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Re: Do people actually want Automatic Accessibility within Web Technologies?

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From: Paul J. Adam
Date: Apr 20, 2012 8:39AM

Everyone want's automatic accessibility, end users and developers. HTML & HTML5 with JavaScript & CSS are the only web technologies that provide universal design and have the ability to automatically be accessible as long as they are coded with W3C standards. Of course they are often not coded correctly so the accessibility is not quite automatic but HTML, JS, & CSS fit the definition of universal design since they work on all devices from feature phones to ebook readers to smart phones and beyond.

It's web technologies that do not work accessibly on all platforms and devices which support accessibility that are preventing automatic accessibility. E.g. Flash, PDF, MS Office Docs being the biggest barriers to automatic accessibility.

I'm sure people will disagree with my suggestions to avoid non-HTML web technologies but until they work on all accessible desktop platforms like Windows, OS X, and Linux and also work on the accessible smartphone platforms like iOS and (with many limitations) Android I will continue to suggest avoiding them if you want to achieve universal design & accessibility.


Paul J. Adam
Accessibility Evangelist
Deque Systems
<EMAIL REMOVED>
www.PaulJAdam.com
@pauljadam on Twitter

On Apr 19, 2012, at 10:31 PM, Bryan Garaventa wrote:

> I'm curious about this.
>
> When I say Automatic Accessibility, I'm referring to a combination of Universal Design (equally accessible for all) and Inclusive Design (integrated accessibility within mainstream applications). I adopted the term Automatic Accessibility because it's more descriptive and easier for people to understand who aren't already familiar with the terms Universal and Inclusive design.
>
> So when I refer to Automatic Accessibility for web technologies, I'm talking about the incorporation of automatically accessible processes at the bedrock level of enterprise development. This way, new technologies can be built that include accessible features automatically, and everyone wins.
>
> Is there something wrong with this idea?
> > >