- From: (unknown charset) Charles F. Munat <coder@acnet.net>
- Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1999 16:17:37 -0600
- To: (unknown charset) <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
As a sort of New Year's resolution, I have decided to get this off my chest. Although I find the WAI-IG list to be a very useful source of information on accessibility and, often, a variety of other issues, there are three things about this list I really don't like. Rather than make one very long post, I decided to do three separate posts to make it easier to thread any discussion that follows. #1 The first thing I dislike about this list, or at least about a common thread on it, is a piece of propaganda that irks me every time I see it. I am referring to the near constant mantra that building an accessible site doesn't really take much extra effort. Before deluging me with replies as to how I must be doing it incorrectly, please read on. The simple reality of web site design is that most designers are self-taught. Some come in from related fields, such as programming or design, others just decided that this was what they wanted to do. Upon making this decision (or, in many cases, sort of sliding sideways into it), some took courses at a local college, or even chose to pursue a degree in web design or its equivalent. My guess is, however, that most just picked up a book and the tools and started doing it. In my case I came with no real programming or design background. I started out with FrontPage, graduated to HotMetal Pro, ditched it in favor of Notepad (believe it or not), and ended up using HomeSite/Cold Fusion Studio. I bought a few books, did a lot of research on-line, and basically learned by doing. I suspect that there are a great many designers (if not most) who took a similar path. Somewhere along the line I learned about accessibility issues, joined this list, and began looking seriously at the accessibility of my sites. Now, in some ideal future, accessible site design might be taught simply as the way you design a site. But here and now, much if not most of the web design material on the net and in books pays scant if any attention to accessibility issues. Thus the need for this list and the WAI itself. So what extra effort is required? First, there is a little extra effort required to add Alt tags, Abbr tags, indicate the language and direction, add accesskeys if you believe in them, add the variety of new table attributes that make tables more accessible, etc. In fact, this effort alone is, in my opinion, at lot more than most people on this list are willing to admit. But the effort required to actually code a site so it is accessible is only one small part of the effort involved in making web sites accessible. Another significant effort is that required to think in accessible terms. Now, this might not be too difficult if you yourself are a person with a disability and are forced to confront accessibility issues every day. But for those of us temporarily abled, it requires a real effort to try to think in terms of accessibility when designing a site. For example, if you are not colorblind, then it does not naturally occur to you that identifying elements in text by color is not accessible to all users. You have to train yourself to think this way. Trying things like accessing your site blindfolded or with the monitor off, using a text-only browser, turning off the audio, or whatever, can help, but the point here is that all this takes effort: a very significant amount of effort. Which brings me to third effort required, and this is by far the most significant. It takes a lot of time and effort to UNLEARN bad web design and LEARN accessible design. And unless you restrict your sources for new information, everything you find on the web has to be double-checked to ensure that you aren't learning a new way to make your site less accessible. And just when you think you've got it, you discover that the rules have changed, there's a new, better way to do it, and it's time to do some more learning. That time spent researching, learning, experimenting, testing, fixing, retesting, etc. is a VERY significant amount of time for me. And I find it hard to believe that I am the only web designer stupid enough to have gone about learning about accessibility this way, so I must assume that a lot of designers have had similar experiences, or, more likely, have just given up. I think that this list would do much better by concentrating on ways to make it faster and easier to both learn how to design accessible sites and to actually design them, and less time proclaiming that it doesn't really take any extra effort. Considering how much time and effort I've put into learning about accessibility (and still being far from an expert), I look upon these claims as simply insulting. A related common claim is that making sites accessible does not impede creativity. This, too, is largely bunk. I can't count the number of times that I've come up with an idea for a clever use of HTML or JavaScript or whatever that would make for a very interesting site. But then I ask, is this accessible? And more often than not, the answer is, sadly, no. To give but one example, the site http://www.fray.com has done some really clever work with frames. Is their site accessible? Ha. Not a chance. Could they work around it? Probably, but not achieving quite the same effect. I am not advocating creative, inaccessible sites. But there are times when there is just no way to make an idea work on an accessible site and a choice must be made. And to pretend that that choice never occurs is disingenuous, in my opinion. Yes, the site can still be made interesting, exciting, interactive (whatever that means), etc. and be made accessible, but insisting that a site be accessible does result in trade-offs for the designer in terms of his or her freedom to play with the code. And while I generally choose accessible over an interesting but inaccessible idea, I suspect that a lot of designers just say to hell with accessibility and do what they want to do. In fact, there are sites out there advocating this kind of no-holds-barred creativity that have absolutely nothing to say about accessibility. I'm not saying that that is good or bad, just that it's a fallacy to think that anything is possible (given the current technology) within an accessible framework. Wow. Already I feel 33 1/3% better. Charles Munat Puerto Vallarta
Received on Saturday, 2 January 1999 19:01:14 UTC