Simply leave a comment below or contact me via Twitter at @prettysimple. You’re welcome to remain anonymous, of course, but leaving contact details would enable me to follow up your comments and find out more about the problems you’ve had.

Early this morning, pursuing a personal vice nurtured since childhood, I bounded along to the local branch of a well known national video game retailer, planning to grab myself a copy of a newly released and hotly anticipated game. On arrival, I was shocked to discover that the price tag on the game was a whopping £5 more than advertised on their own online store – a 14% mark-up. On principle, I left empty handed.

Luckily, I have the luxury of going home tonight and browsing for a better deal online. But what about those who can’t shop online? They would be stuck with paying the premium rate.

I got to work and didn’t think any more about it, until I read the excellent and profound article on the BBC Ouch blog – Martha Lane Fox talking about the case for getting more disabled people online.

“We know now that if you are online, even from a low income household, you save £200 a year, net, of the computer and internet connection.”

“Direct debits, switching energy deals, searching around for deals; you are massively disadvantaged economically now, if you are not online.”

Martha Lane Fox, UK digital champion

There are so many arguments for helping people to get online (many of which were explored at the recent GovCamp Scotland, which culminated in the signing of a digital participation charter for Scotland). Whilst many of the impacts can be hard to measure (though arguably far more profound), it’s good to see some cold hard figures that underline the economic imperative of helping people get online.

Couple that with the main story behind Martha Lane Fox’s article – that over 4.25 million disabled people in the UK are not online (worryingly, over half of the 8.43 million of all UK residents not online), and you can really start to perceive the impact of digital exclusion.

In the same article, Nigel Lewis from AbilityNet suggested why he thought so many disabled people remained disconnected:

“Often it’s because it is not accessible to them. Either they can’t engage with and use the standard computer out of the box, and so it needs adapting in some way, or the online services, the websites, are not accessible with their adaptive technology.”

Nigel Lewi, CEO of AbilityNet

One of the major messages in the aforementioned charter for Scotland was that we all have a part to play: friends and neighbours helping to support people to log on; tech companies helping to make the necessary devices readily available to those who need it; telecomms companies working with communities to improve connectivity; online providers making their products and services truly accessible; and local and central government pushing the digital agenda across all sectors.

I have no doubt that every reader of this post will fit into one or more of the above categories. I’d therefore urge everyone to take a moment to reinforce that message in their own minds – it won’t truly be the World Wide Web until everyone is online.

Léonie Watson, Director of Accessibility at Nomensa, reported on the idea behind the site and outlined the process for people to report problems that they encounter with website accessibility.

Fix The Web is a marvellous collaboration between people with disabilities and web accessibility volunteers. It’s so easy to report problems with websites to Fix The Web, and the volunteers take the worry out of contacting website owners yourself.

Léonie Watson

You can hear the show on the BBC iPlayer (UK only, available for a limited time)

Alternatively you can download and listen to the piece below:

Fix The Web radio feature (MP3, 5MB)

Reporting problems to Fix The Web

There are four ways to report a problem:

1. Use the form on the Fix The Web website
2. Email post@fixtheweb.net , putting the URL in the subject header and information about the problem in the body
3. Tweet  ”#fixtheweb #fail”; include the url and what the issue is
4. Use the Fix The Web toolbar and click the red love-heart / Fix the Web button to open a form and report any websites as you surf on them!

Further details can be found on the BSI website.

Sadly I can’t make it down to London myself, but I look forward to hearing the discussions coming out of it. If you’re going, and plan to cover it (blog, live-tweet etc), do let me know.

Motor impairments

The day had a motor impairment theme, which is typically a rather under-represented area of web accessibility. There was a bit of discussion around why this was, with the suggestion that it was due to a lack of pressure coming from those representing the needs of that audience. The excellent work of the likes of RNIB has led to a far greater understanding of the needs of visually impaired users, for example, and there is clearly a need for this to be replicated across the board.

Following a nice introduction to web accessibility from organisers Makayla Lewis (@maccymacx) and Graham Armfield (@coolfields), Makayla presented some of her findings from her research on how people with motor impairments (specifically those with Cerebral Palsy) use the web.

Perhaps the clearest message from Makayla’s presentation was how important the web, and social networking in particular, is to many users with CP – providing opportunities to interact with others far more easily. Such opportunities would have been strictly limited before the web, but accessibility issues continue to put up barriers. One telling example Makayla gives is of the user with severe impairments, who relies upon a carer to help them use FaceBook. The resulting lack of privacy is clearly far from ideal, and no doubt limits what they are comfortable doing online.

