Unlikely to be Web Accessibility Test Case, says Expert

Accessibility expert Peter Bosher told the UK UPA meeting in London last week that a test case on web accessibility was unlikely, because the design picture wasn't so bad, but there remained plenty of room for improvement.

He started by making the point that what might be novel for most people, was revolutionising for the 2-4M people in Britain with disabilities. 'The Web is really exciting as so much more is now possible, it's even more useful than for the average person.'

He ran through a list of controversial practices with the audience, getting them to say how they viewed different elements that go to make up a website, such as Flash, link names, text-only versions, frames, tables, and alt text. Then he talked through some examples of their use which supported and some which failed to support the needs of users with disabilities, pointing out that no tool was without some value.

He stressed that tools and their uses were evolving so that what had seemed totally irredeemable in earlier days, was now much less of a problem. There were no longer Flash pages that appeared totally empty to screen reader, he told the audience.

But he criticised some famous names, like the Amazon site - known for usability with mainstream browsers, but inflexible with others - and the BBC's, which, he said, was full of irrelevant clutter. He even paused briefly to point out that the UK UPA site had one small accessibility flaw in it.

Giving some insight into life with a screen reader (Bosher is himself blind), he said that though the perception was that everything had to be read serially, experienced users could overcome design shortcomings by using skipping commands that new users would not be as familiar with. This was one reason why usability testers could not just pick up a screen reader and get an impresssion of how using it would be for a blind person.

Commenting on a question about whether people with different disabilities had conflicting needs that would challenge designers, he said that this tended not to happen on the Web, but he could think of examples from the physical world.

Joining him for the evening were Matt Hopgood of Sapient, who were hosting the event, and Ian Lloyd of the Nationwide Building Society.

Hopgood talked through a project conducted for the Government that had originally involved two versions of a site, but which had then to be redeveloped into one series of pages, using the lessons learnt from the more inclusive channel.

Lloyd shared the mechanics of the building society website's redesign to meet accessibility guidelines which he spearheaded a few months ago. Read a fascinating and thorough account of this, in his own words, already on UN: How Nationwide tackled Accessibility - The Whole Story.

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