Accessibility on the Web
For many disabled people, access to the World Wide Web and a computer equipped with adaptive technology is literally life-transforming; providing a route to a more independent life and access to a rich array of information, news and a multitude of on-line communities. This chapter provides an introduction to the issues surrounding accessible information on the World Wide Web and makes the case for ensuring that no-one is excluded from the Web due to thoughtless or misguided Web design practices.
The Internet and Information Providers
Imagine for the sake of argument, that you are employed in the field of ‘information provision’. More specifically you are employed to provide information directly to disabled people; information relating to all sorts of services, entitlements, and local resources. You name it, you are going to be asked to provide it.
Now you have been doing this job for a few years, long enough to be acutely aware that it’s a difficult job. There are problems to be addressed and decisions to be made about how you solve those problems. For a start your information has to be accessible, it’s got to be continually updated, stored in a way that it can be easily retrieved, and you’ve have got to spend time publicizing your service. And on top of all that you have got to respond to all the enquiries that your publicity has generated.
Each of these areas is a tall order in itself. For example: the information you have to provide must be accessible. Sounds simple, if you say it quick, but in practice it is very difficult. What do we mean when we say that we want to provide accessible information?
What is meant by Accessible Information?
Perhaps you should be providing all your information in large text leaflets so that people who have a visual impairment can actually read them. That’s a good start and shouldn’t be too difficult. You are aware of course that there are lots of disabled people who’s first language is not English (you support equal opportunities of course), perhaps you should be providing information in a variety of different languages. How many different languages?
And there are plenty of people people who don’t read at all, maybe you need to provide the information in audio format. Although not everybody wants to have to listen to audio—there are some who could read the information fine if only you could provide it in printed form with the correct contrast between the background colour and text colour. And then there are folk who prefer it in braille form or for that matter the people who could understand it if you provided it in some sort of picture form.
That’s just the start, access to information and services is not just about getting information down on paper or onto an audio tape. How are folk going to find out about this information? i.e. where it is, why it’s relevant to them, how do they go about getting it. And by the way, is the building you work in accessible?
Here’s another question. Why am I going on about this when what we are supposed to be doing is learning about how to use the internet?
It will be no surprise to you that what I am suggesting is that the Internet is a tool which can be used to help solve at least some of those problems—particularly those related to making information accessible—with less effort and cost for you the information provider than would usually be the case. This is true whether you are providing information to disabled people or for that matter anyone else who has access to the Internet.
When you provide information as pages on the World Wide Web(WWW or Web for short) you don’t have to worry about providing a separate version with bigger text, or a particular text/background colour combination. The person reading on their web browser can decide for themselves what size they want the text to be or the colour which would make reading it easier. If they have a screen reader they can get it in audio format and it is even possible to have the information ‘interpreted’ so that it can be printed out in a braille. (See HTML to Braille service: http://elvis.inf.tu-dresden.de/html2brl/html2brl_form.engl.html) If they want the text in a different language there are websites that will carry out ‘on-the-fly’ language interpretation - althought to be honest these are not really that good yet, maybe soon.
And if your building is inaccessible, (which I am not suggesting is something we can now forget about)-but your information is on the Internet, people no longer have to be physically present to access it.
Why the Internet? What makes it different?
Computer networks are not an entirely new thing - most large banks have used computer networks for document storage and distribution for a long time . Sharing information within an organisation has been possible for a while, the problem arises when you want to share your documents or data with another organisation - and they are not using the same type of computer system as you.
Once solution to this problem is to try to get everyone to use the same types of computer and the same software to write and store their information, i.e standardised hardware and software. This the arguement goes - will make it easier to share the resulting documents and data.
As long as I can remember1 there always seems to be some plan on the go to standardise - even to this day this is still being put forward as the solution to our problems. Just last year the department I work in was being put under pressure to use PCs rather than the Macs and to standardise on particular applications. This is not the way to go - these attempts are always doomed to fail and are not the answer.
