TitlePages - Preamble - Introduction - Accessibility - UniversalAccessibility - PostProduction - Metadata - Accessibility Metadata - PNP - DRD - Matching - Interoperability - Conclusion - References - Appendix 1 - Appendix 2 - Appendix 3 - Appendix 4 - Appendix 5 - Appendix 6 - Appendix 7 - Appendix 8 - Appendix 9 - Appendix 10 - Appendix 11
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
© 2008 Liddy Nevile
In this chapter, the term 'accessibility' is considered in some detail. Most people assume they know what it means because they assume they can imagine what it is like to have such disabilities as blindness. Also, they seem to assume that the functional problems for people with disabilities are easily defined and even, perhaps, soluble. This chapter shows that these assumptions are not helpful. It also asserts that it is inappropriate to think of disabilities as fixed qualities of people rather than changing characteristics related to contexts and activities that can apply to anyone.
One of the most frequently cited articles about the Web and accessibility is by Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles (1999) who wrote:
"As the web becomes a major communications medium, the data on it must be made more accessible."
They were, as so many now realise, talking about why they were working on search engines, and most particularly Google, the now famous point of entry/gateway to the Web. Their sentiments, however, were similar to those of many others, especially those working to ensure that everyone gets access to information on the Web. In 1999, Lawrence and Giles were quoting figures such as 800 million pages, 6 terabytes of text data and 3 million servers being publicly indexed but amounting to only about 16% of what is actually available. They were lamenting that much of what people possibly wanted to find was not indexed by anyone.
Tim Berners-Lee is reputed to have said some time ago that, "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect" [WAI]. This now famous quotation represented Berners-Lee reacting to the disturbing news that even when a resource could be found, and was able to be delivered to a particular user, it was not necessarily in a form that a user could access. His reference was to the perceptual access that was in some cases limited by a user's permanent disabilities.
Accessibility and disability as terms have been in tension for a long time. The term "accessibility" is ambiguous as access can be of many types, including that dependent upon economic conditions, intellectual property rights, telecommunications services, etc. Disability communities are often quick to promote a particular view or perspective of the effects of a disability on users to avoid labeling people. They want to concentrate on positive aspects of their lives. Members of the deaf community in Melbourne, Australia, often ask to be referred to simply as "members of a deaf community". They assert that their communication in sign language is itself not appropriately described by reference to a medical condition so much as the use of a non-English language. Personal experience suggests they expect to be treated in the same way as other non-English speaking people. In different countries, the names for disabilities, or even their existence, are changed for political reasons. At times, it seems, it is good to avoid labeling people by their disabilities and better to promote people's abilities. At other times, however, political motivation leads to the disabilities being referred to in order to draw attention to them: the context and goals are often determinants of which definition is used.
Vision impairment, for example, need not be understood as a quality of a person, but as the condition of a person in a context: everyone has a vision impairment sometimes. When driving a car and trying to find a new location, we find drivers looking at printed maps and looking at the road, or worse, looking at the road and getting directions on a mobile phone screen. It is what is called an 'eyes busy' situation, where driving should completely occupy the eyes, but they are instead being shared across tasks. Effectively, the person has a vision impairment either with respect to watching the road, or to reading the map or using the phone. Additionally, of course, the person also has a control impairment: their hands cannot perform well at two tasks at the same time. Disabilities are relative to contexts and activities.
Some disabilities are hard to understand and recognise. Cognitive impairment is not usually expected to be associated with people who are performing well in the community but universities are beginning to find that a number of their otherwise capable students have conditions such as dyslexia, for example (Morgan, 2000). Statistics vary enormously as dyslexia, for example, is not clearly defined and thus not easily quantified, but it may be reasonable to assume that every classroom has at least one dyslexic student. Being clever and being dyslexic can easily go together (Lloyd, 2007), as the disability is relative to reading. In the case of learning Japanese, a character-based language, there is some chance that dyslexia will not be relevant or is even a positive ability (Asthana, 2006), whereas it is a recognised impairment when learning to read phonetic alphabets.
A difficulty associated with working to support people with disabilities is, therefore, discovering who needs assistance and what assistance they need. In part this is due to our reluctance, for good reason, to label people by naming a disability. It is partly due to the reluctance of some people to identify themselves as having a disability, and partly due to the ignorance of many people that they do, in fact, have a disability in a given situation. In everyday life, for most things, people overcome whatever small inadequacies they have and are unaware of the process. Many people simply do what they can do well and do not bother with what they can not do so well. In most situations this quick-fix works. The problems arise when people are required to do something they can not do well.
The workplace is one context in which tolerance for disabilities is critical: people are often required to perform tasks that compromise their abilities. Accessing civil rights is another such context: being able to vote, being able to access government services, being able to buy tickets to the Olympics Games, are just a few activities to which all citizens have an equal right of participation but might be prevented from active participation by an impairment or ill-designed services.
