Sustainable Accessibility

[Gruden]

The following is the transcript of a talk given by Mark Stanton at the recent Accessibility Update for the Australian Government event in Canberra. The event was very well attended so thanks to all who came along.

For accessibility to be truly supported, an organisation has to think of it as more than a checklist. Accessibility is a complex issue that has arguably been made more complex with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2′s (WCAG2) more comprehensive approach. I believe that for accessibility to be ongoing and sustainable 3 elements are required:

The first is awareness – establishing an understanding that accessibility is an issue that needs to be addressed.

When the Web Standards Group was founded in a Sydney pub back in 2003, awareness was one of the main issues we set out to tackle. I’m very pleased to say that we’ve come a long way since then. At the grass roots, among people who build web sites for a living, awareness of accessibility is light years ahead of where it was 8 years ago.

Today Jacqui and her team are carrying the torch, doing excellent work to raise awareness at higher levels in the decision making chain.

The second element is education. What does it mean for a site to be accessible? This was also a key goal and, I think, a key success of the Web Standards Group.

With WCAG2 there is a certain amount of re-education that needs to go on, but the momentum is there and I’m confident progress will be rapid.

The final element is empathy. I believe that empathy is at the heart of good decision making, but unfortunately empathy is the least evolved of the three elements.

As the statistics that Jacqui presented show – accessibility, or a lack of accessibility, is a real issue for many Australians.

When accessibility is mentioned most people think of vision impairment, or maybe also hearing impairment. Fewer people think of common mobility impairments such as arthritis, RSI or Parkinson’s or cognitive impairments like dyslexia or memory limitations.

The sticking point with empathy is that most of us do not have a disability, we do not experience the fundamental difficulties that many have to live with every day.

So how do we overcome this? The W3C have released some draft documents called “How People with Disabilities Use the Web“. These are stories of users with a variety of disabilities and the ways in which they go about interacting online. These are a great way to begin to understand what accessibility means on the ground.

A technique I like to use is to ask people to pick up a pen in each fist and then try and use a computer or website. Obviously you can no longer use a mouse, key combinations are more difficult and your typing will be much slower.

But can you still complete the tasks you need to carry out? This physical challenge make mobility impairment real to able bodied people and helps build empathy.

As Jacqui pointed out good accessibility is also good usability and the flow-on benefits are not limited to those with disabilities. A recent survey of mature age Australians found that 68% reported having difficulties reading a page because of to size or colour of the text. Similarly with mobile devices screens are getting smaller and bandwidth is become more constrained. Good accessibility will help in these instances too.

One of the great steps forward with WCAG2 is that takes a more holistic approach, it acts as a guideline to improving the overall user experience, not just making it possible for screen readers to access content. It is, in effect, a lowest common denominator that allows more people to interact more effectively across the broad possible range of devices and contexts.

The key to good user experience, not just good accessibility, is an understanding of users and empathy for their situations.

Which brings me to Gruden.

Gruden are a digital services agency with a focus on web. Our business is to help clients use the web to achieve meaningful outcomes such as improved communications or the delivery of new tools.

We do this by providing a range of services including design, information architecture, application development, CMS implementations and strategic consulting.

Web standards underpin everything we do and accessibility is an integral part of our day to day activities. For us it’s not so much a matter of how we achieve compliance but how to achieve and maintain the optimal experience for end users.

And we believe that in order to manage accessibility on a continuing basis there are several areas that need to be addressed through out a project’s lifecycle, and they are:

• Awareness and attitude
• Personnel and training
• Infrastructure and procurement
• Solution design and development
• Testing
• Support

Let’s go through them.

It starts with awareness and attitude. The commercial imperatives mean that awareness at, and commitment from, the top down is essential. We strongly recommend that accessibility is not presented purely as a technical hurdle to be overcome, but that management is “sold to” and made aware of the value found in building solutions that are accessible, usable and appropriate for their target audience.

The next level down is staff. We are not in the business of providing recruitment advice, but when Gruden recruit people, regardless of whether they’re programmers, designers, project managers or analysts we need to be confident that they have a good understanding of the web as a platform and of how people interact with it. This obviously includes accessibility.

Our recruitment processes always includes some non-leading questions to reveal the candidates level of awareness. For designers this may be about the use of colour, for developers it may relate to the technical aspects of web standards. Whatever the role, these questions are framed to establish the level of knowledge and to ensure we recruit the right people.

The next level is infrastructure and procurement. From time to time we work with clients to either review their existing infrastructure and toolset or to advise on upcoming procurements in this area. We recommended – particularly to our government clients – that accessibility support is always included as a mandatory baseline requirement.

Accessibility is a key consideration in the design process. We consider it in-line with other essential requirements such as security, privacy, brand and maintainability. From the information architecture through to the look and feel and even through to the design of publishing workflows, we focus not only the business requirements but also end user’s needs such as accessibility.

Our testing strategy and procedures vary from project to project depending on the nature of the application and the defined quality gates. However there are some essential elements and accessibility is one of them. Accessibility testing is integrated into various stages of the design and development process from early mock ups and prototypes through to final conformance testing and involves a mix of automated tools and manual testing.

The final stage is what happens after go-live. Modern web sites and applications are dynamic in nature and constantly evolving. It is therefore critical that the work we do in the design and build stages carries over beyond the initial delivery. We provide our customers with ongoing support that can include periodic site reviews and feedback on how and when business should react to evolving accessibility best-practice.

As you can see Gruden do not just focus on point in time assessment, remediation or publishing a conformance statement. We work with business managers, communication teams, content publishers and IT to transfer knowledge and culture and to help embed accessibility into their business processes.

The Australian Government is leading the world in using the web to deliver customer-centric, equitable and transparent services.

As I talk to people in Canberra I hear about many exciting initiatives that are underway and many more on the horizon.

• The Department of Parliamentary Services are in the process of building a system to digitise and publish the audio, video and text records of all proceedings in Parliament House through their website.
• Human Services are looking to greatly improve their online services delivery and provide a consistent customer experience across Medicare, Centrelink and the rest of the portfolio.
• The Department of Immigration and Citizenship are looking to implement an online self-service portal that would allow customers to manage their visa applications from start to finish through a single browser based interface.

There is a great opportunity to embed accessibility into these projects and many more like them. And I believe that doing so will not only assist the group who rely most on web-based access government services, but will result in better outcomes for all users.

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