Technology moves at such a fast pace that no matter what hardware you decide to standardise on today you will be forced to move to the new ‘standard’ tomorrow.
The development of the internet allows any type of computer to get information from any other type of computer (or indeed any other internet aware device, e.g a ‘Personal Digital Assistant’ like a Palm Pilot ). The standards which matter are the methods of communication between computers rather than the computers themselves.
This is even more important today that it was in the past. It is clear that within the next few years desktop computers will only be one of many devices attached to the internet. In fact they will very soon be in a minority. Televisions, personal organisers, telephones, and even your household appliances are expected to be linked to the internet. As explained in a recent Gartner Report:
“Enterprises that win the battle to control their business desktops will have won the "war of yesteryear" and may potentially face greater problems than enterprises that do not tightly optimize around a single architectural model for control and application deployment...”2
In this environment trying to standardise everyone on a single type of computer or operating system makes little sense; today I use a desktop computer to write my notes, organise my time, surf the web etc. but tomorrow I might be carrying around a device in my pocket that can allow me to do all of these things and more. What operating system will this device use and what hardware standard will it subscribe to? Who knows?
Benefits for Disabled People
‘The World Wide Web (WWW) has the ability to increase the accessibility of information for disabled people.’ Is this true? If so what is it about the WWW that makes it true?Here is an example of one person who certainly seems to think so and has benefited from its existence:
“I am a Deafblind computer user, a totally blind and almost profoundly deaf person. But I can almost access the same information which you can receive on the Net.... The Internet is my gateway to the outside world. And not just a means of entertainment as you may use it. I am very enthusiastic about technology, if it wasn't for the latest advances then I wouldn't be able to access the computer and thereby the Net and you wouldn't be able to read this article. So this may explain to you why I am so intrigued by technology, it's my only way to access the real world of information.” James Gallagher from an Article in ‘Free Pint’ 1998
Just as an aside - about a year after I read this article I ‘bumped into’ ( in the virtual sense) James Gallagher again. He replied to a question I posted on a mailing list about appropriate software for a blind computer user. After corresponding with him and thanking him for writing the article he told me that he lived in Glasgow and had actually walked past the gate of the University I work in the previous day. Small virtual world!
James Gallagher is not the only disabled person who has benefitted from the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web. There are thousands, if not millions of disabled people using the internet and WWW every day for any task you can conceive of; to read the news, send and receive e-mail, do research, buy goods and services, set up web pages, chat or browse the millions of web pages available.
There are a million and one ways to control a computer apart from a mouse or a keyboard (maybe not literally, but you know what I mean). Once you can control the computer by whatever method you can also log on and use the internet, and once you can use the internet you have access to a huge information and communication resource - over 300 million pages of information the last time I checked! You can: send e-mail; participate in chat rooms; join discussion groups; get the daily news play the stock market; organise your banking; book your holiday; buy books; check your horoscope; or order a pizza3 .
Not everyone uses a mouse!Screen readers read aloud with voice synthesizers text displayed on the computer screen, making it accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired as well as some learning disabled people with dyslexia. Mouse and keyboard simulators allow persons whose mobility is limited to one finger to cruise the Internet. And special switches allow patrons who can control minimal voluntary muscles (e.g., mouth, eye, foot) to keep current with the world around them. |
There are plenty of folk like James Gallagher surfing the web by voice, using screen readers, adapted keyboards or a miriad of other input devices and participating in the opportunities offered by this communication medium. At its best this allows equal participation, freedom from prejudice, the power to choose ‘unfiltered’ information, and opportunities for employment in new areas. Here is quote from an article by Wendy Chisholm that I came across recently on the Web which illustrates this point:
John has cerebral palsy and his coordination limitations prevent him from using a mouse. Jean is blind and to him a mouse is pointless. Jane, who is deaf, cannot use sound cues, audiotracks, and so on. Joan has a reading disability and finds it difficult to read plain text. John is very adept at using his alternative keyboard to drive his computer. The keys are bigger and have more space between them than on a standard keyboard. Jean uses a standard keyboard but instead of displaying pages visually on a standard monitor; he listens to page text read by a speech synthesizer. Jane uses a graphical desktop computer, but requires captions to understand movies she downloads from the Web. Joan also uses software that reads text from the screen aloud and highlights which word is being read. This way, she can see and hear the words.
