What is an accessible website?
Attempting a definition.
An article by Jim Byrne
It is fairly easy to provides examples of the types of problems people with particular impairments have on the Web, and the techniques that can be used to make a site more accessible. But a simple definition; a sentence that sums up what an accessible website is, is not quite such an easy task.
An attempt at a definition is a good idea; if we are clear what an accessible website is, we will have a better idea of what we should be doing to build one.
You could probably think of many definitions, each looking at the issue from a particular perspective and serving the interests of a particular audience (and of course providing valuable insights). My aim in this particular article, is to try to address the issue from producers point of view, i.e. web designers, developers and content providers. The idea is to find a definition that serves those who's job is to publish and manage accessible web content. Hopefully we will arrive at a definition that offers practical lessons, and provides some insight into what our aims as web designers should be.
In trying to formulate my ideas, I came up with four definitions that I found useful in terms of clarifying the issues, and teasing out some some practical lessons. Each of these are definitions that are in common use by both advocates of accessible web design, and web developers who are not necessarily advocates but have to appear to know what they are talking about when a client asks them if do 'accessible web design'.
What is an accessible website?
- One that will be accessible to everyone.
- One that will be accessible to the intended audience - though perhaps not accessible to other groups.
- One that will be accessible to disabled people.
- One that will be accessible to machines first, and people second.
Let's examine the first definition.
1. An accessibe website is one that is accessible to everyone.
On first thought this seems like the one to go for - what could be better than a website that is accessible to everyone? But is this just an unobtainable 'utopian vision' or is it possible and practical? And we must also ask, is it desirable?
Is a website that is accessible to everyone possible?
Ignoring for now the HTML and presentation of a site, let's first of all look at this question as it relates to content. One barrier to the accessibility of content is the language a site is written in.
To be accessible to everyone a website will have to be available in many different languages; we can't assume that everyone will be able to read our native language. And remember we want our site to be accessible to everyone - we are not just talking about most common languages - we would also need to accommodate minority languages.
How many languages are there?
When first pushing this point in my 'Accessible Web Design Training Course', I was asked this very question - and unfortunately I didn't have an answer (well prepared eh?). To avoid getting caught out again, I needed to do a little research. A couple of evenings later there was a news piece on the television related to the UK census, which declared that in one square mile in London , there where people speaking 120 different languages - an eye opener, and a good start. I continued my research on the Web and found a site that claimed to have 'resources from 780 different languages' - so I knew there were at least 750 languages in the world. Finally I hit the proverbial jackpot, when I found a site called ethnologue.com, which publishes a report called, Ethnologue Volume 2, which gives both a list of current language names and their associated languages,
"Language Name Index.This is a computer-produced index of 41,806 entries to the names that are associated with the 6,809 languages listed in Ethnologue, Volume 1: Languages of the World, Fourteenth Edition, 2000. http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/introduction.asp
Given enough resources, enough money and enough time it is certainly possible to translate a website into 6,809 languages (There are already some programs that can automatically translate one languages into another, and some 'real-life' translation services, see http://www.multikulti.org.uk for UK community informaton in multiple languages). It's not impossible (in theory at least) to translate all of the content of a website into every language - but is it practical?
I have a sneaking suspicion that the benefits are unlikely to be worth the enormous energy and resources expended on the exercise, so it is probably not practical. Neither is it likely to be desirable; most websites are aimed at a specific audience rather than a indiscriminate worldwide audience.
Ok, let's move on from the language problem; it can be done but it's probably not a good idea. It is time to look at another area highlighted by the W3C Accessibility Guidelines; writing style.
Should all websites be written using simple language?
The World Wide Web Consortium's Accessibility Guidelines tell us that simple words, and short sentences, will increase the accessibility of a website. This will particularly assist people with a cognitive impairment and help to overcome the fact that visitors are likely to have different reading ages. In theory, the simpler the vocabulary used the bigger the potential audience.
There is certainly a lot of merit in this approach - particularly for commercial Websites in the business of selling a product or getting a message across quickly. But the Web is made up of more than commercial websites with a product to sell; should they all be re-written to ensure that they are accessible to the widest possible audience? And will one 'simple' writing style make all web pages accessible to all audiences?
I am seeing a possible problem here. If every website is written in as simple a manner as possible - I can't see how we will manage to retain the variety and personality of different writers? Do people enjoy the work different authors because they like the way they write?
I like to read what Philip Greenspun has to say about Web design - and he tends to 'go on a bit'. But I happen to like the way he goes on. I am part of his intended audience and I'm interested in what he has to say. Should he try to make his writing style more accessible by making it simpler - and if so would I still be interested? In other words, would it still be accessible to me, and my particular bag of prejudices and conceits? I think not.
