LSW-WebDesign

I recently was involved in a discussion among professionals preparing for a web accessibility training for the state of Alaska. I replied that we need to avoid speaking of only disabilities and also point out that we are speaking of people’s habits and preferences as well as their needs.

So the person in charge rewrote a question meant to gage their knowledge before and then after the training. What was in fact notable in this discussion was not that a change was made at my request, but the choice of words used in the rewrite. Specifically, they used the term barriers and barrier free.

Talk about a “Eureka” moment. You see, we all easily forget our beginning days in this, how the terminology we throw around today was not so clear back then. Any web person, web designer or programmer knows what navigation means and it is perfectly clear and we expect users to understand as well as it is simply that clear. But studies show that navigation is not clear to beginners and average users and that menu is a better term.

Now it seems that we in the accessibility movement have possibly forgotten our roots, that we have adopted this “Professional language” and become so use to it that we forget what others may think.

What is an accessible web site? What does the term really suggest? To me off the top and ignoring what I know is meant? it means someone is able to get to the web site. The most inaccessible site is usually accessible to the user, maybe they cannot use it but they can get to it. So I wonder if our troubles convincing people to make their sites accessible may not stem from the very terminology we choose? My web site works so it is accessible to them, so leave me alone.

Germany however used the term “Barrier free” and so that was the term I started with. Once I discovered that the “correct term” is accessibility that is what I adopted and forgot about “barriers” until it popped up again in this discussion.

Is Barriers and barrier free not more understandable?

Again, accessible is a simple true or false answer. Is your site accessible? Yes, they can get to it, next question.

But barriers, barriers demand further info.

Is your site barrier free? Hugh? Barrier free? Barrier suggests itself as a roadblock, something to be overcome. What do you mean by a road block in my site? What is there to be overcome?

Barrier free lends itself not to further movement past the subject, but to a slamming of the breaks and further investigation as to what is meant, it demands further questions and details. Suddenly we have the person’s attention.

They want visitors, usually visitors who spend money. It is easy to skip over a suggestion when you know your site is accessible? it is not so easy to skip over the idea that your web site has barriers that by it’s very term suggests something is stopping the user for fulfilling their quest and hopefully putting money I the owners pocket. Now the ears are wide open and the question is looming in the shadows, “what is stopping the user from buying my product”?

No one wants to think that they are stopping potential sales and making users overcome something. No one builds an obstacle course with mines and tank barricades between the front door and the show room & the showroom and the cash register. But that is what many web sites do and now they are open to having that pointed out. Now they want to improve their site.

So this is just a thought, but maybe we accessibility advocates have made accessibility inaccessible by a poor choice of terminology while preaching to the masses that they should use simple English as not to create problems for users. We have created problems for ourselves that make it hard for us to sell our movement.

Maybe terminology is a barrier for us as well and it is time we open ourselves to simpler and better terminology so we can have a barrier free movement.

The following points were written originally to pull my thoughts together for a accessibility briefing on the status of web sites belonging to the state of Alaska, I thought I would add them here for you to read as well.

• Alt stands for Alternative text. This means a text alternative to the information held or represented by an image. The popular misconception is that you need describe the image or say what the image is. This is not quite the point. The text is meant as an alternative to inform the user of any info they may be missing. If the image has no informative value it need not have alt text.
• The alt attribute however is required on every image. If there is no information to be shared, it may be left blank, alt=”".
• If an image has information like a “Pie chart” you would wish to offer the same info as an alt attribute. You would textually show the same info, you can decide if the fact that the image is a pie chart is of importance or not. If not, then simply add the % shown. alt=”Jueau: Rainfall 70%, Cloudy 20%, Sunshine 10%”
• You would not describe the image as in alt=”3D pie chart using the colors red, yellow and green. Green being sunny days, red rain and yellow cloudy…”
• DHSS has cases of decoration images using alt attributes. Common is alt=”bottom right corner”. Although correct, this has no informative value as it pertains only to the look of the site for visual users. In these cases having a screen reader notify the user during the flow of the information that it has reached an image representing the bottom right corner is of no importance and adds to the general “noise.” By leaving the alt in place but empty, the screen reader will skip the image and the user will either not know an image is present or will understand that the image is of no real value and they are missing nothing.
• In another case, in the Commissioners Office, a image of the Commissioner and the Governor has no alt attribute. This is of course an error and in breech of section 508. The result of this error, the effect on the user is that the name of the image will be used rather than information about the image. The user would hear “image snodgrass-sen-center.jpg” which of course has no value to them. By adding the alt attribute it will either ignore the image or read the alt text given.
• For the above image a correct alt attribute would be to describe the information in the image… not the image itself. In this case alt=”Commissioner Snuffy Smith and Governor Gomer Pile visit with seniors at the Snodgrass Senior Center on Wednesday, May 23, 2007.”, no description of the surroundings or even in what position the officials are standing in is given as it is of no value for the visually impaired.
• Again the same image, the image does however have a caption. It was from this caption that I drew the above alt text. In this case you would not want a caption and an alt text as this would result in the screen reader reading both and the information is doubled. You do not want the alt alone as the visual user will not have access to it. However the caption due to it’s positioning would be clear enough to a screen reader user that the two belong together. So in the case of captions, as there are no HTML elements to deal with captions, it is justified to leave the alt attribute blank as the caption text already describes the information of the image and you would leave the left and right specifications in place for the visual users.