From 'enabling Your Web Site - A brief Introduction to Disabilities Affecting Web Access', by Wendy Chisholm (http://designshops.com/pace/ds/pub/1999/08/able.html)
The virtual environment has - in many cases - less barriers than the physical environment, and as a result opportunities are now open to disabled people which previously did not exist. John who is mentioned above is a software developer who runs a Web site for a group of 20 researchers, Jean is student of law who uses the Web for research, Jane is a non-fiction writer who uses the Web to show off her travel photographs and travel writing to friends, and Joan is a high school student who likes to use the Web to check out the progress of archaelogical digs in Egypt.
The Internet and the World Wide Web has also provided particular opportunities for the 1.7 million people in the UK who are blind or who have a visual impairment. The RNIB Web site, 'Campaign for Better Web Design' highlights the benefits but also brings out the point that not every Web site is accessible:
(http://www.rnib.org.uk/digital/)
- With the help of synthesised speech and braille display technology, people with serious sight problems or blindness are using the Internet to read enormous amounts of information otherwise unavailable to them.
- For these technologies to work properly, Web pages must be written in correct HTML (hypertext mark-up language).
- Many Web sites are unusable by blind people because they are not written in correct HTML (or not written in HTML at all).
- People with disabilities have a moral right to be able to use all Web sites, but many companies and designers still fail to recognise this.
- Companies! There are 1.7 million people in the UK with serious sight problems or blindness! Can they use your Web site?
The Internet and the Web also have a 'social side' which can be tapped into through the many chat rooms, questiona and answer forums, news groups and mailing lists that are publicly available: Here is an example of the Web providing peer support for people who share a common experience. On the Web Servers I run at The Making Connections Unit ( http://www.connections.gcal.ac.uk/) I provide several Web page based chat rooms , some of which can only be entered by password. One of the password protected rooms provides a forum for discussion and support for people who have had mental health problems and are now on medication. This is a well used chat room - and is available twenty four hours a day seven days a week.
I know how valuable this provision is - not only because I get e-mails telling me so - but because when ( like over the Christmas holidays) the network is down, I receive e-mails from people asking what the problem is and telling me how much they miss it.
Tell me again - why is the Web more accessible than other mediums? - part 2
It’s time to explore what it is that makes the internet accessible - and for that we need to know how it works. I will also look at some of the barriers to accessibility that the web can present and speculate on how these can be solved in the future. Some of this information may on first reading seem a bit on the technical side - I apologise if that seems to be the case - I will try to keep it as simple as I can but no simpler ( I think Einstein said that).
A significant contribution to the accessibility of the internet can be summed up in three words: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).4 What does that mean? Not much, unless you are already familiar with publishing information on the internet. A basic understanding of hypertext markup language is, luckily for us, relatively simple to grasp - and once grasped can take us a good way along the path to understanding why the WWW is such a boon for disabled people.
HTML is one of the topics we are going to explore shortly, but first a tiny bit of history which is relevant to our purpose. We need to know a bit about how the World Wide Web came about in the first place.
Tim Berners Lee was the man who come up with key elements of the World Wide Web5 . He was a researcher at the European Centre for Nuclear Research in Geneva (CERN) and was interested in finding ways to ease the ‘flow’ of documentation between researchers from different institutions - even when those institutions where miles away from one other.
The internet had existed and been in continuous development since the late 1960s so one part of the problem was already solved; the ability to connect distant institutions together and transport information between them6 .
What had not been solved was how to overcome the fact that the institutions all used different types of computers, different software controlling those computers, and incompatible ways of ‘marking-up’ (don’t worry I’ll explain this phrase later) and storing their documents.
