Technology

In what was heralded as a watershed moment in the movement for greater and more meaningful web access for those with disabilities, last April, Staples, the world’s largest office supply company, entered into an agreement with several advocacy groups for those with disabilities to make improvements to its website that will benefit people with disabilities—chiefly of the visual sort. According to the terms of the settlement, in addition to making several enhancements to their brick-and-mortar stores in order to accommodate shoppers with certain disabilities, Staples agreed to bind, more or less, the development of its website, www.staples.com, to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines put forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Staples agreed to have in place the checkpoint one and checkpoint two guidelines by June 2009, and to ensure that going forward, any changes or enhancements made to the site would comply with W3C accessibility guidelines.

In the brick-and-mortar world, the need to provide equitable and unfettered access to those with disabilities is a bit more obvious than it is in the virtual world; after all, the virtual world is principally a visual medium—to a lesser extent an aural one, and to an even lesser extent a tactile one. As a natural extension of its native environment, the web-based world is a virtual Valhalla for visual designers; arguably, the best of the breed now do their best and most revolutionary work within the borders of a browser. From a facile standpoint, it may seem to the casual observer that strict adherence to accessibility guidelines might only hobble visual designers and prevent the best work from being done. But after careful consideration, it soon becomes apparent that this is not the case, and that adhering to accessibility standards actually makes good visual design even better. Throw in the notion that accessibility standards also strengthen the code and provide some business benefits as well, and suddenly it makes little sense not to design with accessibility in mind.

From an information architecture standpoint, you can go a long way towards meeting a good portion of the W3C accessibility guidelines by designing with screen readers in mind. A screen reader, like JAWS, paints an audio version of a web site for those with visual impairments. Because a screen reader concocts things like navigation schemes based on words rather than pictures, it’s incumbent on the designer to supply good content—and well-ordered content—in order to provide the screen reader with the fodder it needs to construct a website’s framework for visually-challenged users. While a quick visual scan can tell most sighted users how good or how bad an information architecture has been constructed, a quick aural scan goes one step further by eliminating things that sighed users take for granted—like page placement and visual patterns—to see if the information architecture still sticks together. If it does, through a screen reader, the web page sounds like a concise, non-repetitive, well-ordered entity. If it does not, through a screen reader, the web page sounds like a cluttered, repetitive mess.

Coding for accessibility standards largely means going back to basics: things like closing all tags, stripping formatting elements from the code and putting them in a CSS file instead, and providing meaningful ALT tags for all images—religiously. Dovetailing onto this notion, coding for accessibility makes great business sense, for it also has the added benefit of providing better search engine optimization. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Accessibility standards attempt to open the web up to users who are encumbered by physical or technological standards; a search engine processing algorithm is much the same thing. It cannot “see” visual media, it cannot “hear” audio media, it cannot comprehend clips of code. Therefore, by providing ALT tags for visual and audio media—especially meaningful tags that truly represent the media and the reason it’s included in the design—coders and designers can give search engine algorithms the sort of understanding and context it needs to index a site correctly, thereby increasing the chance of the site popping up near the top of a set of search results. Thereby exposing a site to an even greater audience.

In essence, accessibility standards bolster standard good design practices, and almost invariably, good design practices leads to better business. Rather than encumber development and hobble creativity and innovation, accessibility standards provide the essential foundation and framework from which features and functionality can flourish to make the world a better place for all users, not merely those unencumbered by limitations of one sort or another.

By Robert Pothier