The harsh and crippling burden of accessibility

There are a couple of recent articles on accessibility floating around the blogosphere that have got me a bit riled up. The less controversial of the two I stumbled upon randomly, and is by Peter Bowyer pondering about graphical CAPTCHAs. He says that he dislikes using them because of course they don't comply with the DDA, and although he has good eyesight, he finds them difficult to read (I agree). However, he says, they're the best solution to the problem of spambots.

He then compares the graphical CAPTCHAs to the much more accessible and usable text-based ones, such as Jeremy Zawody requiring commenters to "Type 'Jeremy' below". It's hard if not impossible for spambots to supply the correct response, and so he cuts out automated spam without denying commenting to blind or partially-sighted readers. Peter seems to think that all text-based questions:

• These set up a barrier for dyslexic or dyspraxic people.
• For people who don’t speak English (or whatever language your website is in, they are difficult if not impossible.
• They require more effort than reading a list of characters! OK, so CAPTCHAs are hard to read and require effort, but not mental work. I don’t want to drag my brain onto another topic after writing a post (and I have a physics degree, so it’s not like they’re impossible)

Um, excuse me? You shouldn't use a text question because of the people who have such overwhelming cognitive disorders that they will find it impossible to comprehend it, but who have already read the article on your website and would like to respond? Come on. Pretty much everyone finds graphical CAPTCHAs annoying or hard to read (as he himself says). But a text-based solution is the real culprit? Right.

And now onto the high-profile designer and his accessibility rant. Excuse me if I come across as rather caustic but, in addition to the content of the article, I have a "thing" about people who make their commenters' font two sizes smaller than their own. Really gives you an indication of ego.

Jeff Croft's article, entitled Has accessibility been taken too far?, argues that so-called accessibility zealots routinely take things too far in the name of their idol, making inordinate demands of web designers that have large cost and very little benefit associated with them.

The web is being limited creatively by accessibility and usability zealots that [. . .] overcomplicate the matter.

Gosh. And you know, so many accessibility measures have an aesthetic impact and require that the designer not be creative. Oh look, folks! It's that old chestnut again: Accessible websites are boring. This is disingenuous at best: accessibility and usability "zealots" (hereafter referred to as AUZs) are doing nothing of the kind.

Jeff points out that the print world has for decades, if not centuries, produced materials that have non-resizable text, dark text on a light background with no alternative colour schemes available, and other monstrosities, but that a) AUZs aren't jumping up and down over this, and b) "no one's died from it to date". Therefore, he asks, why do they insist on demanding that web designers cater for absolutely as much of their audience as they can? It's impractical, he says.

And here's my point. Because we can. Because the web is not print and we as web designers/developers are not constrained by the physical and practical requirements of print. Because the web is a magic technology (lit.: sufficiently advanced) that allows us to deliver content in a dozen different ways with a relatively tiny extra initial cost, and none thereafter, to accommodate people accessing the information with a thousand different environments. To recognise that 10% of the population have a disability, and while these disabilities may not all impact on their ability to use the internet, there are also many other people for whom consideration can and should be made. People who use different browsers or lower resolution than the designers, who still have slow dial-up connections and pay for their internet usage by the minute, who have different or fewer technologies installed, people who can't use a mouse, people who use voice-assisted technology or text-to-speech, people who are blind, partially-sighted, short-sighted or colour-blind, people who are unfamiliar with the internet or who don't have English as a first language. Hell, I have good eyesight and am used to staring at a computer screen all day, and I still find many trendy designers' websites hard to read because of extra-tiny text and/or low contrast between font colour and background colour (Zeldman, I'm looking at you).

And the point is that, while in the print medium a lot of these things are hard, expensive or impractical to cater for (although, for instance, the government provides all leaflets and information in braille, large print or audio tape on request), with the web we can do this. And we should, because of what I believe is a fundamental principle: on the web, everyone is equal. Everyone should be able to access the same content regardless. And it's possible to make this happen.

Jeff states that making accessibility improvements for the last 10% of people who can't view the website without difficulty would be nice, but the cost-benefit ratio doesn't allow for it. It's fine for a geek's personal website, but in business terms it's impractical.

Feature x is going to take 4 hours and benefit 0.5% of our readership? Nah, it's not worth it. We don't have the time.

I take issue with this. It's the geek and his personal website who can afford to exclude 10% of the population. It's business who can't afford to exclude 10% of potential customers, and who will actually see a return on investing in accessible website. And besides, where did this nebulous 0.5% come from anyway? If this is the number of current customers who would benefit, well, Mark Pilgrim once put it rather succinctly: "Yeah, none of your customers are f-ing cripples, because none of the f-ing cripples could get into your f-ing store, so they all took their f-ing money and spent it somewhere else."

And finally, Jeff brings up the print analogy again, saying that print designers have always taken decisions to benefit the majority of people who found the resultant design readable/usable/accessible. And the rest?

They dealt with it. It wasn’t the designers job to account for every possible difference in the individuals who would be reading or using their product. Got poor vision? Get a magnifying glass.

How empathetic. He states that it is not, nor should it be, the web designer's responsibility to cater to their audience. Anyone who has a problem with the website needs to find tools to solve their problems, not look to the person who designed the site in the first place.

“What’s that? You’re complaining because you can’t scale the text of my site in Internet Explorer 6?” That’s your problem. Get glasses. Get a better browser. I can’t account for the fact that you have low vision and have chosen a shitty browser. The tools are out there to make your experience better, so use them.

That's the browser with 82% market share? What was that you were saying about catering to the majority? And is it really so difficult to say font-size: small; instead of font-size: 12px;, especially when you know that the latter will cause problems for potentially 82% of your customers?

The comments on the entry seem to at first consist primarily of those whom I shall term the web-design-trendy-bandwagon-jumping-fanboys who lap up everything that has been said. Some of them seem to take the article as an excuse for being lazy and not bothering so hard with that weird accessibility stuff in future. One person, John Foliot, says mostly what I was thinking at this stage:

[T]he reality is that standards, and compliance, and understanding are important, and too bad if you have to work a little harder to meet these goals - we're supposed to be PROFESSIONALS.

[. . .]

Of course it's hard - it's hard to understand and anticipate the needs of these users, of all users. Us web accessibility zealots - we try - real hard - to get that, to understand and to share those perspectives. And yes, we push, we complain, we shine the light where others wish we wouldn't. Sometimes it may seem that us zealots, over here on the fringes, are un-compromising, unwilling to accept, pedant and "stuck in our ways". You think that it's easy being this hard-nosed?

But, when someone like Jeff Croft stands up and says, "..well, ya know, we really should always try, but sometimes, well, ya, I know, the business case..." - well, that's when zealots like me get angry. Because people like Jeff Croft get listened to; people read his blog, they quote him back and link to his articles. He's got a bully pulpit. And when he uses that platform to somehow excuse or justify not striving for perfect every time... well, I for one get mad. ...

[. . .]

[I]t's comments and opinions such as yours that need to be challenged all of the time, it's the slippery slope, the knife's edge.

That's why I got so angry at this article. I think it was irresponsible of Jeff Croft, with his platform and, well, call it influence, to write an article in this tone and essentially give any "followers" a free pass to not care about accessibility. I feel that in the near future there may be a bit of a backlash against accessibility once the non-compliant web designers realise that we're serious, this isn't a Mickey Mouse tickbox measure. This is for real.