What Lee felt was needed was a way to exchange documents which would satisfy three elements;
- Work on any computer.
- Be able to use the internet.
- Be easy to learn and implement.
In short, he recognised that what was needed was a standard way of formatting and distributing documents.
The promise of HTML and the World Wide Web is described by Tim Berners Lee as “human communication through shared knowledge”7 . Human communication through shared knowledge - yes that sounds good, and it is, but we can’t share knowledge if we don’t speak the same language. Or more accurately if our computers don’t speak the same language.
It was this fundamental problem which Lee saw as as being at the crux of the matter and what got him thinking about solutions back in 1979/80. But it wasn’t until 1990 that he coined the term World Wide Web. This was the name he chose for the first hypertext browser he created while at CERN.
Text Markup Language
The idea he came up with was a simple one8 (and to be honest not entirely new). Divide documents into their different elements: headings, paragraphs, lists, blockquotes etc. Then come up with a simple way of labeling each of these elements which could be interpreted and easily understood by all computers. In other words what was needed was a standard (and simple) way of logically ‘marking-up’ the structure of documents.What is meant by ‘marking-up’ a document?
An examples should help. This document you are reading is extremely simple in its structure; consisting mainly of headings and paragraphs and the odd quote or two. The main heading is at the top of the page and throughout the document there are several sub-headings. To distinguish these from the text I have made the headings bold, sat them on their own lines and made them a bit bigger than the rest of text. Paragraphs, the other structural element of this document are, simply put, bits of text which have carriage returns after them. Now as we all know computers are stupid and only know what we tell them - so how do they know the difference between the elements in a document unless we - hugely intelligent humans that we are - tell them. The World Wide Web uses a standardised way of doing just that by putting additional instructions in with the normal text (i.e the normal text being the bits you and I read). This way it can tell the difference between a heading and a paragraph or indeed any other element of the document. When it knows this information it can display the ‘structure’ of the document appropriately on the screen. Here’s an example of marked-up text for use on the web:
<H1>The Biggest Heading on the Page </H1>
<P>
It is difficult to think up something to put in a paragraph when you are not really talking about anything but just want to illustrate some point. If I just write another bit it will make it a long enough bit of text so that it looks like a reasonably sized paragraph.
</p>
<h2>A Sub Heading for my imaginary document </h2>
If I fed this to my web browser it would say (if it could speak) “Ah something I understand, this first line is to be formatted as a large Heading (in fact the largest heading of the possible six I have available) and that next bit is to be formatted as a paragraph, I better put some space after it. Finally I’ve got another heading a wee bit smaller than the first one.”
Do you see the pattern here? Instructions to the computer telling it how it should lay out the text are contained in what are called tags, e.g. <H1> is a Header tag, <P>, is a Paragraph tag. Tags are a letter or more representing some formatting or structural feature, such as H for Header, or P for paragraph or EM for Emphasis which are enclosed by chevrons < on the left and > on the right.
The idea is that you have an opening tag which signifies that the next piece of text is a particular type of element in the document ( i.e a header, or a paragraph or a list or a quote) or formatting element (such as italics or bold) and a closing tag. The closing tag indicates that this feature is now to be turned off. Closing tags have a forward slash just after the left hand chevron. So to sum up; you open a tag, (e.g <P>) put the text in, and then close it ( </P>)
Even the lowest powered computer if it understood these basic rules could reproduce the structure of any document marked up in this way. If it was really old and feeble it might not be able to make the headings bold or indent any quotes it came across but it could use it’s own capabilities to indicate the structural meaning of the document in some other way, i.e it could find some way to indicate to the human reader the difference between a paragraph a heading and list. More modern machines could use their power to enhance and highlight the documents structure - reproduce all the subtleties of the formatting and make it nicer to look at and easier to read.
Ian S. Graham in his book ‘HTML Stylesheets sourcebook’ describes HTML thus,
“ HTML Documents as simply structured, platform-independent containers of information”(page2)
Thanks Ian that’s what I call concise.