To repeat and misuse what Lawrence and Giles (1999) said, "As the web becomes a major communications medium, the data on it must be made more accessible." It becomes more important to ensure that not only those who have naturally taken to the new technologies, but everyone, can access what they need using the new medium.
Having established that disability and accessibility have a context: the question becomes: in the presence of this major communications medium, when are people denied access? The answer is found in a variety of ways, as shown below, and it is as variable as the ways of describing disabilities or abilities. Access is not simplified by an approach that aims to use medical pathology terms. It is easier to work on access when it is described in terms of required functionality.
The World Health Organisation [WHO, 2008] produce the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. Their Web site says:
The ICF puts the notions of ‘health’ and ‘disability’ in a new light. It acknowledges that every human being can experience a decrement in health and thereby experience some degree of disability. Disability is not something that only happens to a minority of humanity. The ICF thus ‘mainstreams’ the experience of disability and recognises it as a universal human experience. By shifting the focus from cause to impact it places all health conditions on an equal footing allowing them to be compared using a common metric – the ruler of health and disability. Furthermore ICF takes into account the social aspects of disability and does not see disability only as a 'medical' or 'biological' dysfunction. By including Contextual Factors, in which environmental factors are listed ICF allows to records the impact of the environment on the person's functioning.
ANEC, the European consumer voice in standardisation [ANEC], elaborated:
This new definition emphasizes that disabled people’s functioning in a specific domain is an interactive process between their health condition, activities and the contextual factors. It is a radical departure from the earlier versions, which focused substantially on the medical and individual aspects of disability. The social model of disability suggests that disability is not entirely an attribute of an individual, but rather a complex social and environmental construct largely imposed by societal attitudes and the limitations of the human-made environment. Consequently, any process of amelioration and inclusion requires social action, and it is the collective responsibility of society at large to make the environmental and attitudinal changes necessary for their full participation in all areas of life. (WS-SMH, 2003, p.10)
As stated in Wikipedia (2008):
The social model of disability is often based on a distinction between the terms 'impairment' and 'disability.' Impairment is used to refer to the actual attributes (or loss of attributes) of a person, whether in terms of limbs, organs or mechanisms, including psychological. Disability is used to refer to the restrictions caused by society when it does not give equivalent attention and accommodation to the needs of individuals with impairments.
The 'social model of disability' was first proposed by Michael Oliver in 1983 but later explained further, particularly in 1990:
There are two fundamental points that need to be made about the individual model of disability. Firstly, it locates the 'problem' of disability within the individual and secondly it sees the causes of this problem as stemming from the functional limitations or psychological losses which are assumed to arise from disability. These two points are underpinned by what might be called 'the personal tragedy theory of disability' which suggests that disability is some terrible chance event which occurs at random to unfortunate individuals. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
The genesis, development and articulation of the social model of disability by disabled people themselves is a rejection of all of these fundamentals [Oliver 1990a]. It does not deny the problem of disability but locates it squarely within society. It is not individual limitations, of whatever kind, which are the cause of the problem but society's failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure the needs of disabled people are fully taken into account in its social organisation. Further, the consequences of this failure does not simply and randomly fall on individuals but systematically upon disabled people as a group who experience this failure as discrimination institutionalised throughout society. (Oliver, 1990b)
Oliver argues that by using a social model, one can understand disability as something that can be dealt with at a social level, and that it is not merely about non-normal characteristics of individuals but rather the ways in which society functions. Social efforts including adjustments can, according to Oliver's theory, mitigate a disability.
Liz Crow (1995), on the other hand, argues that exclusively treating disability as a social problem restricts the ability of the person with disabilities and that some awareness of impairment in the medical sense is essential. She says that it is not that impairment does not exist but rather how it is interpreted that is important. She argues for awareness on the part of the person with disabilities and for them to consider their medical needs, which is not to accept other people's interpretations that imply inferiority.
A major use of the social model is the development of inclusive practices. Inclusion aims to consider all people equally and to avoid disabilities by providing for the needs of all people. To achieve this in education, for example, communities have worked on attitudes and practices that value everyone equally and so provide for all of them equally. Inclusion UK is a consortium of four organisations supporting inclusion in education [Inclusion UK]. The Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education provides details about their publications [CSIE]. On their Web site they show the process approach they advocate for inclusion in education:
The Index takes the social model of disability as its starting point, builds on good practice, and then organises the Index work around a cycle of activities which guide schools through the stages of preparation, investigation, development and review. (Booth & Ainscow, 2000)
The Index was widely distributed in the UK education system and has been updated.
Of interest in this thesis is the approach taken by CSIE. Inclusion is not treated as a fixed quality of a location but rather as a set of practices. CSIE advocates a continuous cycle of development and review. In the research, the social model of disability is adopted with the aim of making the Web an inclusive information space, with continual improvement based on an on-going cycle of development and review of Web resources.