Makayla then establishes a live phone link with a person with Cerebral Palsy, who talks about the challenges she faces everyday. Problems like buttons being too small to easily click are common, and the user expressed frustration at the lack of help that websites offer. Another clear problem which many people may not think about was the issues generated when a website updates its design. The user stated that sites should really warn users before changing a site – explaining the how and why, and offering support. Finally, she suggested that the option to go back to the old version was always useful. Users with impairments will often adopt ‘coping strategies’ that will have to change when a site changes, so consideration of these users when launching a redesign is essential.

HTML5

I sacrificed a bite to eat to attend a lunchtime presentation by Martin Kliehm (@kliehm) on HTML5, which he called “Of Unicorns and Crocodiles”. It was an interesting showcase of both the problems and opportunities that will come with HTML5 – most notably, Martin suggested that accessibility was still very much a ‘bolt-on’ and that needed to change.

Crowd-sourcing web accessibility

The ‘unconference’ style of the day meant there were plenty of tough decisions about which sessions to attend, but I opted to go along to hear Dr Gail Bradbrook (@FixTheWebGail) talk about Fix The Web. The idea behind the site is to allow disabled users to easily report issues with websites. These are then picked up by a team of volunteers who will get in touch with the site owner, to report the issue and hopefully get it resolved.

I’ve signed up as a volunteer and will blog more about this exciting initiative soon.

Practical accessibility

Next, I went along to hear Karen Mardahl (@kmdk) give a few tips on practical accessibility, including captioning videos and creating accessible PDFs. I’ve written plenty on these subjects myself, and it was great to hear Karen talk about the quick-wins which are so easy to implement, yet which make such a huge difference to users.

Thanks to Makayla and all the others involved in organising the day – I hope it proved to be an inspiration to all those who attended or followed on Twitter, and I look forward to seeing the discussions continue online.

A YouTube caption fail

I’ve been spending some time on YouTube recently, as we’re hosting a number of videos on the platform for a campaign we’re running to recruit foster carers.

Obviously we wanted to make sure we added captions to the videos, and to save a bit of time I’ve been trying out the caption tools. Firstly I noticed that YouTube automatically ‘machine transcribed’ some of the videos. On inspection, though, the accuracy of these was way off – possibly made worse by the particular accents which the speakers had, to which I doubt YouTube’s voice recognition is very well tuned.

YouTube's auto-captioning is way off here

However, the transcript tool fared much better. This lets you upload a plain text file with the transcript of the video. This is far easier than creating captions, which require timecodes.

YouTube then processes the file in a matter of seconds and applies the text as captions to the video, making a best guess at the timing. With the 7 videos I had uploaded, the results were very good, with split second accuracy in many cases.

A bit of user input makes all the difference

One thing that did sometimes throw the timing a bit was where I had skipped some of the dialogue or shortened it for brevity and ease of reading. Overall, though, it was certainly satisfactory and a massive time saver.

In conclusion, then, I certainly wouldn’t rely on the auto-captioning, but it’s fantastic that YouTube are offering this given that the majority of uploaders will never bother manually adding captions. The transcription tool is an excellent compromise delivering better than average results, as it certainly worthy of praise.

As you may or may not know, the British Standards Institute have now published the 2nd draft of the BS8878 British Code of Practice on Web Accessibility.

Briefly, the standard is designed to be an end-to-end guide to helping web product (website, mobile site, IPTV site) owners ensure their products condier the needs of disabled and elderly people at all stage of the web production process, from initial requirements gathering, through selection of technologies and platforms, testing, launch and maintenance.

It’s a standard for web producers, project and product managers, who need to understand the process of how to create accessible web products, rather than how to create the technology, design and editorial of web products (which WCAG already does very well).

It will supercede the previous PAS-78 guidelines, updating them to include guidance on such topics as:

• The Equality Act 2010
• The relationship between inclusive design and user-personalised approaches to accessibility, including whether to provide additional accessibility provisions
• Creating accessible web products for computer, mobile and IPTV platforms
• How to procure accessible web products
• How to assure a product’s accessibility throughout the production process, including the value and costs of different forms of accessibility testing
• Dealing with feedback and complaints on accessibility from users

The standard is a guide to the use of the different accessibility guidelines out there (bringing together references to the work of WAI-WCAG and WAI-AGE, as well as others), rather than replacing or replicating those existing guidelines.

This Draft for Public Consultation is a chance for people to tell us whether our drafting committee have got the content and style of the standard right and both given them an idea of the breadth of the parts of their production process that accessibility issues impact, and also demystified accessibility so they feel confident they know how to proceed.