When Tim Berners Lee was putting all this together he wasn’t particularly concerned by how a page of information would look. The priority was the development of a dependable and easy way to exchange documents while still retaining their original meaning. Presentation and design were secondary considerations.
Following some simple rules should mean that a document could be displayed by just about any device (i.e platform independent) as long as it can convert the marked-up text into format appropriate to it’s capabilities - whether that be graphics, text, sound or for that matter braille. The system used for marking up these documents was christened, Hypertext Markup Language or HTML for short.
Why does that make it accessible?
So now we have some idea of what is meant by ‘text Markup’, but what about the ‘Hypertext’ bit. The term ‘hypertext’ was coined in 1965 by Ted Nelson and at its’ simplest means ‘text which contains links to other texts’9. Rather than get into a more detailed explanation - which if you are interested you will find in chapter 2 of this guide - I would like to explore the implications for accessibility of what we have learned so far.
Why does this new way of sharing documents makes information more accessible than before?
Let’s look at a simple example. As we have seen, HTML was designed to mark-up the structure of a document. It was also used to indicate how the various elements related to each other, e.g. a piece of text marked-up with an <H1> tag would be bigger than that with a <h2> tag, which again would be bigger that text marked with a <h3> tag.
We have tags which indicate the relative size and also the relative importance of these headings. The word relative is significant here - what has not been done is to dictate absolutely the sizes of these headings - as would have been the case if the document had been created in a word processor, printed out and handed to you in paper form.
There is an important point we can tease out in this scenario. Using HTML to mark up a document in the way originally envisaged by Tim Berners Lee means the creator of the document does not dictate how it looks, he/she just marks it up to delineates its’ structure. It is the user of the document that has the power to decide just how it should be formatted, i.e. how big the text should be, or what will be the colour of the background and text, or indeed what type of device should be used to display it.
For example, if I have a visual impairment this last point is very significant - perhaps I can read text if it is above a certain size or has good contrast between the text and the background. The way pages on the web are marked up gives me control of these variables - all I have to do is adjust the preferences on my web browser, so that I can read each web page I download. As a result I potentially have access to just about every bit of text information on the internet - recent counts put that at about 320 million indexable web pages!
That is just a simple example but it illustrates the key point; HTML as originally envisaged allows the creation of documents which do not have their presentation/design hard-wired in. Thus all the decisions about what is the most appropriate presentation of the document is left to the user.
This has implications also for the creator of such documents - there is no longer the same pressure to create multiple copies of everything in order to ensure that information is accessible to people with a wide range of impairments.
If you increase the number of devices that are capable of interpreting and presenting information formatted as HTML then it seems obvious that the accessibility of that information is increased.
But, I hear you say, how does the internet increase the accessibility of information and services for all the other disabled people who are not blind or visually impaired? Surely it doesn’t have anything to offer someone who is, for example, a wheelchair user?
Good point, but think of it this way. Are there buildings that wheelchair users would find difficult to get into? The answer is yes plenty of them. Do some of the organisations which work in these buildings have information which would be of interest to a wheelchair user? The answer again is yes. How does a wheelchair user get hold of that information?
One route would be if the information was published on the internet. Now there is no need to visit the building!
Another question. How could a wheelchair user get employed by one of these organisations?
Internet technology can be used (and is) for communication and exchange of information within organisations as well as outwith them10 . It is relatively easy for employees to work remotely and still ‘plug-in’ to on-site databases, web sites and e-mail systems.
Within an organisation documents no longer need to be physically moved from floor to floor, from department to department or from person to person. A wheelchair user doesn’t need to go upstairs to deliver or recieve a document, it can now be delivered electronically. Communication and sharing information can also be done electronically. Physical barriers have just been taken out of the equation. This means wider employment opportunites, less excuses for rationalising prejudice from employers and more chance for disabled people to get a job and avoid poverty and social exclusion.
Problems, what Problems?