So in closing, it is imperative that all images regardless are given a alt attribute, alt text should only be used if the image portraits important information. If the image is purely decorative the alt attribute is left empty and in the case of images with captions the alt attribute should be left empty.

One footnote: I discovered a interesting use for the “Longdesc” attribute in the Section508.gov FAQ:

For pictures illustrating a tone or mood you may wish to convey, a good method is to have both a 3-5 word “alt” and a long description of 1-3 sentences, or more if required. This will allow a screen reader user to access the longer description, but does not require the user to hear it every time that he/she returns to the page.

Another footnote: In her article “Reviving Anorexic Web Writing,” Amber Simmons makes a very good point about how alt text can make even decorative images more interesting and give an emotional alternitive meaning to the vision impaired.

Thoughtfully constructed alt text is valuable because it provides emotional content; it should make the reader feel something. Given a photograph of the University of Texas tower, for example, simple alt text that says, “UT tower” might not be terribly useful to someone who has never seen the tower, though it may be useful to someone who knows what the tower looks like. But alt text that says, “Evening view of UT tower aglow after a big Texas win” is better, because it is meaningful to anyone, sighted or not—it projects pride, kinship, tradition. It conveys very particular emotions using revealing language. - Amber Simmons

The following is something I wrote to get my thoughts together for a briefing on accessibility of Alaskan state web sites, I thought it worth noting here to help others perhaps better understand accessibility law.

1. Massive lack of accessibility resulting in the user not being able to use the web site at all to reach information or services.
2. Complaints made and requests to correct the issues have been ignored.

Lawsuits against the state would be made under Sec. 508 of the ADA. The only current lawsuit in progress is against the state of Texas from Feb. 2007 in which 3 state employees with visual impairments were not able to do their job which required working with Oracle Databases. Complaints were filed and software requested and nothing was done so they sued the state of Texas and Oracle for lack of accessible software under Sec. 508. This is not directly web related but shows how the system works. The state of Alaska would not be sued immediately for lack of a alt attribute. A user must complain first and then if we did not improve the site (which we would) a lawsuit could be filed.

The court would decide of the case was warranted. The legal rule of thumb seems to be whether “reasonable attempts” have been made to make the web site accessible. Failing one minor issue on some (not all) pages would likely not justify a court case. I am, however, no legal authority.

All other news worthy lawsuits have been brought against commercial sites, and as Sec. 508 does not cover commercial sites, these lawsuits in the US, and Australia under the British Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), have not been based on the web sites themselves, but on the fact that a service/product was not made available to those with disabilities in the same manner as those without. So those with disabilities were being discriminated against. Hence it is not the accessibility of the web site that was brought before the court but the discrimination against the disabled as they are not able to access the service/product over the net in the same manner as those without disabilities. The web site is not required by law to be accessible, but the service/product offered by the web site is required by law to be accessible to those with disabilities.

One final note on the past lawsuits, in all but the first web accessibility lawsuit brought against Soutwest Airlines, the web site owners have lost the case. However in the instances of Ramada and Priceline, although they lost the case, almost no changes were required of the web sites as the court agreed that doing so would be to expensive and therefore an undue bourdon on the companies, also the suit only covers accessibility for the visually impaired and not all disabilities. They are wrong for not ensuring their services are available to those with disabilities however are not required to do much to correct the problem.