Is clear and simple language always compatible with the personal approach, style and intention of every writer?
"Many a clever boy is floggd into a dunce and many an orginal composition corrected into mediocrity." The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, p.g. 188
I'm inclined to think that not all Web documents will be made more accessible by re-writing them in short sentences and using simple words. Some will, but not all - and to satisfy this first definition - we need to be accessible to everyone.
Let's look at an example; scientific or technical papers published on the Web - should these be written using simple language? In science there needs to be agreement on what particular words mean (these same words may mean something different in another community).
Every scientific community has it's own vocabulary (i.e. jargon) - known to those within the community but perhaps not comprehensible to those outwith the community. Should scientific papers published on the Web use different language from the same paper published in hard copy? Would the scientific or technical papers still be clear and comprehensible to the intended audience. (This also begs the question, should everything published in hard copy also be accessible to everyone?)
There are those of course who cannot read no matter how simple the language is or how short the sentences are.
So far we have only covered a few points - and I have little doubt you are thinking - 'now I can see you are being absurd'. But remember I am only matching my examples up against the definition that an accessible website is one that is accessible to everyone. I think we can agree that this definition is starting to look problematic?
When I wrote the first version of this article I was thinking that there was one way to ensure that a website is accessible to everyone, and that would be to create multiple versions of all content; pages in every language, written in every style, and presented in a host of different formats to accommodate the accessibility needs of all users. However after a little thought, I now realise that even this is not possible; 'everyone' is just too wide a definition; and includes babies, and people who do not have the capacity to understand the content of a web page, no matter how it is presented to them.
It would be theoretically possible to produce many different versions to ensure you page is accessible to all who are capable of understanding it - and that's a great idea for the consumer, but a major problem for the producer. In my experience, most organisations who try to maintain even two versions of a website already struggle to keep both current (e.g. many organisations try to maintain a graphics version and a text only version).
One last note, before we move on; just to add to the aburdity this definition would mean that we are also including those people not yet connected to the Web. At the very least we need to amend or qualify our definition by saying that it only includes those people who have access to the Web. (Although if I am being that pedantic, that would have to apply to all our definitions.)
2. An accessible website is one that is accessible to the intended audience - though perhaps not accessible to other groups.
Phew! this definition certainly looks like it should cut down the number of variables we need to design for. If your intended audience doesn't include those who speak other languages then at least you don't have to worry about the cost and burden of multiple translations. Equally, when it comes to writing style, we don't need to worry about writing for the needs of every potential reader; clearly, the style should be appropriate to the audience and site content.
That is not to say that a clear and simple style may be appropriate and help to broaden the accessibility of many websites. However, this is not always the case as some web documents are only written for a very select and private group (e,g those carrying out research and using the web in a non-public way, to share information as their project progresses).
To ensure that your website is accessible to the intended audience the following principles need to be adhered to:
- You will need to know the physical and cognitive capabilities of your audience.
- You will need to know the Web devices (or user agents as they are commonly called) being used by your audience i.e type of computer, Browser type, screens size etc.
At least 10% of people in Europe and 20% of people in America are disabled. Is it likely that your intended audience will reflect this same breakdown of disabled and non-disabled? If so, this implies that your will have to ensure your website is accessible to people with physical and/or cognitive impairments.
You might think this doesn't apply to your particular group - because you really know them well. However, not all impairments are obvious; can you assume there is no-one in your group who is colour blind or who has dyslexia? what about those people in your organisation over 40, how is their eyesight these days? (8% men and 0.4% women are colour blind, 15% of the population have Dyslexia.)
To ensure your intended audience can access your website you will need to know about the devices being used - and the characteristics of those devices (screen size, resolution, speed of data throughput, input devices etc).
In the past, in relation to web connected devices, perhaps all we had to know was screen size and screen resolution, although there is the added complication that many people resize there browser windows. Today people are increasingly using mobile phones, games consoles, PDAs and televisions to browse the Web. The type and size of output device, its display capabilities, and speed of access will all have an impact of the way you will need to design your website. It is no good designing a Web page for a 21" screen if everyone is going to be accessing the page from their PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants, e.g. a Palm Organiser).
As yet we haven't posed any insurmountable problems with this definition; given enough time and research you can find out the physical and cognitive capabilities of your audience and what they will be using to browse the Web. This looks like it has some mileage as a definition for those designing for a closed environment - like a workplace Intranet. But with a website open to the World - with its unpredicability in terms of audience and 'user agent' - there could still be problems.
