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

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From: John Foliot
Date: Apr 20, 2012 11:19AM

Paul J. Adam wrote:
> Everyone want's automatic accessibility, end users and developers.

...and as blues great Albert Collins wrote, "...everybody wants to go to
heaven, nobody wants to die."


> 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.

You see, this is exactly the type of problem I am talking about. I can take
HTML/HTML5 + JavaScript + CSS and create a fully conformant yet totally
inaccessible piece of garbage with little effort, and we've been able to do
so for years now. This is one of the reasons why WCAG dropped the
requirement for code validation, because we now know that validation alone
does not equal accessible.


> 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 not the devices, but rather the user-agent combinations
(browsers/software) and the content created for those combinations of
hardware and software tools that is key. Every piece of the chain is
critical, and to somehow suggest that using some magical tokens (HTML5,
JavaScript and CSS) will "automatically" give you Universal or Automatic
Access is simply false, and serves to further illustrate my overarching
concern.

When used correctly, Daisy and ePub (both non W3C technologies) can produce
accessible content for many if not most users, including sighted and
mobility impaired users. Content creators need to *THINK* about what they
are trying to achieve, rather than look at every problem as a nail, because
they have HTML/JS/CSS hammers...


> 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.

Yes, yes, big bad Adobe and Microsoft (who can't seem to get accessibility
right on the Mac platform - ever consider maybe it's not *their* fault?).

I want to remind everyone that any tool, when misused, can cause pain or
harm. Flash itself is not inaccessible, it is inaccessible content created
by under-educated developers that introduces inaccessibility. Yet, when it
comes to the "most accessible" option for providing videos on the web today,
it's not HTML5 that comes to the rescue, but rather Flash-based video
players, which can and do support closed captions, descriptive audio and
other accessibility accommodations. The current crop of HTML5 browsers that
are supporting the HTML5 <video> tag cannot even provide native support for
captions today, and descriptive audio is far down the line to come. (And
before anyone wants to chime in about lack of Flash support on iOS, go
complain to Apple, not to me, as it was Apple who chose not to support a
specific type of technology, thus impacting all of their users negatively.
So much for "Universality" huh?)

PDF itself isn't inaccessible, once again it is poorly created content that
is the root of problems. A well constructed PDF form (for example) can be
quite accessible to both sighted and non-sighted users, and due to some
formatting constructs that you can employ within PDF there may be instances
when using a PDF form is in fact the best choice for the task at hand.

What's the expression? "Guns don't kill people, People kill people..."


>
> 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.

I disagree with your simplistic assertions that using a specific set of
technologies will "automatically" get you to accessible - it simply won't.

JF