Making Web Accessible to All

June 10, 2002
By SARAH HORTON






THERE is a wall outside my window. I have an attractive
first-floor office in a newly constructed building on the
campus of Dartmouth College. But my view is obscured by a
pillared free-standing wall that runs parallel to the north
face of the building. The wall has no structural purpose;
its function is purely aesthetic.

Contemplating this wall daily has brought me face to face
with the senseless barriers that are built in the name of
design, particularly in my own design specialty: the Web.

As a Web designer, I do not consciously build walls, but
like the architect of my office building, I do fall prey to
vanity. I use design to draw attention to myself and to my
work. I want people to be delighted when they look at my
Web pages. I want them to notice my designs. But just as
the wall obstructs my view of the world outside my office
window, my fancy graphics and page designs are often simple
barriers between people and the information they seek.

Take something as basic as access to the daily news. People
who cannot see can nevertheless read the Web using
text-to-speech software. And because there are loads of
news sources on the Web, blind people should theoretically
have access to much more information online than in the
print world, where they often must rely on the availability
of alternative versions, like audio recordings or Braille.

But with the Web's current hyperactive state,
text-to-speech access to the daily news is tedious at best,
impossible at worst. Screen-reader software works only when
it has text to read. Graphics are not text. Flash
animations and navigation are not text. Video is not text.
PDF files often are not text. So unless the Web developer
provides a "text equivalent" in the page's underlying code,
material in these formats is inaccessible to people who
rely on screen-reader software.

Consider the news site MSNBC.com. The site uses graphic
text for its navigation links, which cannot be read by
screen-reader software. Nor can the text be enlarged by
people who can see only large type. Because the site's
developer did not provide alternative text in the code of
the pages, when the screen reader encounters the Sports
link, it reads the link's U.R.L., which sounds like "slash
news slash s p t underline front dot asp link." Huh?

Another potential barrier on the MSNBC site is the video,
which is great and interesting and useful, but only if you
can hear and see (and are running Microsoft's Internet
Explorer and Windows Media Player). There are no captions,
text transcripts or descriptions to accompany the video and
audio material.

Peter Dorogoff, a spokesman for MSNBC.com, said the site's
developers would continue to assess its usefulness to the
largest possible audience. "We've addressed the broadest
accessibility issues within the constraints of our
publishing tool and other necessary resources," Mr.
Dorogoff said. "We continue to monitor and evaluate
accessibility across the site and have made a concerted
effort to achieve this goal on a consistent basis,
sitewide."

There is no reason to single out MSNBC.com. The New York
Times on the Web, for example, presents its own barriers.
Every page on the Web site has graphics and advertising at
the top and an extensive set of navigation links along the
left side. Sighted people, if they choose to, can skip the
advertisements, the last updated date, the search features
and log-in information and the more than 50 navigation
links and jump straight to the headlines.

But for people who rely on text-to-speech software,
skipping over those elements is not an option.
Screen-reader software reads sequentially, starting at the
top of the page. This means that blind people must listen
to the advertisements and navigation before reaching the
main content, and they must do this on every page of the
site.

Stephen P. Newman, the assistant general manager of
NYTimes.com, says the Times Web site is frequently
redesigned. "For each redesign," he said, "we gather
feedback from our readers during comprehensive user testing
and focus groups. So our designs currently reflect the
needs of the majority of our users."

Accessible design does not mean doing away with navigation
links, graphics and banner advertisements. Accessible
design means designing in features that accommodate all
users. For example, some sites, like CNN.com, have added a
special "skip navigation" link at the top of every page
that is invisible to sighted people but is detected by
screen-reader software. When activated, this link directs
the screen reader's focus to the main content of the page.

The "skip navigation" convention is a fairly recent one,
and sites that lack this feature were probably designed
before people started talking about accessibility. Indeed,
most Web barriers result from errors of omission and
unintended consequences.

But some Web sites do seem designed with a deliberate lack
of flexibility. People wanting to play games at
HarryPotter.com, for instance, had better arrive with a
current browser, the Flash plug-in, and good vision and
hearing. Otherwise, they won't make it past the intro page.
Most of the site is in the Flash format, which allows
animations, sounds, fancy fonts and other cool features
that are not available using standard Web coding. It also
means the pages on this site cannot be enlarged or rendered
to speech, and they are not easily accessible from the
keyboard.

The site is fun for those who are able to use it, and I
doubt that its developers are mean spirited. But they did
make a choice to favor the cool over the practical and most
widely accessible. Macromedia recently released a new
version of Flash, Flash MX, which allows developers to
include more accessibility features in their Flash
presentations.

Don Buckley, the senior vice president for interactive
marketing at Warner Brothers Pictures, said that the topic
of access for people with disabilities was "of great
interest" and that the Web site's developers "would
certainly be looking at the technology." Maybe the
developers at Warner Brothers will revise the site to
include some of these new features, or, better yet, use
plain old HTML to build a new, flexible Diagon Alley that's
accessible and fun for everyone. Now that would be cool.

It does not necessarily take more time or cost more money
to design accessible Web sites. The Web was designed to be
flexible. Why not work within the medium and build Web
sites that are accessible to the largest possible audience?


The Web is so much more than image. The Web is an access
point, an entryway, a window on the world. Let's not allow
fancy walls to block the view.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/technology/10NECO.html?ex=1024711016&ei=1&
en=a0a31d33de427bcf



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