There is one potential glitch; if your website is going to be available to the World there is a risk you could be breaking the law (in the UK the Disability Discrimination Act and in the America The Americans with Disabilities Act). Your expectations of who will use your website may not match up with the reality of those who actually do use it. If someone who is not part of your intended audience visits your Website, but cannot access it, because you have not predicted their requirements, they may be entitled to start legal proceedings against you?
But with the above proviso - and if you are good at predicting the present and the future needs, the devices used, and the physical and cognitive abilities of you audience this holds some promise as a useful definition for Intranet Web designers.
Time to move on to our next definition - which in my experience is closest to what most people think of when they hear the phrase, 'an accessible website'.
3. An accessible website is one that is accessible to disabled people.
A commendable definition - what could be better than websites that are accessible to disabled people. All the literature about designing accessible websites tells us that if your website is accessible to disabled people you are likely to increase the audience for your information or service. You are likely also to have a website that is easier to use for everyone - and if you are in the business to make money you are likely to make more of it (In the UK alone disabled people have £40 billion of disposable income).
But let's not get ahead of ourselves, to start with we need to know if our definition includes all disabled people? Or do we mean only disabled people who are part of our known audience?
If we mean all disabled people we have the exactly the same problems highlighted in our first definition; the number of variables we have to design for is very high. There are disabled people in every country, so apart from taking into account the needs of people with different impairments, we still have to deal with the language problem. Furthermore, the writing style and reading age arguments still apply; there are bound to be disabled people with cognitive impairments that limit their reading ability.
If we mean only those disabled people who are part of our intended audience; we will need perfect knowledge about their physical and cognitive capabilities. Even within a subset of disabled people all speaking the same language, it may be difficult to make our content accessible to everyone without creating several versions - each to suit the diverse needs of our audience. A website that is accessible to a person with a learning disability might not be accessible to someone who is blind or has a visual impairment.
There can be no doubt that designing websites that are accessible to disabled people will be an important part of any definition we arrive at. However, is a definition that concentrates solely on making websites accessible to disabled people sufficient to help us deal with some other extremely important issues. For example will it help us to build websites that will work on a range of different devices or build robust 'future- proofed' easy to manage sites? These are important issues for the producers of websites, and so far we have only been concentrating on satisfying the access needs of the consumer.
If we settle on a definition that is only about ensuring a website is accessible to the end user, and doesn't address the needs of the producers and managers of websites, we may be setting off on the wrong foot; possibly building sites that will be difficult to manage and maintain in the future. The next definition tries to accomodate the needs of both producers of and consumers of websites, by moving the spotlight away from the content of a site and moving it on to the way we package up that content.
4.An accessible website is one that is accessible to machines first (e.g. a computer) and people second.
With this definition we are moving away from concentrating solely on content to looking at how we package that content, i.e. how we use HTML to give structure to web documents.
All access to web pages is mediated through some type of technology. This is as true for disabled people using assistive technology as it is for everyone else. Assisitve technologies such as: refreshable braille displays; voice activated or speaking browsers; adapted keyboards; and switches are just more Web connected devices to add to the long list that we are already familiar with: televisions; PDAs; games consoles; in-car information systems, telephones, and so on.
How do we cope with ensuring that our documents will work on the huge diversity of output devices currently available? The answer: use the system invented by Tim Berners Lee that he called the World Wide Web! The web was designed to solve this very problem; all we have to do is follow the rules.
The rules I am talking about are the ones that tell us how to 'markup' the structure of documents with labels, i.e. a lables that say, this bits a header, other labels that says, this bits a paragraph, this bits a list, and so on. And also the relationships between the various elements of a web document. Tim Berners Lee called this arrangement of labels and content, HTML. The rules for writing HTML are encapsulated in a set of documents called Document Type Definitions. If you create web pages in accordance with the rules set out within a Document Type Definition, you are writing standard HTML - the current and final HTML standard is HTML version 4.01.
If we want to make our content accessible to real people and the first step to achieving this is to ensure that our pages are accessible to the technology that people will be using. The best chance we have of doing that is to create our pages using standard HTML.
Making webpages accessible to people
Creating structured documents using standard HTML doesn't solve all the problems mentioned in the earlier definitions: i.e. the difficulty of making content accessible to people, not just machines. However, if we design our web pages using standard HTML and also try to divorce the structure of our documents from the way they are presented, then we are taking a very important step towards tackling this problem.
luckily there is already a good way to divorce structure from presentation when creating webpages - and that is to use Cascading Style Sheets as a way of determining document presentation, when creating web pages - in the same way as we can use style sheets to give a consisten look and feel to a Microsoft Word document.