DPC BS 8878 can be viewed at www.bsigroup.com/drafts until 30 June 2010.

Jonathan Hassell

I certainly aim to pop along and comment, and I’d urge others to as well.

I recently bought a new phone. It’s great, but like most smartphones it’s taking a bit of time to get completely used to the complex interface.

On the second day of playing with it, I was browsing the web and came across a site which had Captcha. It was a Google product, and I had to complete the Captcha field to continue with what I wanted to do. The problem was, the image that it had come up with was terribly distorted, and I couldn’t make out the letters and numbers. I tried several possibilities, failing every time. Normally I would simply refresh the page to get a new image, but I hadn’t yet learned how to do that on my phone! I tried going back then forwards again, but it just loaded the same image. And crucially, there was no link to an accessible alternative.

It was one of those rare occasions where I had hit an absolute brick wall because of an inaccessible web design feature.

What did I do? Well, I could have fired up my laptop and done it on that. I could have closed the browser and logged back on, or tried again later. I did none of those things – the moment was lost, as was my interest in completing the task. But what if it had been something really important?

The experience reminded me of a few conversations I have had recently about web accessibility, and all of these had a similar theme – the unnecessary need for some users to take the long way round to access information.

In terms of web accessibility, the most serious type of problem is when a user can’t access information at all (for example, when no alt description is given to an image containing important content, such as navigational tabs). But there is also the slightly ‘softer’ issue where information is available, but the user has to work to get to it.

Are you sending your users the long way round? (Photo by incurable_hippie)

Someone recently posted to the Accessify Forum, asking whether it was a good idea to create an alternative accessible version of a website. I recommended that this be avoided, as it creates an unnecessary division between ‘types’ of user which is undesirable and potentially discriminatory. Making it necessary to click on a “Text-only” or “Accessible” version simply introduces another workaround which some users will have to use, and goes against the principles of inclusion and integration that Web Accessibility tries to promote. It reminds me of when you see signs for wheelchair access which take you round the back of a building – some people will have to take the long way round, and may feel quite inferior as a result.

Another example was during the recent televised UK election debates. When the second debate televised by Sky News hit the airwaves, there was immediate outrage across Twitter and the web at the fact that no live captions or BSL interpretation were available. This meant some users had to look elsewhere for the content – something they should not have had to do.

THERE ARE NO #SUBTITLES (why not?) on #leadersdebate it is NOT #accessible for 1 in 7 (70,000) #DEAF people @skynews you #fail!!! pls RT

An angry Tweet from Pesky People

Too much of the web involves these sort of workarounds for some users, and the problem seems to be that some developers think that this is good enough. Going back to the building analogy, there are often very reasonable factors which mean ramp access has to be round the back – for example, to comply with building regulations. However, there are far less reasons why a web site should require someone to take the long way round.

So if you’re a developer, give consideration to how you’re presenting your content and think carefully about whether you’re offering an equal experience for all your users. Forcing someone to take an alternative route or employ workarounds to get to your content, just as with my experience with Google on my new phone, may well mean they give up and go elsewhere.

Photo derived from a work by incurable_hippie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

This is the day where all around the world, disabled and non-disabled people will blog about their experiences, observations and thoughts about disability discrimination. In this way, we hope to raise awareness of inequality, promote equality and celebrate the progress we’ve made.

Diary of a Goldfish

For this event last year I wrote a piece entitled Defining Disablism which proved popular and sparked some good discussions.

I’m still undecided on what I will cover this year, and indeed may wait until the day before finally committing. It will certainly have a web focus. Watch this space! (update – didn’t get a chance to do this on the day but pulling something together now and will post soon!)

Visit the Diary of a Goldfish site to see a list of other bloggers taking part in the day, as well as links to posts from previous years.

Although no official mention of the day has appeared on the site which started it all, it seems a lot of people have made sure to observe the tradition again this year.

This is a fun idea, fully in line with the reasons for creating CSS in the first place. While most designers are attracted by the extra presentational capabilities, saving HTML from becoming a presentational language was probably a more important motivation for most people who participated in the beginning.

Håkon Wium Lie

Just as with last year, I’ve stripped the CSS from my own site and it looks just fine (albeit a little dull!). I know of various other web developers who have done the same, and it’s an excellent visual way of checking that you’re up to scratch in terms of web standards.

Website without CSS

For anyone interested in this technique, the excellent Web Developer toolbar (FireFox add-on) has a handy option to turn off CSS styles.

Web Developer toolbar