10 misconceptions about web accessibility

Posted by Ben on January 23, 2009 | Permalink | Hits: 753 

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Image by Life As Art.

Before we get into the list, here's a quick explanation of what web accessibility is, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality.

But in the eyes of some, web accessibility is a painful and not particularly worthwhile process. I'd like to address some of the misconceptions.

Special thanks to Nathanael Boehm and Andrew Boyd for their input on this post.

1. Accessibility only affects disabled people.

One of the best explanations I've heard comes from the University of Dundee:

Accessibility affects ordinary people in extraordinary situations.

What if you break your arm? What if your mouse stops working and you can only use the keyboard? What if you're hungover and a bad colour combination or a flickering advert could make you sick?

Nathanael Boehm adds:

What about the 1 in 12 males who have colour perception difficulties? What about search engines who can't figure out what you're site is about at all because you've got all the content locked away in images? What about having your site running on a flaky server or with an unreliable codebase so that it fails to serve 50% of requests? (like Twitter Search).

Accessibility affects everyone, much like usability. An accessible, useable site is better for everyone.

2. Accessible sites are boring.

Well, if blinking text and autoplaying audio are your kind of thing, then maybe an accessible site is boring to you. But you can still use images! Just remember to set the "alt" attribute so every image has a text-equivalent.

3. Accessibility is hard or impossible to achieve.

When I first learned HTML, I didn't use CSS, and all my HTML tags were in capital letters. Down the road, I discovered that people were starting to use lowercase tags, so I went through changing all of my code. Also, I realised that using CSS would be good in the long run, as I could put my site design in one file instead of defining fonts, colours and so on in every page. But in order to do that, I had to rework a lot of my site.

If you don't know how to make your site accessible, you may need to make quite a few changes to meet the accessibility guidelines. When you first do it, yes, it can take some time to do. But once you're aware of how to make your site accessible, you'll be able to do it that way in future. If you know how to do something the "right way", you can get it right first time from that moment onwards.

As for whether it's an impossible task, here's how Nathanael Boehm puts it:

Unless you're contractually required to deliberately not comply with web standards then it's possible. If you're building a complex, highly interactive, highly dynamic web application then it's going to take time and diligence, but it's possible.

Changing your ways can be half the battle, but once you know how to make your site accessible, it can become part of the process you follow when working on a new site.

4. Disabled people won't be reading my site anyway.

Why not? Maybe you're not only writing for disabled people, but disabled people are still people. Now, if they miss the point of your latest "Wordless Wednesday" post because you didn't bother to put a decent text equivalent, why will they want to visit your site again?

Every reader is different - you can't please everyone, but don't cut people out by not having an accessible site.

5. You should focus on the majority - most people aren't disabled.

Let's just look at why the "majority" rule doesn't always work. The majority will not comment on your site. Of the people who do comment, the majority will only comment once or twice.

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

Source: Participation Inequality by Jakob Nielsen.

Perhaps your site doesn't follow this pattern - but a blog is still an online community, and this rule does seem to apply to most of the sites I've seen. Can you afford to ignore the needs of the minorities? By all means start by addressing what you believe the majority would want (try conducting some surveys if you're not sure what they want) - but don't leave out everyone else.

6. Nobody surfs at 800x600 anymore.

Your stats may give you some idea of what screen resolution most of your readers use, but by providing a very wide site that looks terrible on a small screen, you're giving those people a reason not to visit. That may be why those stats are so low!

Remember that mobile devices have small screens. Suddenly, the trend towards bigger and better flat-screen monitors goes out the window.

As Nathanael Boehm points out:

What about the increasing numbers of iPhone users, not to mention people who've been using even smaller resolutions on mobile phones for years? Try downloading the Australian Yellow Pages website over GPRS ... just so you can find the link to their mobile version.

Furthermore, some people have big screens but don't maximise their browser. Why maximise when you have so much space to use for other applications?

You can't address every possible need, but it's worth avoiding a horizontal scrollbar if you can.

7. PDF and Flash cannot be made accessible.

Actually, they can. Andrew Boyd explains:

You design the PDF and Flash as directed by Adobe. Structured and tagged PDF is accessible - and Flash needs sufficient navigation and alt text embedded.

You may find this useful: Ten tips for creating useable and accessible PDFs.

I'd advise against using PDF for what should be a web page, or Flash for an entire website.

8. If the code validates, it's accessible.

Both Andrew and Nathanael raised this point - there is a lot more to accessiblity than simply validating your code. Validation is a good sanity check, but it's not the end of your accessibility testing.

The Dundee University has a good guide for getting started with the web accessibility guidelines.

9. Nobody can force you to do it, so why bother?

In some countries there are laws requiring you to implement accessibility standards into your website, or that more generally ask you not to discriminate against people with disabilities.

More information on legally-required web accessibility can be found at Wikipedia.

10. You need to create a second version of your site and make it accessible.

This just isn't a good idea. Why create extra work by running two sites? Isn't one site enough work to maintain? This is particularly aimed at sites that open in a new window and cannot be resized or moved. The "text-only version" is pitiful in comparison. Why not build a proper, accessible site that doesn't spawn new windows?

What do you think? Has this corrected some of your views of web accessibility? Is your site accessible?

Comments on 10 misconceptions about web accessibility

5

Ben | January 26, 2009 | Ben's home page | 190 comments

Thanks for the great comments. :) Accessibility is really important, I hope I have debunked some of the common mistakes people make when thinking of it.