In the mid 1980's, long before the Web became popular, there were communities of people with disabilities (in the medical sense) who had already been using computers for some time. The technology of the time allowed for text activities online and these presented few problems for assistive technologies; people with hearing disabilities were often assisted by their use of teletype machines and other print technologies that could allow them to communicate using what were otherwise typically sound or image and sound technologies, such as telephones, televisions, etc.; people with sight disabilities were able to use computers to enlarge script, to have it read aloud to them, and to produce Braille. (The author worked with such technologies for three years from 1983-6 for Barson Research.)
In 1989, Mosaic was released as the first major mouse-driven interface to the Web.
The Web's popularity exploded with Mosaic, which made it accessible to the novice user. This explosion started in earnest during 1993, a year in which Web traffic over the Internet increased by 300,000%. (wikipedia Computing Timeline, 2008)
A significant aspect of the Web that made it instantly attractive to the masses was its ability to include mouse-controlled images, sounds, and multi-media in general.
Unfortunately, the very technology that has opened the door to unprecedented access also harbors the possibility for the very opposite. Just as there are enabling and disabling conditions in the physical environment, so are there conditions associated with digital technology that result in the inclusion or exclusion of certain people. Technology that is not universally designed, without consideration for the full spectrum of human (dis)abilities, is likely to contain access barriers for people with print disabilities. (Schmetzke, 2001)
There is a sad irony here because it was the availability of computers that at one time enabled many people with permanent disabilities to rejoin society, using assistive technologies to overcome their previous lack of access to many activities. In fact, many of the older, pre-Web technologies still can be used in ways that enable people: Miles Hilton-Barber, a blind man, recently co-piloted a small plane half-way around the world. (The Age, 2007)
A typical and simple illustration of what became a problem for some people is the use of the 'mouse' pointer. People with sight disabilities rarely use a mouse to navigate the screen because they do not get the instant feedback that endears this exercise to people who are watching the screen. The cursor, driven by the mouse, floats over the structure of a screen representation, and is freed from the serial flow of text, for example. This freedom makes the mouse pointer combination useful on the screen. Without seeing the screen, one cannot tell where the cursor is. There is no coordinate system for people who cannot see that conveys to them what is offered to the person who watches the cursor. Recently, the Fluid project has developed a drag-and-drop user interface component that will be used to do this in the future. (Fluid, 2008)
Mouse users move the screen content under the cursor by using other screen controls, and move the cursor over the screen. Many people who cannot see the cursor move about the screen by using keystrokes for such functions as 'line-up', 'line-down, 'move-left', 'move-right'. On arrival at a 'screen' destination, they need information about where they are, what they are capable of acting on. In the case of the Web, this is often a hyperlink. It was almost always, in the beginning, and is still too often, labeled "click here". For the sighted person, the surrounding context, including the layout of the objects on the screen, will probably tell them what is likely to happen if they do, indeed, click there. The person who cannot see the screen, and so does not know the context for the hyperlink, is often confused as to what will happen if they click. Worse, experience soon teaches them that if they click, they may well be taken somewhere they did not anticipate and it might be very hard to find their way back. The easy recovery technique of simply pressing the back button does not work when the link in fact spawns a new window, and that window does not have a 'previous' window. If they do find the previous location, they may not be able to choose the correct hyperlink to click when there are several choices all similarly labeled. How do they know if this link relates to the writing before the link or the writing after it, without access to the screen to see how the links are related graphically and location-wise on the screen? Perhaps there is a pull-down menu of links and, if there is, what is the new set of difficulties they will face?
It is not hard to understand that without properly labeled links, without certainty about the relationship between a link and a description of the choices available, the user does not have satisfactory access to the content that refers to linked material or services.
Further, if the resource is a video, without captions and a transcript, a deaf person is unlikely to have satisfactory access to the content of the video. Without a tactile version or long description of a diagram, a blind person is not likely to have satisfactory access to chemical formula they may need. Without access to the content in a language understood by the user, there will be no access. Without content that is free of sarcasm, irony, literary illusion, a person with dyslexia is unlikely to understand the content.
For all these reasons, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines authors have worked on the aspects of access which are important to people who encounter difficulties when trying to access Web content. For many years now, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group [WCAG WG] has been trying to find ways of alleviating these difficulties. Typically, the WCAG WG identifies what can be done to help, describes ways resources must be developed to satisfy the user requirements, in a set of guidelines, and their priorities are transferred to the developers of the computer languages developed by their colleagues within W3C and elsewhere. These capabilities are incorporated into new languages and specifications for the Web. A typical example of this work is provided by W3C's development of Scalable Vector Graphics [SVG].
A detailed explanation of what accessibility means in practice, and how it is achieved, is available in a hyperlecture developed by the author some years ago (Nevile, 1999; Appendix 8).