Instead of having to create multiple versions of every web page, we can create web pages that are flexible in the way they can be presented. This is a solution that mininises the workload for producers of web pages, and gives more control to consumers. In some sense we move the responsibility for how the content is presented, away from the producer, towards the consumer and the particular web client they are using.
As we found out earlier, making content accessible to people is difficult because there are so many variables to try to control. Depending on the makeup of your audience you may still have to produce more than one version of your content (e.g. if you have a site aimed at both people with learning difficulties and professionals supporting people with a learning difficulty). But by creating more flexible documents we can cover the all those who require the same content but need to have it presented in a way that makes it accessible to them.
We can optimise the flexibility of our sites by writing to standards and divorcing content from presentation. A further step we can take to cope with the diversity of our audience, is to following the Web Accessibility guidelines created by W3C. These guidelines tell us how to use the standards to create more flexible webpages; it saves us figuring it all out for ourselves, as the most important techniques are all summarised in the guidelines and techniques documents.
Taking a step back
My aim in exploring the first three definitions was not to warn you away from attempting to make your content accessible to your largest possible audience. Rather it was squash a few current myths and get away from 'thoughtless banner headline accessibility', one of which is this notion that it is possible to make a website 100% accessible (and if you don't, why are you saying you design accessible websites?). Making websites accessible will always require clear thinking; thinking about who will your main audience is, what their need are, and what knowledge, time and resources are available in trying to meet those needs.
In relation to language, and writing style, there are many producers who will - because, for one thing, there are equal opportunity laws - have to address the issues outlined in the first definition. They will have to create content in different languages and written using plain easy to understand words. Examples are websites by local and national government, college and universities websites, and the sites of organisations important for social inclusion and feelings of citizenship (doesn't that include Banks, building societies, shops, Art Galleries and Museums, Travel websites.. in fact an endless list of sites).
However each of these organisations will have to find ways to ensure they are building their websites in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. It is important to understand the distinction between that part of your audience that can be served by providing the same content in a way that can be be presented in different ways to diferent users, and that part of your audience that can only be served by creating new content.
In this context creating well structured documents, marked up and a standard way, and with presentation determined by style sheets, looks to be a good approach. (If you are looking for a good book to help you in this quest for standards based web design, I recommend Designing With Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman.)
In summary:
- First, make web documents accessible to machines.
- An accessible website is one that is marked up using Standard HTML to provide clear document structure.
- The presentation of webpages can be made flexible by the use of style sheets to help divorce the content from the presentation of that content .
- Second, make web documents accessible to people.
- Accomplish the first part of our definition and you are in the best position to accommodate the diverse needs of your intended audience (and those not part of your intended audience). Draw on the research and lessons encapsulated in the W3c guidelines to help ensure that your documents will be accessible to people, not just machines.
With this definition our first thought is not to separate disabled people out as a special group to be catered for; there will be disabled people and non-disabled people in our intended audience. They will all be using a web browser of some sort and we will have done all we can to ensure our documents are accessible to those web browsers. No input or output device is more 'normal' than any other input or output device; you may be using a mouse and a monitor, someone else will be using a keyboard and a set of headphones. And if we are doing our jobs right as web designers, it won't make any difference - they will all still get the content.
Conclusions in the form of a diagram
- All access to web pages is mediated through some type of technology; if it isn't accessible to the machine you are using, it won't be accessible to you.
- You have the best chance of your web page working on these intermediate devices if you use standard markup.
- People with different needs will be able to access the same content - as long as it can be presented in a way that suits them.
- Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to make the presentation of your web content flexible.
- For CSS to work consistently standard markup is required.
- Use the World Wide Web Consortiums Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to make your content more flexible.
- Some people will require different content and different presentation.
- Prioritize your audiences - and spend your budget accordingly to create different versions of your content.
What have we learned?
- Trying to make our content accessible to everyone is next to impossible. Accessibility is a relative concept: it will depend on your audience, your knowledge about the needs of your audience and the resources you have available.
- You can't control how the page will be presented to the end user, but the one thing you have absolute control of is the markup of your pages (i.e. the HTML).
- All content arrives at the user via some type of computer and browser.
- The first step to creating an accessible website is to create sites that are accessible to machines. Your best chance of achieving this is to use standard HTML.
- When content can be divorced from presentation, using style sheets, the same content can be presented in many different ways. We don't have to worry about creating quite so many versions of each web page to meet the needs of a diverse audience.
- The W3c Accessibility Guidelines can be used to make your standards based websites more flexible, and able to accomodate the diverse needs of your audience.
An article by Jim Byrne - the accessible web design specialist since 1996 and founder of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers.