[html4all] Accessible to whom (or to which groups) ?

[Gez Lemon]

Philip Taylor (Webmaster) wrote:
<quote>
I was intrigued (and, I admit, surprised) to find that
both WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 (Draft) both unashamedly state
that the underlying aim [of the accessibility guidelines]
is to :

        1.0 : [Make web] content  accessible to people with disabilities.
        2.0 : [Make web] accessible to a wider range of people with
disabilities [...]
</quote>

Why should they feel ashamed?

<quote>
My belief is (and always has been) that "accessibility"
is about making web content accessible to all, not just
to those with disabilities, and I'd be interested to
hear the opinions of others on this (rather central,
and almost certainly contentious) point.
</quote>

Universality and "access for all" are generic terms used to ensure
that content is available to everyone, regardless of the device,
platform, network, culture, geographic location, or physical or mental
ability of those using it. Accessibility is a subset of universality
(access to all) to ensure that people who cannot readily change an
aspect of themselves are not considered a minority when considering
the "for all" part of universality/access for all.

Laura Carlson wrote:
<quote>
Universality verses accessibility has been a hot topic, Phil. Both Gez
[1] and Roger [2] wrote about it last year.
</quote>

Thank you for mentioning it, Laura. This is an article I regret
contributing to, as I didn't make my point as well as I could have
done. I quite often see my opinion being quoted as, "don't cater for
everyone, just cater for people with disabilities". I think it's very
sad if that's what people come away with from the article, but then
again, I wrote my opinion (if not those words), so I've obviously made
my point very very badly. I completely agree with universality and
ensuring that content is available to everyone, but accessibility is
more important, as it's about people, rather than choices people can
make.

A couple of weeks after collaborating on this article, Mike suggested
a technique that allows IE6 to visually render a tooltip in IE6:

<abbr>
  <span title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</span>
</abbr>

When I pointed out that the title attribute needed to be in the
abbreviation or assistive technology wouldn't have access, Mike's
response was that the proposed technique "served the masses well". In
other words, there are more IE6 users than assistive technology users.
That is an outrageous response in my opinion, and despite people
consistently telling me that they always consider people with
disabilities, more often than not, people with disabilities are always
way down in their priorities. Mike is a relatively well-known
accessibility advocate, yet is prepared to put IE6 users' needs before
catering for anyone else, as there are more IE6 users. IE6 users can
upgrade to IE7, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and so on; people with
disabilities cannot so readily change aspects about themselves. Of
course I see the person first, but I definitely don't think that
disability is a dirty word, nor a word that should be avoided.

I fully support universality, access for all, or any other name that
includes everyone, but not at the expense of catering for whims, as
opposed to aspects that people cannot change about themselves. I also
appreciate that there are other aspects of universality that aren't
necessarily whims, such as people in remote locations with poor
connectivity, but I wouldn't consider dropping accessibility
provisions in order to reduce the size of a page.



Gez

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