Accessibility Guidelines Unlock the Web for Millions

Jenifer Simpson just refinanced her house. She did it all online.

But depending on how well the Web site was designed, tasks such as accurately filling in all those fields could be impossible for someone who’s blind or has other disabilities.

“Even to get into college or to apply for jobs or even to interview -- you’re interviewed over the Internet now either through videoconferencing or Second Life – this is definitely the way the world is going,” says Simpson, senior director of telecommunications and technology policy for the American Association of People with Disabilities. “If people with disabilities don’t have accessibility [to the Internet], they’re going to be left behind.”

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in December issued its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, an update to its recommendations for Web design issued in 1999, a time of static Web pages. But the Web has grown more dynamic since then, incorporating audio, video and other enhancements that increasingly pose barriers to people with disabilities. Here’s the quick reference.

The cross-platform guidelines are voluntary and come with rich documentation designed to help designers avoid common barriers: video with no captions, such as on this news story, that would allow the deaf to understand it; shopping sites with images that aren’t labeled, so a blind person can’t find the intended item; or buttons with no distinction between “Place my order” and “Cancel my order.” Content that’s constantly refreshing can stymie screen readers and other devices that can’t capture it. (Or a common problem, one found on the IT Business Edge site, is text that says “Click here to learn more,” but the screen reader finds no label to tell users what they will learn about.)

Judy Brewer, director of the consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), says there are tradeoffs as ever more information moves to the Web.

“I’ve heard people in the blindness community say the sheer volume of information that’s available in digital media is an improvement, but it’s a frustration to sometimes run into front-end barriers,” she says. “If you take something like a CAPTCHA, that can sometimes be an inaccessible front door to what would otherwise be a treasure trove of information. For people with disabilities, it becomes not just an inconvenience, but a real working barrier…”

For the mortgage application, people who have low vision or are blind might use a screen magnifier to bump up the type size far beyond what the browser allows, use speech synthesis (a screen reader) or refreshable Braille to read the page using keyboard shortcuts to navigate through it such as tabbing, or the technology might create menus on the fly of headings or a list of links.

“But on a poorly designed page, it can become awkward, time consuming and just not possible to navigate,” Brewer says.

The form fields might not be clearly labeled, the asterisks that denote required information might be more helpful if placed before the field rather than after it if a screen reader is used, and it can be incredibly frustrating if the screen reader and the form don’t work together in the end to submit the information – or the user can’t tell whether it was submitted at all.

The Federation of the Blind's lawsuit against Target over the inaccessibility of its Web site put e-tailers on notice that cyberspace is covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act and sometimes companies need that legal nudge to provide accessibility. But Anne Taylor, director of access technology for the National Federation of the Blind’s Jernigan Institute, likes to direct attention to the market that disabled people represent: 54 million people in the United States with $220 billion in discretionary income.

“We’re trying to create awareness that accessibility that’s good for the user is also good for business. This is a population that is currently underserved,” Taylor says.

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