Microsoft Offices, Edinburgh
At 5pm last Friday, dozens of like-minded web enthusiasts gathered at the Microsoft offices at Waverley Gate, Edinburgh, for a Scottish Public Sector Barcamp meetup. On the agenda was everything from Web 2.0 and social media to the credit crunch and website rationalisation, and we only had two hours to put the world to rights.
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I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.
Margaret Thatcher
Debate and discussion are vital to the progress and development of web accessibility. With that in mind it’s great to see that, as ever, there is plenty of discussion going on out there in the fora, blogs and Tweets of those interested in the subject.
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Street View, an enhancement of Google Maps, launched in the UK yesterday, and already there has been plenty of discussion and debate around the service.
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My grandmother came to visit me last year and, as we hoped to do plenty of sightseeing, we hired a wheelchair from the Red Cross. This meant we could visit all sorts of places without worrying about my grandmother tiring herself out.
We expected there to be challenges – central Edinburgh has many steep inclines, with lots of cobbled streets and bumpy pavements. We knew, however, that we could always jump in a taxi if things got too difficult – Edinburgh’s countless black cabs are all wheelchair accessible.
It was this assumption, though, which delivered the most crushing disappointment.
Whilst all black cabs are wheelchair accessible, with adequate head space and ramps, we would often find that taxis would ignore us, driving straight past or even turning off their ‘For Hire’ signs as they neared us. This happened with far too great a frequency to have been a coincidence – the harsh truth was that those drivers could not be bothered to stop, retrieve their detachable ramps from the boot and help us into their cab, only to have to repeat the process at our destination.
The reason for this tale is that I have recently been thinking about why my organisation often struggles to meet even the most basic web accessibility standards. It has the necessary tools – our CMS produces reasonably accessible code – and all of our web authors are trained in basic accessibility issues. By despite this, I continue to come across inaccessible content every day.
The reason is that, like the few woeful taxi drivers that we encountered that weekend, the organisation has the technology to be accessible, but it does not yet have the will to be accessible. It is not yet hardwired into the culture, there is no consistency in its execution (either through training or quality control), and it is rarely actually part of anyone’s job.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. Most of our webpages
are accessible, just as many taxi drivers did stop for my grandmother and I. But the fact that it is not a universal truth means that there is significant room for improvement.
This goes to show that the battle for accessibility must be fought on two fronts: on the technological front, equipping people with the tools to create accessible webpages; but also on the ideological front, educating people about the need for accessibility and why it is so important.
I’m currently writing a paper on how to instigate cultural change in organisations – looking at everything from front-line training needs to getting buy-in from senior management. I will, of course, share this with you all once complete. Comments welcome in the meantime.
I’m not saying that we should all be using false identities all the time, but my practice of occasionally giving a fake name, date of birth and address seems to have paid off.
The BBC today reports that Spotify has been hacked and users’ details stolen. When I signed up for the service a few weeks ago I was a little annoyed that they were insisting that I give them not only a name and e-mail address (probably fair enough) but also an address and date of birth. Why!? There is a premium account option, for which you must pay, so I understand why they need certain details for that. But if I’m just registering for the free account, they really don’t need these details.
So I did what I often do in these situations; I gave a false name (or just initials if the site accepts them), a false date of birth (I usually make a note of this for each account so that I can recall it if I ever need to) and a false postcode (taken from a famous landmark or nearby public building, and again noted down). True, this is probably in breach of most sites’ acceptable use terms, but then again letting hackers steal my details is against my ‘acceptable website behaviour’ terms.
Actually, the attack on Spotify occurred in late 2008, before I’d signed up, so I wouldn’t have been affected on this occasion. Nevertheless, I hate giving out personal details at the best of times, and especially when I can see no reason for it.