Joe Clark is a Toronto based accessibility consultant and journalist renowned for not pulling punches. He is also the author of the book “Building Accessible Websites”. In April 2003, he spoke to Made For All about the state of accessibility. Interview by Made For All editor, Tim Roberts.
Joe, in a nutshell, how did you first become involved in web-development, and why did your attention turn to web accessibility?
That seems to be lost to the mists of time. I’ve spent about a third of my life online and can barely remember the dim prehistory when I didn’t have E-mail. Then circa 1994, I downloaded the earliest browsers and surfed what passed for the Web at that time. I think it wasn’t until 1995 or 1996 that I signed up for a commercial E-mail account– I had been a guest on someone else’s Unix box– and it included Webspace.
Thus did my journey begin.
You wouldn’t believe the complete crap I posted on the Web back then. Luckily for us all, it simply does not exist anymore.
I’d always been interested in accessibility (I can legitimately say “always”– it’s been nearly 25 years). Back in 1996, WGBH in Boston ran a contest to develop a symbol for accessible Web sites– quite an awful idea, and with rather dreadful results from a graphic-design standpoint, but that was where I first learned of the whole issue. (The pages that were posted for that contest also seem not to exist anymore. The issue is still ongoing, though.)
Throughout your career, have you noticed any great changes in accessibility methods, or are they still based around a set of very strong, unchanged priniciples?
I don’t think there are *enough* principles in accessibility. At best you find the kind of high-level or generalized principle that people with disabilities deserve and have a legal right to equivalent access to goods, services, information, entertainment, and the like. But how does that help you design an accessible Web site?
Web accessibility is seen as more of a technical issue– “use alt texts in every img element”– rather than a design goal. If we had a really good set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines– there is some chance that the 2.0 version will be technically solid and enduring– then we could develop a set of design principles that would shepherd the interpretation of those guidelines. For the last several months I have been boring people left, right, and centre with my insistence that design (let’s call it visual design, but that’s not the only kind) be held to a high standard on accessible Web sites. Accessibility advocates have been pestering Web designers to work at their level for years; now that the message is getting through, accessibility advocates have to begin working at *designers’* level.
Do you think as developers we need to be more aware about the characteristics of certain disabilities, or is it safe just to trust what guidelines and standards tell us. Are there any important areas where you feel current standards and guidelines are lacking?
Pretty much everyone assumes that accessibility equals blind. That’s certainly the group that needs the biggest boost; the Web *is* visual. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people need almost no accommodation on the Web; the Web is mostly silent. Someone with a mobility impairment, who finds it inconvenient to use the mouse or keyboard, or whose adaptive technology makes it tedious to do so, merits much more attention than people have been giving so far. (Navigation becomes the big issue then. You need to use skip-navigation links and a few other mechanisms to make it convenient to get around a Web page.)
Advocates of accessibility for learning-disabled people are now much more voluble on the various accessibility mailing lists, and I’m sure the Web Accessibility Initiative will eventually come out with plausible recommendations that won’t overthrow the Web as we know it; the Web is a medium of pictures and text, which people with certain learning disabilities have trouble understanding. But this group may never be significantly accommodated. It may never be possible to make the Web as easy to use and understand as it can be made for blind or mobility-impaired people
Misuse or omittance of the alt attribute is often cited as the most common web accessibility problem In your experience, what other common mistakes are the biggest burden to users with disabilities.
Lousy HTML. I have softened my hardline stance on valid HTML; I think tiny validation errors are inconsequential, but tag soup has just *got* to go. Learn to use headings, lists, and other structures.
Difficult navigation. I don’t care if you use tables for layout or not (they were never banned, and they’re not as terrible as CSS absolutists insist), but if you’ve got a zillion links in a column or row, you need to make it possible to skip the links.
In an ideal world, it would be practicable to caption and audio-describe videoclips. It isn’t. Maybe someday it will be, at which point we’re going to start insisting on those accessibility features.
