have high ranking in a company. Their boss doesn't understand what accessibility is and he doesn't care. Webmaster tries to teach him, he explains. The boss says we don't have time for this right now. Webmaster puts an invisible-to-eyes link into page called LUCI (just for now).
* Designers in other countries don't have any clue about accessibility. I write about accessibility regularly (not about LUCI, about accessibility). My recent article was about accessibility and reading the comments was real eye-opener. Someone said, "Who cares about %1 in Turkey", someone said, "Amazon doesn't care why should I".
So in this picture, who you rather wait until these thick-heads get the idea or come up with something that they can use (until they get it.)
Maybe you are not [a] little far away from the real world. Everyone else is. But can we wait for them?
P.S. I do not use LUCI on my website. I do not need it. I try my best to make my site accessible.
June 21, 2005 10:03 AM | Reply
"Can you explain why UNB thinks that text-only renderings have anything at all to do with accessibility?"
-- Joe Clark
Answer: We don't think "text-only" is accessibility nor Luci is a perfect solution.
I love his passion even though sometimes his ideas are little far away from the real world. We (web designers) try our best to make Internet more accessible for everyone but the most websites are managed by people who don't have any idea about html, css, accessibility, usability etc. or who don't care about these stuff.