accessibility - are you conerned about your site?
I feel it is important to explore the issues around Accessibility. It is through the process of discussion that we can all play a small part in achieving the goal of a future internet that is available to all.
There is a lot of talk about making your website accessible. The reality is that public information / services sites are the primary candidates for accessibility, and quite rightly so. These include educational institutes, local councils and health authorities. If your site is selling a product or service and you make no effort to make it accessible then long before the spectre of legal action you will simply miss customers and money.
Most of JeliNet's websites are not optimised for Accessibility. Why?
The reasons are simple. Most customers are not asking for accessibility - indeed many ask for products that can't be made accessible, such as full flash presentations. Hybrid sites can't easily either, unless text only options are created, which defeats the point which is to make the same product accessible to all. Many of the older websites I've inherited can't be made accessible either without a re-design, which no one is about to pay for.
I also admit that accessibility is an issue that I'm increasingly addressing. That's being honest. Some designers are ahead of me, and many are behind. I'm working hard to ensure that as many aspects as possible are incorporated into my work by default.
Who pays the bills calls the shots . . .
Some claim that accessible sites need not cost more, but they do. Accessibility is as much about attention to detail as design. For example, if your site has 100 images (including the less obvious ones) either you do add ALT tags or you don't. Adding them is simple enough but it takes more time than just ignoring them. This simple process, one of many, takes time and therefore costs money. It can be ignored and the site works fine for most people. So one has to ask - who pays for this?
Web design is highly competitive. Costs are always being hammered down by market forces. Perceived costs are lower than actual costs, which in part is a reaction to the awful reputation the industry had for over priced product up until a few years ago.
Web design software is sold with the tag line 'build sites more easily and more quickly than ever', even to us professional folks! It still allows web designers to build wonderfully inaccessible sites because Triple A is very much a hand-coding attention to detail process. Attempts have been made to automate the process however the software is very expensive which brings us back to the bottom line . . . cost.
Design is back in the hands of the users - templates, social networking and blogs
Hosting companies provide templates that enable anyone to build a site for a few pounds. Forget accessibility with those! The power to build the web is increasingly back in the hands of the users, as it was in the early days of simple html. Except that now the users have very professional highly-styled designs that are hosted as part of a sophisticated database driven application. Even personal web spaces, or blog sites can been highly styled, but they are not necessarily accessible.
Large sectors of the industry are aggressively marketing non-accessible websites. This is the industry now. This sector is growing, especially in e-commerce sites for small businesses. Every day a new site is added and many are out of the hands of the web designers who want to make the net better.
What about Mobiles and other devices?
For several years since mobile technology ventured into the world of the internet, designers have been converting sites over to this limited medium. The best sites will probably still be those built with accessibility in mind - especially considering the limits of navigation using a small interface.
The investors in this technology have not waited until the net is made fully accessible. They have developed browsers to meet the market. Arguably this is another set back for accessibility because the need to address the subject has, again, been placed on the commercial back-burner.
Surely there will be a flurry of legal cases to make site owners accountable?
So far, no - in the future, possibly. English Law is one of precedent so even though the law is in place it has yet to be tested extensively in the Courts. To date, a couple of potential cases have been settled out of Court by the design agencies promptly fixing their sites in return for anonymity. That was the right thing to do, however the test will come when a website owner decides to challenge the complaint through the Courts. It also has to be remembered that users have had since 1999 to make legal challenges.