In 1998, writing on the W3C WAI Interest Group mailing list, Harvey Bingham forwarded the following from Ephraim P. Glinert
Folks: I would like to draw your attention to a new research focus on the topic of UNIVERSAL ACCESS jointly sponsored by the HCI and KCS programs within the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division of CISE.
The word "access" implies the ability to find, manipulate and use information in an efficient and comprehensive manner. A primary objective of the HCI/KCS research focus on universal access is to empower people with disabilities so that they are able to participate as first class citizens in the emerging information society. But more than that, the research focus will benefit the nation as a whole, by advancing computer technology so that all people can possess the skills needed to fully harness the power of computing to enrich and make their lives more productive within a tightly knit "national family" whose members communicate naturally and painlessly through the sharing of (multimodal) information. (Bingham, 1998)
Bingham was focused on what should happen, not how it should happen, and it has taken until now to find technology that will enable his dream to be realised.
It has been noted that the research is advocating an inclusive Web. This means more than merely solving problems for users with medical conditions. Internationalisation, for example, is treated as an issue of accessibility alongside location dependence and independence.
In 2008, the Australian Government established a Social Inclusion Board with a Minister responsible for social inclusion (Stephens, 2008). The Minister, prior to election, said:
Let me be clear: our social inclusion initiatives will not be about welfare – they will be an investment strategy to join social policy to economic policy to the benefit of both. For this reason, our Social Inclusion Unit and Board will be made up of serious economic and social thinkers, not just welfare representatives. This won’t be a memorial to good intentions – it will be about action and hard-headed economics. (Gillard, 2007)
About 15% of Europeans report difficulties performing daily life activities due to some form of disability. With the demographic change towards an ageing population, this figure will significantly increase in the coming years. Older people are often confronted with multiple minor disabilities which can prevent them from enjoying the benefits that technology offers. As a result, people with disabilities are one of the largest groups at risk of exclusion within the Information Society in Europe.
It is estimated that only 10% of persons over 65 years of age use internet compared with 65% of people aged between 16-24. This restricts their possibilities of buying cheaper products, booking trips on line or having access to relevant information, including social and health services. Furthermore, accessibility barriers in products and devices prevents older people and people with disabilities from fully enjoying digital TV, using mobile phones and accessing remote services having a direct impact in the quality of their daily lives.
Moreover, the employment rate of people with disabilities is 20% lower than the average population. Accessible technologies can play a key role in improving this situation, making the difference for individuals with disabilities between being unemployed and enjoying full employment between being a tax payer or recipient of social benefits.
The recent United Nations convention on the rights of people with disabilities clearly states that accessibility is a matter of human rights. In the 21st century, it will be increasingly difficult to conceive of achieving rights of access to education, employment health care and equal opportunities without ensuring accessible technology. (Reding, 2007)
In 2008, a new European Commission IST Specific Support Action project called WAI-AGE commenced with the goal of increasing accessibility of the Web for the elderly as well as for people with disabilities in European Union Member States [WAI-AGE].
In the Report of the CEN ISSS MMI-DC (W15) Workshop on Metadata for Accessibility, Nevile and Ford (2004) considered multilinguality, and all it encompasses, at the same time as other accessibility issues. The report notes:
The European Union's official languages have recently increased from eleven to twenty. The linguistic combinations will increase from one hundred and ten to two hundred and ten. ... many Europeans have difficulties when using the Internet (p. 4).
and, in more detail, with respect to multilingualism:
Languages have inherent qualities: many of these are linguistic but others are cultural. Obviously, metaphors based on regionally or culturally specific analogies do not necessarily translate into other languages. What is often not realised is that there are other qualities that affect language use: there are different ways of describing time, location, people's identities, and more. Conversations across language boundaries are endlessly surprising; the provision of multiple-language versions of content and translation of content are almost always problematic. But within languages there are also problems: levels of facility with complexity of languages and limitations of languages are two examples. Not everyone is capable of understanding the same form of representation in any given language, yet we know this is not just a matter of literacy learning; for some it is to do with how well they have learned to read and for others it is to do with constraints imposed on them by such disabilities as dyslexia and disnumeracy. Those dependent upon Braille, for example, can find that their language does not yet have ways of representing information which is easily represented in other languages. (p. 7)
Further work on the problem of lack of access due to language barriers was reported by Morosumi, Nevile and Sugimoto (2007). The immediate problem is related to the lack of access to English research literature available on the Web:
There are at least three major groups of readers with language-skill problems who want access to intellectually stimulating and specialist English texts:
- people with domain expertise who lacking sufficient English reading skills to access the English literature in their field of interest;
- people with domain expertise who need translations of English literature, and
- people with dyslexia.
We consider the problem for second-language readers, translators (particularly automated ones) and people with dyslexia to be similar: In all cases it is important to have plain English without distracting or confusing metaphors, or complicated language constructions such as the subjunctive mood or passive voice.
