Accessibility as a Process

In Part III, Robin and I discuss the legal issues that can arise through not having an accessible digital product, and how to set up an accessibility infrastructure within your organisation.

As a usability professional, I believe that it is the responsibility of the information architect or user experience architect to ensure that their usability proposals are inclusive. Others may argue that it is the developer’s responsibility, since many accessibility issues arise from incorrect coding. What are your thoughts?

I think it’s both. Accessibility needs to be considered all the way along. So, from procurement right through to UAD. It’s the responsibility of the management, right up to the CEO to make sure there’s that priority is given to accessibility and usability within the organisation and that that’s reflected in the strategy etc.

You can’t really point at one group and say it’s the responsibility of the people who created the initial design or the UX, or the coders when they get to the coding of the templates, because it’s right across the board.

I agree. I think usability’s a bit like that. You have to have an infrastructure.

And I’m not sure you can split out usability and accessibility. It’s a spectrum or it’s a Venn diagram with a very large overlap, because what’s a usability niggle for somebody will be an accessibility barrier for others, and what’s an accessibility niggle might be a significant usability barrier for an able bodied person. So you can’t really separate the two at all.

You mentioned in your presentation a few week’s ago (UK UPA event Accessibility: Assistive Technologies Explored 24.09.09) that accessibility is not “sexy”. In fact, many organisations ignore accessibility altogether, or give it a token thought. How can we – the usability professionals – “sell on” the importance of accessibility to peers, stakeholders and team members?

There are two separate issues there. One is that accessibility can be sexy if the final product is shown to be as aesthetically pleasing, as functional and as dynamic as possible.

We’re not saying “Don’t use Ajax or anything like that”, just make sure that it’s done in an accessible way, and there are lots of libraries and lots of work that has been done by people out there to make sure that that is easier for your average designer, developer etc. But how to get buy in is more about the business case for accessibility and there’s a really good business case. The carrots are more significant than the sticks, even though there are some big sticks in the form of legislation etc.

What are the legal implications of ignoring accessibility?

Certainly in the UK there is the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act,) which talks about the fact that people must provide equal goods and services on an equal basis within reasonable boundaries and that “reasonable adjustments” idea is what people who provide any websites – whether it’s commercial right down to SME’s and voluntary sector etc – that they should make sure that their website is at the basic level of accessibility. So there is a legal requirement in the UK. The problem with the UK legislation is that it’s very thin on detail and they have traditionally in the UK relied on case law to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. What we’ve found so far is that there hasn’t been a lot of litigation, but it’s all been on an individual private case basis, and it’s all settled out of court, and part of that settlement has been anonymity. So we’ve not had the legal precedent that really makes people sit up and listen.

We’ve also not had that additional information that case law would bring to say well, this is exactly what the DDA’s asking us to do : Is it A, is it AA, do you have to test with end users etc? There was an article on www.outlaw.com that came out on 2nd October 2009 that flagged that the European Commission are considering implementing European wide legislation on website accessibility. So that’s a really interesting development as well.

I know that some years ago the Sydney Olympics website was taken to court over accessibility issues …

Yes, and that’s quite relevant with the upcoming 2012 Olympics in 2012 here in the UK. That was the milestone case for sometime. There has been a more recent one.: Target in the States, which is a subsidiary of Amazon, also fell foul of Section 508 over there. That’s probably the most recent high profile case that’s come to everyone’s attention. What would be lovely over here in the UK is if the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) would start to bring cases under the DDA themselves - and not just rely on claims brought by individuals. There are a lot of people disadvantaged by all websites, but particularly high profile ones like Facebook, for example, which is extremely difficult to use. It would be great if we had some higher profile cases brought by the government, in effect. There’s hardly any other area where the government is not interested in implementing it’s own laws, whereas here, the EHRC has never been that interested. So that would be an extremely interesting development, and then we’d see some high profile cases here, too.

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Interview with Robin Christopherson, Head of Accessibility Services, AbilityNet. Follow Robin Christopherson on Twitter for updates on seminars, lectures and general accessibility news and issues.

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