I would say another common mistake is rushing into accessibility without taking time to let the dust settle in one’s mind. There are a lot of techniques that are not obvious, or with non-obvious exceptions. If you’re new to the field, you might be tempted to send mail to a site owner telling them they’re making a mistake when in fact they actually chose an unusual approach that works. An example would be a photograph with alt=”" that is immediately followed by a plain-text caption for that photo– the sort of thing you’d find at a newspaper site, for example. alt=”" for a photo technically violates the spec, but the plain-text caption fulfills the same function.
By the same token, don’t take the word of accessibility checkers as gospel. (All of them seem to have human first names– Bobby, Cynthia– that make them sound like transvestite hostesses at gay bars.)
In your book Building Accessible Websites, you say: “The true reason to design for accessibility is greed.” Can you qualify this statement with an argument that would help the eager developer convince his client or employer to focus on the accessibility of their site?
“Greed” does not refer to money. It refers to having everything at once– full standards compliance, the highest calibre of graphic design, and excellent accessibility.
As an argument for recalcitrant employers, I would propose accessibility as part of a suite of standards-compliant practices– valid code, usability testing, and visual appeal– that are generally easy to attain and that will pay off in the long run with reduced maintenance costs, among other benefits.
Should the laws that govern accessible web sites spread further into the commercial sphere? Is a wider scope for the legal obligation to be accessible on the web inevitable?
Various laws already *do* apply to “the commercial sphere.” The Disability Discrimination Act in the U.K. almost certainly applies to commercial sites, as does the different law with the same name in Australia. Provincial, federal, and territorial human-rights legislation in Canada applies to for-profit companies. The day will eventually come when the Americans with Disabilities Act, which everyone seems to fixate upon, will be proven to apply to the Web.
Now, the fact that few, if any, complaints or lawsuits have been filed is beside the point. You may never have gotten a speeding ticket in your life, but you drive the speed limit because that’s the law. Or you drive above the speed limit and live with the risk of getting a ticket. Similarly, businesses can accept reality and provide accessibility up front– the wise businesses will do so, at least– or they can wait around for a specific legal order. I strongly discourage the latter approach. Any kind of judgement or settlement that requires accessibility will be resented, and the company involved might provide only the most minimal and perfunctory compliance. Or they’d actively retaliate, using alt=”alt text as required by ADA lawsuit” as the alternative text in every single graphic.
Lawsuits and complaints are a necessary component of the armamentarium that people with disabilities have at their disposal. I have filed accessibility-related complaints myself (mostly to the CRTC, the Canadian broadcasting regulator). I just don’t think people should either sit around and wait for them to be filed, or particularly fear them. I feel that complaints and litigation are weapons we should have but not have to use.
Amazon recently produced their first “Accessible” version of their site. Do you think the big web players are still letting the side down in terms of being accessible?
Well, the allegedly-accessible Amazon subpage is the model *not* to follow.
Text-only is not accessible, and separate is not equal. It’s that simple!
(The Amazon Access page doesn’t even return the same results. And the punchline? The example I keep using– searching for the movie Zentropa by title alone fails on the Amazon Access site but works on the *real* page and even on the text-only site– is still true!)
I used to hold the opinion that “big Web players” simply needed to follow all the same Web-accessibility standards other people did, but then I learned a bit more about Web applications, which often cannot be made genuinely accessible without reprogramming and recompiling (and re-testing) them. Nonetheless, for a site that doesn’t run customized Web applications, there is nothing special about a big Web site when it comes to accessibility, at least if we are not envisaging a retrofit of thousands or millions of “legacy” pages. For template-based sites, accessibility can be instantly improved for many of those pages, but a conservative approach would improve the site’s homepage and all future additions to the site.
Finally, as someone who has been involved with accessibility for many years, do you see a major improvement in accessibility, or is there still much more to be done?
In broad terms, accessibility has improved beyond any reasonable expectation in the 20 years I’ve been following the field. It still isn’t good enough, but it’s way better than before, and is certain to continue to improve. I never would have imagined, 20 years ago when I watched my first captioned TV show, that I would one day turn on an ordinary pay-TV movie channel and watch porn with captions. (Not my style, but there you go.)
Accessibility: You’ve come a long way, baby.