So it is necessary to be aware that cultural and linguistic considerations can necessitate functional accessibility requirements for information users.
Location can be very relevant to accessibility: location dependent information is very useful but it might need to be supplied in a language that is not associated with the location, e.g. for travelers. In such a case, location independence can be very important. Just because one is in Greece does not mean that one is thinking of what is on at the local cinema; a parent might be interested in what film a child is proposing to see at the local cinema in their absence. Whereas most efforts to work with location currently involve finding ways to be sensitive to the location, it is necessary to also be sensitive to the user's needs irrespective of their location.
Location changes can cause mismatch problems when assistive technology settings, or the actions of user agents, or other circumstances, change in some way.
Contexts often account for the special needs and preferences of users. If a user is in a noisy location, they will probably not be able to benefit from audio output whereas a user in a very quiet location may not be welcome to start using voice input. Content needs can also change because of device changes and these are at times associated with location changes. So sometimes context influences will be predictable according to the location and sometimes they will be temporary and personal, or independent of location.
The location changes might be small or large. When the changes are from one country to another, such as for a traveler moving from Italy to France, it is likely that the changes will involve language changes. When location changes are triggered by movement from one room in a house to another, it is quite likely the difference will be device changes and this may mean changes in means of control of the access device. ...
We can also imagine the same person moving from their personal laptop computer to the one in their family's office expecting to find that the office one needs to change to their needs and preferences after it has accommodated other members of the family with different needs and preferences. We cannot imagine users wanting to set up their needs and preferences every time they make such location changes. In fact, there are many people who would not be capable of determining their own needs and preferences and for these people, making the changes might be the most important.
When the location is fixed in one sense, as is the case in a train, but varied in a global sense, because the train moves, relative and absolute location descriptions become necessary. (Nevile & Ford, 2006)
and
... we need a way to be precise about the locations so that we can ease the burden of adapting the devices to the user. This in turn means being able to specify a particular location with precision and in three dimensions. It also means being able to describe dynamic locations, such as inside a moving car or train. These may be relative locations. It also means being able to associate the user's personal profile for that device with that user's profile of needs and preferences. There is a need then for flexible, interoperable, machine-readable descriptions of locations for those cases in which they are determinants of the suitability of user profiles.
There is therefore a requirement for both location-dependent and location-independent profiling. The aim in both cases is the same, stability for the user and thus a personal sense of location-independent accessibility, but one depends upon not being affected by a change in location and the other upon being affected by it. The location-independence is thus as viewed from the user's perspective. (Nevile & Ford, 2006 p ???)
Sometimes, a person's lack of access is more of a temporal problem: if an activity is taking place in one part of the world but welcoming online participants, it can be a matter of where people are located that determines the accessibility of the activity. It is not possible for everyone to be participants in everything and have sufficient sleep and day-time schedules for their local area. This location-based temporal factor means, for many people, difficulties in participating in educational, research, entertainment and financial opportunities that support international equity. This and other issues are considered in detail in a chapter of a book about cartography. (Nevile & Ford, 2006 p ???)
In summary, there are functional accessibility requirements that can flow simply from where the user is located at the time.
Some types of information present particular problems of accessibility. Mathematics depends upon graphical representation to make it quickly accessible to mathematicians. They learn the symbolism and write and interpret the mathematics with agility if they can see it.
Blind mathematicians have enormous difficulties: they have to work with both the mathematical concepts and the very difficult encoding that represents the mathematical content. This combined process is cumbersome and enormously increases the cognitive task (Nevile, 2003c). W3C has developed Mathematics Markup Language [MathML] for simultaneously expressing mathematics for both presentation (graphically) and manipulation. Appropriate software can be used now to both display mathematics on the screen, as one expects to see it, and to enable cutting-and-pasting of sections of mathematics as one does with text in a word processor.
Although the problem has been pretty well solved for the sighted mathematician, it remains a problem for the mathematician who wants to use Braille. The author and others have worked on the development of transformation services that will enable Braille users to access mathematics that is encoded correctly in MathML. ([WCAG-2]; Smith, 2004; BraMaNet, 2008)
Spatial information, now commonly available in multi-media forms, offers a special challenge to those who want everyone to be able to enjoy their information. Not only is there the standard range of problems, such as how does a blind person get access to the information in a map (an image), or how do they participate in an interactive walk-through of a building, but there is the special nature of information to consider. For professionals, the problem is usually different from the one of everyday users. Experts who work in areas such as spatial sciences, usually can work with text and make sense of it: databases containing numbers are useful as representations of information and they can be interpreted and used with standard database techniques, so blind people, for example, can learn to use these alternative formats. But people who are not blind, but for now have their eyes-busy, do not have this training. Not everyone who can see reads a map well, as we know. Some people like to picture the information about the route to the beach by thinking of the land marks, others by using the compass and still others perhaps by remembering the names of streets or the number of them. Maps allow such people to read off what works for them, in most cases. But now that people are walking around with hand-held devices, and the maps are often very small, or they need the information without having to look, we have to find ways for the speech output devices to represent the information. We have to work on the variety of ways in which people might understand spatial information, to find new representations that will work for them. This is a known current challenge, and the field of multi-media cartography is engaged with it. (Nevile & Ford, 2006 p ???)
There are now a growing number of cybercartographers who are trying to re-invent cartography in the era of digital information (Taylor, 2006). Their focus is on what people can do with digital information and how this might lead to new forms of maps. In a similar way, there is work to be done to see how people with disabilities might benefit from the transition to digital data.
In order to decide what to read and when, especially when reading a newspaper, most users with visual abilities look for headings of sections and then choose what is of interest. Headlines play a significant role in the overall presentation of the content. Where the headings are clearly marked up, the visual reader scans the headings and can even get clues as to their relative importance, usually from their size. A page from the New York Times provides a good example of content clearly identified and organised using headings (Figure 12).
Figure 12: New York Times Online (2005)
Where adaptive or assistive technologies provide additional help for users, such as providing an overview of the content of the page, the structure can be marked for presentation in other ways, as illustrated by Human Factors International (Figure 13). On the left, Figure 13 has a browser-generated table of contents from a Web page laid out using correct HTML heading structure. On the right, there is a blank browser-generated table of contents from the same page that was marked up using paragraphs and 'direct format' font size elements to produce "headings" that are identified visually. There are no 'headings' in this version for the user's agent to present to the user.
Figure
13: Two versions of contents as perceived by a computer according to correct and incorrect content markup (HFI-markup, 2005)
Bob Regan (2005), Macromedia's erstwhile accessibility expert, pointed to what he described as the first and still relevant example of accessible Flash (WGBH NCAM, 2005) made by the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media [WGBH NCAM], Figure 14. It offers captions for the video and detailed variations according to the access device being used (see Appendix 3 for complete code). The Web 'page' contains a set of instructions to the browser to automatically determine what software is available and, based on the response, to retrieve and activate certain components. This is, in fact, a simple example of what has been further developed into the AccessForAll approach.
UK Government Accounting offers an interesting collection of information at its site (Figure 15). The financial information is available as PDFs to be printed but also in electronic form so that additional features can be made available.
The electronic version of Government Accounting 2000 enhances the print version by including a keyword search, hyper-links to related sections, pop-up definitions for Glossary terms, and easy-to-use navigation through the pages. The product now includes the ability to personalise font sizes as required. ... (UK Government, 2000)
It is worth noting that this site, which uses frames when presenting the contents online, checks to see if the user wants frames before delivering them, and makes provision for those who do not want them, but it does not do the same for Javascript, on which it relies. A user who does not have Javascript receives a blank page. Also, it is difficult for a user who adjusts the page and then wants to find it in its adjusted form some time later because there is no way to identify the page other than by the generic file from which it is generated. In short, the page lacks a persistent link (identifier).
Human Factors International (HFI), based in the US, has a demonstration page in both inaccessible and accessible form. These are different when rendered aurally although they appear the same when rendered visually (Figure 16).
| Inaccessible | Accessible |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Figure 16: Two versions of a Web 'page' showing similarity in sight but differences in sound versions of the same content according to its encoding (HFI-chocolate, 2005). | |
| The inaccessible Web page illustrated in the first column is representative of much current practice on the Internet. Graphics were used for some of the text, and tables were used to provide layout. Clear blank images were used to help stabilize the layout. HTML structural syntax is ignored. The page HTML is invalid. | The accessible page illustrated in the right column is constructed using text for all text elements, a single image for the one needed graphic. Standard HTML elements were used to construct the page - headings, paragraphs and definition lists in this case. Additional information was also coded into the page to provide some additional information to the listener. The page was validated against the HTML 4.01 standard |
Although the pages appear visually to be much the same, they are very different for a screen reader. HFI provide two audible renderings in mp3 format (others are also available):
screen reading of inaccessible page and screen reading of accessible page.
A simple way to render an inaccessible page accessible is to provide a reading of the page. This would not solve all accessibility problems for all potential users, but it may solve it for many users. Thus, by providing a sound file of a reading of the text and a description of the image, or even a text file where the text is transformable, the content of the page could be made available to a large number of potential users who might otherwise not be able to access it. As this page does not appear to have links, such a simple solution would be useful but only if the user could find the alternative version they want. This means the new file, wherever located, should be described and entered in the same catalogue of resources as the original, as an alternative for the original, and be discoverable by a user with the need for a non-visual version. The alternative approach to dealing with an inaccessible page, with an aim to make it universally accessible, requires the cooperation of the page owner and, unfortunately, often considerable skill. Sometimes, it is just not possible to make the content universally accessible.
