Accessibility rules...

..but at what cost to usability?

I work in web and multimedia design. Bodies like the W3C have lots of great guidelines and practices to help make sure that content produced for the web is usuable, legible and in the best format it can possibly be in for the most possible people in the potential audience. All of which is great—and a positive activity I embrace. This is not a post about them—but about those who misquote them, or misinterpret their rules to make sure their projects seem like they really are accessible to pretty much everyone when in fact they are not.


The W3C offers a great benchmark for good web authoring practice. Ask any good graphic designer and they'll say a lot of what the W3C promotes in terms of desing is really just a fully formulated version of what they were doing with text on the web anyway. The guidelines make sense and are a good thing for the web in general.

Where things get muddied is when developers like ourselves are hired by clients who want to tick all the ‘W3C compliant’ boxes without really thinking about whether making everything ‘accessible’ will in fact make their project ‘usable’. Keen to be seen to be 'doing something' for [insert PC term for someone not with 100% eyesight or motor skills here], they impose blanket restrictions without thinking about how these will affect the ninety-whatever percent of people who would use it in its ‘normal’ mode. So things get compromised to the point that it stops working well for most people and acceptably for the rest — and becomes something that only works marginally for everyone. How is this better? Can anyone tell me? You shouldn't ignore minorities — but neither should you compromise the whole for them. If all sofas were designed so that the smallest of sitters could put their feet on the floor, then how comfortable would they be for the majority of sitters?

Another thing that has started to happen is that the W3C rules become something that the client uses as the ‘de?nitive guide’ to what is right and wrong with any designs you produce. One click of an eydropper and they can rubbish your efforts.. So if it doesn't tick all the boxes - ergo - it is no good. Anyone in design will tell you that although there are rules they exist as a basis for form rather than the absolute. Clients often think that throwing the W3 book at a designer is a good way of getting accessible content but they are kind-of missing the point; designers have to persistently tweak, bend, and break the rules of typography, layout, grid structure colour theory on a daily basis not only to help with legibility and form but to aid the aesthetic attractiveness of something — making someone want to read something that might be a bitter pill in a less sympathetically rendered form. Removing this layer of skill, or craft, strips things back to the bare minimum and promotes simplistic not simply elegant solutions.

Sadly - the playing of the ‘aesthetics card‘ by a designer is usually misunderstood as 'arty fluff' and not considered important when they're wielding the crudeness of the WC3 rule-book in your face. ‘It's not important...’; ‘Look! — The book says this about your colours, this about your fonts. It must be true - I read it in the W3C textbook...’

It seems people want to reinvent the wheel. Does your browser resize text? Of course it does — and if you’re someone that needs to do that you probably already know how so why have ‘bigger text‘ buttons cluttering up your interface? If your flash-based learning environment resizes based on window size — then why spend a third of your budget writing content that re-sizes to a larger size in a fixed window? If your operating system supports system-level magnification, then why retro-fit it into your applications? It's a bit of a no-brainer but we do it all the time; Rocket-science to get down to the shops.

All of this stuff is commonly asked for by clients and not really needed on any computer system built in the last decade. So why does it get asked for? Why are the commissioning people so ignorant—happy to bleed away all the money for a project solving accessibility ‘problems’ that don't need solving? All the money spent on these labour-intensive workarounds is money that could so easily be spent solving the real problem which is purposing content properly for the specific user.

I think there needs to be less of a politically correct, face-saving, faddish and binary response to the notion of accessibility in the mainstream by those who commission or edit digital content. Sprinkle in a little more trust in the skills of designers and developers too and maybe things might start to move into a time where the all-singing, all-dancing information-for-everyone utopia promised with this idealism can actually get some legs.

Only when the notion of streaming ways of delivering content so that users with specific needs get things tailored for those needs rather than shoe-horned into generic ‘able-bodied-but-with-big-text’ templates (as is most often my brief), will things start to improve. Perhaps blind people are actually really sick of listening to endless lists of button names read out in a Joshua-Falken voice? Did anyone ever ask? Or think of an alternative? Perhaps there are better audio-based ways of interfacing with a computer and retrieving information that mean they get the most efficient UI and also means that the sacrifices usually made do not impede the use of more standard interfaces for more standard users. I think I'm saying ‘One size does not fit all’.

As it is there will never be enough budget to create truly accessible multi-media for multiple types of people until the money starts getting spent on new ways of accessing content rather than simply blowing up text to unreasonable sizes or allowing the user to change a font or a colour.

Only then will a more informed way of commisioning, authoring and developing digital content for everyone become something that is truly possible.

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