It all looks good up to this point; HTML gave us the ability to exchange information between different types of devices and increased the accessibility of that information. Things however have changed a lot since 1990 and not all of it has been good for the user.
Academics drove the original growth of the World Wide Web and as a result this gave it a kind of ‘hippy’ noncommercial, ‘keep it pure’ type of feel. But that has all changed over the last three or four years as the World Wide Web has become a ‘hit’ in the commercial world.
“It’s a hit and it has, as they used to say back in the punk days of 77 ‘sold-out’; been seduced by the dubious temptations of layout and formatting control, dazzled by the shiny baubles offered by the world of multimedia, and bullied into a new shape by the commercial need for web pages to be as ‘attractive’ as possible to maximise visitors and therefore, advertising revenue.”11
HTML for Presentation?
The strengths of the original conception of HTML also turned out to be it’s weakness for many publishers. Writers and designers don’t just want people to understand the text and structure of their web pages they also want those pages to look good! The standard HTML tags placed restrictions on their ability to achieve this. After all HTML was never created for design work.
The manufacturers of Web Browsers responded to the pressure for more control of how a web page looked by providing extensions to the HTML language. Marc Andreesen of Netscape started the ball rolling when he introduced the <img> tag so that people who used Netscapes’ web browser could display graphics on their pages.
The use of HTML by many authors page layout rather than imposing structure to a document has led to a debate12 . On the one side you have the purists who argue that writers should stick to HTML standards as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium so that the resulting document can be interpreted and displayed by all computers and all standards compliant browsers.
On the other side there are those that say that communications is not just about words and document structure, communication is as much about page design as the meaning of the words on the page. David Segal in his article “the Web is Ruined and I Ruined It” writes,
“Layout is presentation. Presentation is layout. Apply one set of layout rules and the get The New York Times. Apply another set and get The Village Voice.13 ”and later,
How much information does Nike give out about its products? Not a lot. On the commercial side of the Web, design can make millions of dollars of difference”
This is a difficult one because both arguments are right. Communication is about more than the text and document structure. But if in achieving the goal you discriminate against a proportion of the population then this just isn’t an acceptable situation.
The standards body on the Internet ‘The World Wide Web Consortium’ (W3c) (http://www.w3.org) has recognised this dilemma and has developed and promoted a variety of technologies , techniques and strategies to solve some of the problems.
"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." -- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director
The W3c has set up the ‘Web Accessibility Initiative’ which has developed a set of guidelines for building accessible web sites. You can find the guidelines along with many more useful resources at http://www.w3.org/WAI/
The approach taken by the W3c is to ensure accessibility by promoting the correct use of HTML, advocating the separation where possible of content from layout and building the features of HTML which aid accessibility e.g. provide alternative text descriptions for graphics.
W3c point out that making the web accessible to disabled people benefits everyone. The number and types of devices that are now connecting to the web is increasing rapidly; televisions, telephones, personal digital assistants, household appliances.
Many of these devices will not be controlled by keyboard or mouse e.g. hands-free in-car information systems or speech controlled personal organisers. A good example is the latest ‘Palm’ personal digital assistant (PDA) which currently dominates the market for small personal organisers. It has a built in radio receiver which which allows users to connect to the internet and use e-mail:
“The Palm VII organizer uses a wireless connection and the new Palm.Net™ wireless service to enable users to easily obtain information from the Internet, conduct e-commerce transactions and send and receive instant messages.”14
The Palm personal organiser has a small low resolution screen and doesn’t have much memory. Multimedia driven websites which have not been optimized for accessibility are unlikely to be of use to anyone accessing the web via their Palm organiser.
Organisations designing their website to be accessible to variety of devices will be the first to benefit from a new growing market of customers. In effect web sites which are accessible to disabled people are accessible to everyone.
Potential publishers on the Internet have a duty to ensure that the information they provide will be as accessible to as a wide an audience as possible. Publishing documents on the World Wide Web is at least a start down this road. In a later chapter we will look at how you can do this yourself.