Captions are familiar to many in the form of sub-titles for films, and becoming more common in other circumstances.
Closed Captioning: Closed captions are all white uppercase (captial) letters encased in a black box. A decoder or television with a decoder chip is necessary to view them.
Open Captioning: (subtitling). The captions are "burned" onto the videotape and are always visble [sic] -- no decoder is needed. A wide variety of fonts is available for open-captioning allowing the use of upper and lowercase letters with descenders. The options for caption placement are great, permitting location anywhere on the screen. Open Captions are usually white letters with a black rim or drop shadow. The Captioned Media Program requires Open Captioning. ...
Open Captioning covers many nuances and subtleties. The Guidelines are the key to making knowledge, entertainment and information accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, to those that are seeking to improve their reading and other literacy skills, and to those that are learning to speak English as a second language. (US Department of Education, 2005)
In particular, captions provide an excellent example of the many accessibility techniques that make resources more accessible and useful in general. Like curb-cuts, captions make a huge difference to some but are then found to have many other uses for the general population.
It is important to many users that content is properly structured. The most obvious issue is when a major heading is simply rendered in large or coloured print, and then a less important one is in a smaller font size. This is correctly done when the headings are marked as such, showing their ranking as 1, or 2, for example.
One way to fix this problem is to reform the original page using the correct markup for the headings but one does not always have access to the original: the owner may not be interested, or it may be difficult to contact them, or impossible for some other reason. Providing a simple list of the contents, with links to specific parts of the page, can be done by annotation of the original page, where the annotations are stored elsewhere and then applied to the page upon retrieval before it is served to the user (Kateli, 2006). A less ambitious supplement to the page would be a list of the contents so that at least the user would know what to look for. Either way, the supplementary content needs to be discovered and associated with the original content, whether by the user's agent or the content server or otherwise.
For many years, Microsoft showed its skepticism for universal accessibility, particularly with its failure to make its Internet Explorer browser standards (UAAG) conformant. In 2003, however, Microsoft commissioned a study in the US to get some indication of who might be needing assistance with accessing information if they are to use computers or other electronic devices (Microsoft, 2008). The overall population in the US in the age range 18 to 64 years was found to be divided into the following four groups: those with severe, mild, minimal and no difficulties, in the following four groups: 25% with severe, 37% with mild, and 37% with minimal or no difficulties resulting from disabilities (Figure 17).
Further, the study found (Figure 17) that:
Visual, dexterity, and hearing difficulties and impairments are the most common types of difficulties or impairments among working-age adults:
• Approximately one in four (27%) have a visual difficulty or impairment.
• One in four (26%) have a dexterity difficulty or impairment.
• One in five (21%) have a hearing difficulty or impairment.Somewhat fewer working-age adults have a cognitive difficulty or impairment (20%) and very few (4%) have a speech difficulty or impairment.
... For the top three difficulties and impairments:
• 16% (27.4 million) of working-age adults have a mild visual difficulty or impairment, and 11% (18.5 million) of working-age adults have a severe visual difficulty or impairment.
• 19% (31.7 million) of working-age adults have a mild dexterity difficulty or impairment, and 7% (12.0 million) of working-age adults have a severe dexterity difficulty or impairment.
• 19% (32.0 million) of working-age adults have a mild hearing difficulty or impairment, and 3% (4.3 million) of working-age adults have a severe hearing difficulty or impairment. (Microsoft, 2003b)
or as shown (Figure 18):
These findings show that the majority of working-age adults are likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology. As shown in the chart in Figure 18, 60% (101.4 million) of working-age adults are likely or very likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology.
The chart in Figure 18 also shows the percentages of working-age adults who are likely or very likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology due to a range of mild to severe difficulties and impairments:
• 38% (64.2 million) of working-age adults are likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology due to a mild difficulties and impairments.
• 22% (37.2 million) of working-age adults are very likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology due to a severe difficulties and impairments.
• 40% (67.6 million) of working-age adults are not likely to benefit due to a no or minimal difficulties or impairments. (Microsoft, 2003b)
or as shown in Figure 19:
The report states:
The fact that a large percentage of working-age adults have difficulties or impairments of varying degrees may surprise many people. However, this study uniquely identifies individuals who are not measured in other studies as "disabled" but who do experience difficulty in performing daily tasks and could benefit from the use of accessible technology.
Note that many or most of the individuals who have mild difficulties and impairments do not self-identify as having an impairment or disability. In fact, the difficulties they have are not likely to be noticeable to many of their colleagues. (Microsoft, 2003b)
Three more sets of figures provide the incentive to think carefully about accessibility in the general population:
Together, Figures 20, 21 and 22 paint a picture for the US that looks grim. There is clearly a worrying trend towards much higher proportions of the community being much older than at present, and therefore more likely to be at risk of disability.
