Multimedia and accessibility requirements can be the cause of much confusion. While it is inarguable that as producers of quality software we shouldn’t discriminate against any user, there is also a danger of over-compensating for accessibility requirements. Locking out any sub-group of potential users is never acceptable, but watering down the interactivity of an application so far that it loses sight of its original objectives should not be the solution.

Many organisations are feeling the pressure to bring accessibility to the forefront because of the legal implications of being seen to discriminate. But with confusion over the exact requirements of the law the tendency is to err on the side of caution and commission a ‘lowest-common-denominator’ designed application, just in case. The legal confusion gets even more complex when the target user base crosses national boundaries, as the majority of web content does, and so has to conform to a globeful of differing territorial law.

But there is no reason to lose one’s head over accessibility. It is just a matter of giving a little thought to the issues, and making sure no potential user is likely to be shut out of the experience. The idea of ensuring that all users, regardless of ability, have exactly the same user experience is probably misunderstanding the issue. A visually impaired user is never going to have the same experience as a sighted user for example, simply because the visual content is not available to them. So to compromise a sighted users experience too far to accommodate a non-sighted user is the wrong way of thinking about it. Instead it is important to think of ways we can give disabled users a comparative experience, within the context of their disability.

What Does Accessibility Law say?

The requirements of the law have to be checked according to territory. In the UK, it is a common misconception that the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act (which came into effect in 2004) decreed that multimedia providers can be prosecuted for inaccessible content. The 1995 Act doesn’t explicitly mention websites or multimedia, although it does make provisions for ’service providers’

2.2 (p7): “The Act makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members of the public.”

4.7 (p39): “From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services.”

2.13 – 2.17 (p11-13): “What services are affected by the Act? An airline company provides a flight reservation and booking service to the public on its website. This is a provision of a service and is subject to the act.”

5.23 (p71): “For people with visual impairments, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include … accessible websites.”

5.26 (p68): “For people with hearing disabilities, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include … accessible websites.”

For the first provision you need to be clear on what constitutes the ’service’ you are providing. For eLearning the service is usually a training course, and the opportunity to complete it. This may mean removing barriers within the navigation; dependency on the mouse to progress for example, or providing audio alternatives to text.

Other territories have much stricter laws, Australia and Canada in particular. In the USA, Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act mandates that web content maintained by the federal government must be made accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 is based on the W3C Priority 1 standard. Many legal standards are based on this W3C standard, either priority 1 or 2, which can cause difficulties. The W3C standard dates from 1999, and is inappropriate to anything apart from HTML (the majority of eLearning is Flash based currently, which barely existed in 1999). It is a little archaic (I love the provision it makes for ‘ascii art‘!) but is still useful. Although, it is actually quite easy to conform to the W3C, as most of the provisions are simply passed as ‘not applicable’. This is fine for legality, but not so good in ensuring accessible content.

There is also a key problem when it comes to eLearning that one of the lowest priority W3C requirements is that a page has to be able to function with scripts disabled. This means if you want your app hooked into an LMS, you cannot comply to even the lowest level of the standard.

User Focussed Design

My message is this: don’t take the letter of the law as your roap map to accessible content. If you do it will make for very sterile, non-user focused applications. Instead think about it from a user experience perspective. If you are task focussed, apply good user-centric design, and sensible building practices, meeting the requirements of accessibility law will just come naturally. Adhering to the law is the easy part, it is creating an engaging user experience that is the hard part. So don’t think legalities – think usability.

There are gains to be made by thinking outside the box on the issue, in order to stay focussed on your objectives. For example, if an application needs to cater for partially sighted, motor impaired, or any other user that might have difficulty with a traditional computer application, you might consider the cost/usability implications of making a written version of your content available by mail-order. This way you can cater for all users, without compromising the user experience of the majority. The approach you take should depend on the objectives of your content, not the medium of delivery. If you can meet these objectives in technologically agnostic ways, then you should feel free to do so.

As a final note, if you think accessibility considerations for eLearning are difficult, you should try making considerations for accessibility in the games industry (as I have had to in previous jobs). A game, by its nature, is designed to test motor skills, reaction times, etc. i.e. it is discriminatory by design. Although, if a user cannot play a game this is not really disadvantaging them more than they already are. But if you were to prevent them from buying a service, finding information, or completing an assessment it is a much more serious problem.

Further reading: There is a great case study on the RNIB site, examining the efforts made by J K Rowling website to reach all it’s readers.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 12:01 pm and is filed under accessibility, development, flash, usability, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.