Accessible Design Guidelines can be Simple

Kevin Carey of HumanITy has boiled down five different sets of guidelines (Nielsen, WAI, etc) into what he considers are the three most basic accessibility guidelines for use by designers in making interactive digital products.

Talking at City University in late May, Carey told his audience:
1) Allow simplification and customisation,
2) Create multi-modality,
3) Allow user-interface choice.

Carey sees the value of having fewer and more generic guidelines as less overwhelming for designers and helpful in prompting them to explore and request elaboration. He also recognises that there are risks in both over-simplifying and over-complicating, but to date says the other principle sets haven’t helped much, so a simple three is like a foot in the door and may help engage designers to seek elaboration.

Carey talked about how defining disability in the first place is complex and usually gets done because governments need to legislate (i.e to provide benefits).

He presented a matrix grid showing types of disability compared to types of problems faced. Although the largest cluster of disabled people are those with learning and cognitive difficulties, blind and visually-impaired people had the most problems with the internet.

Carey made the point that all the available sets of principles present designers with a confusing and varied number of things to consider, while giving no clear direction for specifically designing for accessibility. He addressed, in particular:
1. Jakob Nielsen (Nielsen makes little/no mention of vision/disability related factors)
2. Carey’s top ten (mixed disability and generic, many principles are inter-related)
3. MyGuide
4. WAI Quick Tips (Web Accessibility Initiative, part of W3G)
5. DRC (Disability Rights Commission)– top three relate directly to disability

He fleshed out his boiled-down principles:
1) Allow simplification and customisation:
In this category Carey means allowing users to remove information that is unnecessary to the task (eg 'I want to send an email, take away everything else') and allowing them to change presentation features (ie they can increase font size, change colour).

2) Create multi-modality
Allow users to access the content via the medium of their choice (ie via text, via audio, via video/graphics) – as he said, broadcasting has had it down for years.

3) Allow user interface choice
Carey used interface to mean platform. He wanted to make the point that users should be able to choose the platform they want (ie a blind user might be able to afford a mobile phone that speaks but not a pc that speaks). Carey felt that cross-platform should be built in at the beginning rather than suffering re-purposing at the end. Carey’s concern was that if the user couldn’t access it in the first place, they couldn’t read it.

Carey did not define in detail what he meant by each of these principles. They were meant to represent the high-level aggregate of principles across all the 5 sets. But being high-level they are not meaningful enough of themselves to drive design decisions.

'It’s a hopeless situation,' said Carey on reviewing the state of assistive technology for the Web. Assistive technologies are expensive and only give real access to 19% of sites anyhow. The nature of the market works against progress in this field - shallow cash flow, small resource base, intense competition within a cartel. Microsoft isn’t doing much in this space – probably because the technology is actually much more complex than most people realise and requires substantial investment with a limited prospect of return.

However, he also pointed out that the new Mac OS comes bundled with a free screen reader. (This is a basic model so it remains to be seen whether this will provide users a cheap viable alternative.) There are several open source screen readers being developed in different projects around the world, but one of the problems is that this technology is complex and can make progress slow.

At the end of the session he was asked whether there is a need for Web developers to know what to actually do in order to make accessible websites. Doesn’t boiling the guidelines down only bury the complexity and make it harder for designers to unpack later?

Carey said that there are risks in both low level and high level attempts at communicating with designers but three simple generic principles do not overwhelm like other guidelines can and can provide a foot in the door.

Ben Bywater
Flow Interactive

Associated Link: Flow Interactive

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