w1b a11y, Day 3 and wrapup

A smaller crowd today, and a shorter session.

We got a demo from the blind Ph.D. Google guy of his audio desktop, which is a collection of scripts that run the gamut from API-based extensibility of sites to old-school screen-scraping. Basically, he said, out of necessity, he started doing the stuff Greasemonkey does now, about five years before Greasemonkey started doing it. He showed how direct access to content is vastly superior to parsing through a visually-oriented site using a browser rendered by a screenreader, and there's no doubt to me that he's right about that. The problem, for now, is that he has such a poweruser setup that it really isn't useful to blind folks who aren't Ph.D.s at Google.

After the coffee break, we had a free-for-all session. Several of the attendees had websites that we tested, on the big screen, using the Window-Eyes screenreader. This was useful on several levels. First, coming on the heels of the audio desktop demo, it was further proof that direct content beats the clunky screenreader, hands down, and the poor Window-Eyes vendor's protestations didn't help his case any. It's not that his screenreader is such an awful screenreader, as screenreaders go; it's that screenreaders seem like totally the wrong paradigm. I can't help but think of the difference between Signing Exact English and ASL.

The website testing was a bit of déjà vu for me. One after another, websites created by really passionate people, who believed they had really rigorously followed accessibility standards, flunked out when tested with a real live screenreader. Heck, even one of the organizers of the conference, who does these kinds of standards for a living, was surprised by some of the screenreader's behaviors. The same thing happened to me when I, a really passionate person who believed I had really rigorously followed accessibility standards, took my web app to a beta test with a real live blind user and real live JAWS.

I had a lightbulb moment during today's testing session. It isn't just that the accessibility standards are out-of-date, though they are. We are really dealing with two totally different issues, both of which have their analogues in the sighted web. There's standards-based accessibility, the traditional kind, and then there's accessible usability. If you think about the early web, it's clear that these were different things for the sighted world, too, and that one lagged behind the other.

Standards are pretty concrete. Well, OK, less so these days, but still. The problem is, nobody follows them, and the screenreaders know that nobody follows them, so the screenreaders have no choice but to adopt workarounds, which break the standards. (Déjà vu again? Isn't this what some of the early (sighted) browser wars were about?)

But beyond that, standards are not enough. Just like in the sighted web, a perfectly standards-compliant site may be incomprehensible to users; in the case of accessibility, may be incomprehensible to users with screenreaders. Poor organization, badly-designed widgets, counter-intuitive behaviors are not usable. And if a site isn't usable, it isn't accessible, no matter how "compliant" it is.

I doubt very much that I'm the first person to think of accessible usability. It sounds like some of the other (sighted) attendees at this week's conference figured out something along these lines themselves. Screenreader users probably thought of it a long, long time ago.

The problem is, like sighted usability, accessible usability is bound to be much more abstract, less understood, more widely variable among users, and generally debatable for years to come.

And that's even before we attack the paradigm.

This stuff is hard.

w1b a11y, Day 2

Well, the most important thing I did this morning was spill coffee on the Ph.D. blind research scientist from Google. You may safely assume that this wasn't how I planned our meeting to go.

After lunch I found a moment to grovel for forgiveness and he was most gracious, so I may survive the rest of the conference.

My appearance as a panelist was fine, uneventful, and thankfully occurred before the coffee incident. We were supposed to be speaking about accessibility management, which is supremely ironic considering that I'm not a manager and that I engaged in legendary power struggles with my previous manager, often about accessibility.

Anyway, I was delighted to be able to work in my counter to yesterday's web zealots:

The question of "how to be accessible" is not difficult. We all already know how to be accessible. It's very simple. Design for Lynx, with no presentation. Use plaintext, semantic tags, maybe an

---

. Done.

No?

The real question is, newer and richer web technologies are always out there, doing that "emerging" thing that they do. We want to learn them, use them, maybe even help create them. Our users want them. Our bosses want us to provide them to our users. "Don't do that" isn't a strategy, for many reasons. And so the reason we're all here is to figure out how to render more interesting things than plaintext, more interestingly, while remaining accessible.

I was delighted that this point went over more or less well with the group.

It was supported by a back-reference to one of yesterday's presenters, the guy from IBM/W3C who talked about how WCAG 2.0 is moving toward technology-independence; rather than banning certain things (like, helpfully, all of Javascript or all tables), the emphasis is on guidelines to providing accessible content with all technologies.

Today's presenters have been wonderfully concrete: a guy from Adobe and a guy from Yahoo!, both describing actual techniques and strategies for actual web development. Exactly what I'm looking for. Plus, the one from Yahoo! used "a11y" in his slides. Rock on!

w1b a11y, Day 1

This week I'm attending an invite-only conference on web accessibility. It's sponsored by a UW center, but I still had to apply to get in. I was very pleased to be selected and tomorrow I'm going to be a panelist!

This event is formatted like a workshop/working group, rather than a lecture series (I was going to say "than a conference", but conferring is exactly what we're doing). The purpose of the conference, and the topic of the questions when I applied, involved accessibility for emerging web technologies, rich media, etc.

Our group discussions got off to, in my opinion, a rocky start. Over a "working lunch" (our host explained that the NSF won't pay for meals unless they are "working"), I ended up at a table with two good folks who I can only describe as web religious zealots. I think in my past I've been this kind of zealot, and wow, I must have been incredibly annoying. I deserve to be stuck at a table with people like this occasionally. I have one in my working group, and our table picked up one from another group, and they fed off of each other.

Anyway, he and the other zealot very quickly concluded that the solution to accessibility of rich content is that nobody needs rich content anyway, and if we just stick with the old proven web standards then accessibility is no problem.

Fortunately, the majority of us here don't feel that way, that being why we're here. The discussions the rest of the day were much more productive. Our afternoon presentation covered WCAG 2.0, which I like the sound of even if A List Apart doesn't.

Let me also say the food at Hotel Ändra is superb, even better than the food at Microsoft (which was good). This is my second conference this year, but I haven't managed to get out of western Washington yet. Working on it.