Archive — Accessibility

Access for all — my final plea for human-centred design — Lizzie Cass-Maran — Website and Communications Blog

Last month our brilliant colleague Lizzie Cass-Maran left our team after more than 10 years. In her final blog post for our team’s blog, she has written this plea to keep humans at the centre of all our decision-making.

For the past few years I’ve been working with Lizzie, I’ve always been impressed at the impact and quality of the work she has delivered in often challenging circumstances. She is a key reason why Website and Communications has such a strong user-centred culture.

Moreover, her impact stretched far beyond our own team. She influenced human-centred approaches across the entire university. She has played a genuinely leading role in our communities of practice. The effective digital content training that she has designed ensures that our content editors will continue to create well-written content that meets users’ needs.

Most recently, she did most of the heavy lifting in a project to revolutionise the university’s editorial style guide. The outcome of this is that, for the first time, we have a unified style guide that is designed for use across all content, print and digital, being managed across organisational silos.

Our team genuinely will not be the same without her.

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HTML: The Inaccessible Parts — Dave Rupert

Following on from Gov.UK’s revelation about <input type="number">, Dave Rupert has compiled a list of other bits of HTML that can cause inadvertent accessibility issues.

There are some cases where even using plain ol’ HTML causes accessibility problems. I get frustrated and want to quit web development whenever I read about these types of issues. Because if browsers can’t get this right, what hope is there for the rest of us.

Not that we should give up, of course.

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Why the Gov.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers — Hanna Laakso — Technology in government

Numeric keypad interface

The Gov.UK Design System team have discovered that using the HTML element <input type="number"> creates some surprising problems in certain environments.

Some of the limitations in assistive technologies such as Dragon Naturally Speaking are disappointing but unsurprising.

But Chrome deciding to convert large numbers to exponential notation is rather more eyebrow-raising. Then there is Safari adding commas to long numbers that are in fact credit card numbers. You have to wonder about some of the decision-making among browser vendors.

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Why much of the internet is closed off to blind people — James Jeffrey — BBC News

Visually impaired person using the web

The most notable thing about this article is the sorry list of weak excuses offered up by businesses who can’t be bothered to make their websites accessible.

“…a blind person can always ring Domino’s toll-free number and order that way…”
Why should they have to?
“…there is no clear objective guidance on what constitutes an ‘accessible’ website.”
O rly?
“The online environment was never intended to be covered by the ADA…”
Says who?

How about just doing the basics that will help include your customers, and your fellow human beings?

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The web I want

The web I want

Why developers’ obsession with using complicated JavaScript to deliver some text to users needs to stop.

I made my first website about 20 years ago and it delivered as much content as most websites today. It was more accessible, ran faster and easier to develop then 90% of the stuff you’ll read on here.

20 years later I browse the Internet with a few tabs open and I have somehow downloaded many megabytes of data, my laptop is on fire and yet in terms of actual content delivery nothing has really changed.

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Stop building for San Francisco

Stop building for San Francisco

Realising that forcing websites to go HTTPS makes them more inaccessible for people with poorer connections was a penny dropping moment for me.

But this article takes the argument a bit broader.

First of all, you need to understand who your audience is, as people. If they’re genuinely wealthy people in a first world city, then you do you. But for people in rural areas, or countries with less of a solid internet infrastructure, failing to take these restrictions into account will limit your potential to grow. If you’re not building something that is accessible to your audience, you’re not building a solution for them at all.

You ≠ user.

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Why content should be published in HTML and not PDF

Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF

How to give up PDFs and improve your higher education website’s user experience

The crusade against PDFs has been one of my constant hobby-horses over the years. It has also led to some of my toughest battles in my work.

Users hate PDFs, because it makes it harder to use content. But content owners love PDFs, because it makes it easier for them to create content. It is the ultimate in user-hostility. “Who cares about the users? PDFs make my job easier for me.”

So it was great to see two trusted sources reiterate the importance of getting rid of PDFs, within days of each other.

This has also reminded me of a small project I promised I would do, but never got around to — to publish my dissertation as an HTML webpage. The idea was to demonstrate how versatile HTML is, even for things like technical or academic writing. Maybe I’ll return to that this autumn.

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Readability guidelines

Readability guidelines

I really like this idea of crowdsourcing, and making available to the community, a set of readability guidelines based on evidence.

I see many content designers spending time talking – arguing – about points of style when often accessibility and usability show what we should do.

What if there was one place where we, as a community, shared knowledge and created a style guide that was accessible, usable and – if we wanted – evidenced?

We could then spend time on the things that matter more to our organisations.

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Google Duplex is not creepy

Google Duplex is not creepy

Further to my point yesterday about why I don’t agree that Google’s new AI-powered phone calling technology is creepy.

…we live in a world where most restaurants and shops can only really be dealt with by phone – which is very convenient and nice, but (to varying degrees) it doesn’t work for deaf people, introverts, anyone with a speech impediment or social anxiety, or people from Glasgow. Those people have every right to a nice dinner and this makes it possible – or at least much easier.

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Accessibility according to actual people with disabilities

Accessibility according to actual people with disabilities

We often hear about the theory of accessibility in design. But we know that the reality can often be different.

So it’s great to see such a comprehensive run-down of actual digital accessibility complaints from people with disabilities.

The article ends with a sage point:

Basically everything that people with disabilities comment on are things that annoy everyone, so fixing these issues makes your interface better for all users!

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Talking to Léonie Watson about computer vision and blindness

Talking to Léonie Watson about computer vision and blindness

Peter Gasston interviewed Léonie Watson, an accessibility consultant who is blind. In this extract, they discuss computer vision — technologies that can extract information from photos and videos using machine learning. It sounds like massively promising technology.

I was sitting in a hotel having breakfast not long ago and just held up my phone and took a quick snapshot and it told me I was sitting opposite a window, and told me what it could see out the window; and that’s just information I would never have had unless I’d happened to sort of ask whoever I was with to describe it to me. But having that ability to just do that independently is really quite remarkable.

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