There is every reason to assume the figures are similar in Australia.
In summary, the Microsoft report claims:
In the United States, 60% (101.4 million) of working-age adults who range from 18 to 64 years old are likely or very likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology due to difficulties and impairments that may impact computer use. Among current US computer users who range from 18 to 64 years old, 57% (74.2 million) are likely or very likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology due to difficulties and impairments that may impact computer use. (Microsoft, 2003d)
These figures point to the fact that not all those who could benefit from computer use, do use computers. There are many reasons for this, but as the trend to publish becomes electronic and the younger people adopt the technology, the evidence above suggests there is going to be an increasing problem unless accessibility is also rapidly increased.
While Microsoft was working to convince, or otherwise, itself of the need to pay attention to accessibility issues, Texthelp Systems Inc. adopted a different slant and developed a solution at least for a high proportion of those with disabilities. As justification for their product BrowseAloud, they claim:
In the US and Canada there are:
BrowseAloud is a service that can be offered by a Web site to provide streamed reading aloud of the content of the site, assuming it is properly constructed.
In 2006, the US National Council on Disability released a policy paper that explores key trends in information and communication technology, and highlights the potential opportunities and problems these trends present for people with disabilities. It suggests some strategies to maximize opportunities and avoid potential problems and barriers. In particular,
The following are some emerging technology trends that are causing accessibility problems.
The report points out that technology in common use changes fast and unpredictably with the result that "assistive technology developers cannot keep pace". They cite convergence and competitive differences as having "a negative effect on interoperability between assistive and mainstream technology where standards and requirements are often weak or nonexistent". The rapid increase in the number of aging people who have naturally increasing disabilities is, of course, always a concern.
On a more positive note, the NCD report summary lists a number of technological advances and says:
These technical advances will provide a number of opportunities for improvement in the daily lives of individuals with disabilities, including work, education, travel, entertainment, healthcare, and independent living.
It is becoming much easier to make mainstream products more accessible. The increasing flexibility and adaptability that technology advances bring to mainstream products will make it more practical and cost effective to build accessibility directly into these products, often in ways that increase their mass market appeal. (NCD, 2006)
In 1998, the US Federal Government legislated in favour of accessibility of digital resources including applications when the US federal government is procuring content, systems or services [s508]. As the largest employer of people with disabilities in the US, the Federal Government is also responsible for social security (income replacement) including for people with disabilities. There may have been some connection between the two because it is clearly better in a number of ways for the US Federal Government to offer useful employment to their citizens with disabilities than to have to support them all on disability pensions.
Fairfax in Australia, however, has offered a similarly striking economic reason for being concerned about accessibility. In 2003, they redeveloped their Web site with accessibility in mind and the result is a saving of an estimated $1,000,000 per year in transmission costs. In a 2004 presentation for the Web Standards Group [WSG], Brett Jackson, Creative Director of Fairfax Digital, reported that Fairfax credits this achievement to its decision to follow accessibility guidelines by its move to the XHTML/CSS platform. Jackson represented Fairfax Digital "with 40 sites, 5 or 6 key destinations, smh.com.au, theage.com.au, drive.com.au, mycareer.com.au, domain.com.au, afr.com.au. SMH/AGE alone has 135 million PI's per month, 6 mill uv's. [These] represent the leading News sites in Australia." Fairfax "moved our biggest sites across in a 6 month timeframe" with "the smoothest rollout we have ever experienced" and "will save a million $ in bandwidth a year." (Jackson, 2004)
In 2003, a surprisingly high proportion of the Webby award winners (organised by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences) were found to have accessible sites despite their multimedia attraction. In the opinion of Bob Regan, at the time the accessibility expert for Macromedia, the vendors of DreamWeaver and Authorware, the Webby winners did not have accessible sites so much because they were concerned about accessibility as because they were concerned to use the latest, smartest techniques, and these inevitably led to increased accessibility (Regan, 2004).
The Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines [ATAG] can be used as functional requirements for the accessibility of authoring tools of all kinds. The underlying belief is that if the tools are designed to promote accessible products, inadvertently, simply by using the tools, authors of resources will make their products accessible. The author, intermittently involved in the development of ATAG, asserts that if those who are so concerned about training their authors about accessibility were to save the money and time involved and instead buy them better authoring tools, more might be achieved with the same amount of money.
In this chapter, the terms disability and accessibility have been elaborated. This is important for the research because both terms are in common usage and their use in this thesis can be confusing. Understanding that there has been a move in recent years to redefine disability as a label, is significant. It underpins the research in its new form, as a construct affected by human factors, real and virtual environments, and technology. Accessibility is understood in terms of the social definition of disability.
Th scope of the problem of inaccessibility of the Web has been considered. There is a distinct need for help for many people but a clear indication that many more will benefit if this effort is expended.
In the next chapter, the concept of universal accessibility is considered in detail.
