Lis Shorten

Lis's bio

Lis has over 8 years of experience in accessibility and consultancy. Drawing on this extensive expertise she can advise clients on meeting their legal obligations under the DDA and ensure that disabled people do not experience unreasonable difficulty accessing and using websites.

"I am passionate about optimising the user experience where accessibility is fully integrated."

A recent discussion about the nature of mobile applications got me thinking about the many overlaps between accessibility web design and content designed specifically for mobile phone users.

It’s not a huge leap of imagination – after all it’s inevitable that there will be some similarities between the barriers faced by individuals who are differently abled and individuals attempting to enable online services with different platforms and appliances. Wouldn’t it make sense to apply some of the knowledge and skills learnt in making web access more accessible to improving the mobile web experience? Read more…

In today’s Metro, Miles Erwin reported on the ‘10million Britons surfing the internet on their phones’. Read more…

It is quite common on many web pages to find ‘more’, ‘read more’ and ‘continue reading’ links that follow a headline or summary of an article to let users read on. The upside of this is to fit more content on the page, enabling readers to scan the headlines more quickly. Read more…

There is a distinct difference between ‘accessibility compliance’ and ‘an accessible experience’. Read more…

Keyboard accessibility is one of the most important aspects of web accessibility. There are a whole host of reasons why certain users will find mouse usage difficult or impossible. Some users may have no use or limited use of their hands or arms and rely on the keyboard or alternative input devices to navigate websites. Blind people using screen reading software almost exclusively rely on keyboard navigation. Read more…

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) date from the last century. Back in 1999, the web was a different place. Ajax was a detergent and most thought broadband was gangster slang for the Spice Girls. Eight years on, WCAG has grown old disgracefully, and much of it is obsolete.

While browsers, plug-ins, website design techniques, and assistive technology have all moved on, the guidelines have stood still. Checkpoint 10.5 advises designers to include non-link printable characters between links until user agents can render adjacent links distinctly. Now they can, that’s a waste of time and likely to annoy screen reader users who will have to listen to those characters being read out. Similarly, the reminder to include placeholder characters in edit boxes and text areas is no longer necessary because today’s assistive technology can handle empty controls correctly.

These are examples of priority 3 checkpoints. If organisations were to achieve the highest level of accessibility as defined by WCAG 1.0, they would likely do more damage than good and waste a lot of time making fiddly adjustments that have no impact on the end user. Conversely, some of the priority 3 checkpoints (such as ensuring links follow a logical tab order) have a massive impact on users and deserve more prominence.

It’s been a long time coming, but WCAG 2.0, a radical overhaul of the guidelines, is expected to be finalised some time in 2008, perhaps as early as the first quarter. Designers will first have to get their heads around a change in terminology. WCAG 2.0 is built around the principles of making websites perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Guidelines are organised within these categories, but the checkpoints of old have been enhanced with success criteria.

Using the success criteria, it’s much easier for web designers to understand how to satisfy the guidelines. As an example, under WCAG 1.0, designers were reminded to ensure that foreground and background colour combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone who has colour deficits or a black and white screen. Under WCAG 2.0, guideline 1.4 simplifies the language (“make it easy to distinguish foreground information from its background”), and explains how to do that. For AA standard accessibility, there should be a contrast ratio of at least 5:1 and for AAA, the ratio should be 7:1 or higher. There are links to tools to measure the contrast ratio too.

Web designers are invited to discuss their suggested techniques and workarounds. This social networking aspect should ensure that even after the guidelines are finalised, their implementation can move with the times.

Site owners should prepare for the transition to WCAG 2.0. Any new sites should be evaluated using it, and accessibility policies should be updated in preparation. The transition to WCAG 2.0 should enable websites to focus more on changes that will help end users, and to win more business by further improving the user experience. The guidelines are even longer than WCAG 1.0 but the Quick Reference can be customised and provides a great introduction.

While there’s going to be a great deal of work for most people in understanding the new guidelines, the whole process can be speeded up by testing with actual users as early as possible. Despite the advances in WCAG 2.0, the difference between technical accessibility and making a side usable by a wide range of people with disabilities will remain huge.

Recently, we’ve seen so-called experts saying that you don’t need to conduct accessibility tests. Our own experience working with leading websites tells us otherwise.

If you’re committed to making your website usable with assistive devices, accessibility testing is essential. An audit can weed out obvious problems and can check your site against the guidelines. But there can be a gulf between technical compliance with the guidelines and a website that is truly accessible and usable.

We’ve been working for over a year with one of the UK’s leading banks. Through accessibility audits, we were able to coach the company to achieving AA compliance. That means the site satisfied all the priority 1 & 2 checkpoints, which should remove significant barriers to accessing web documents.

When we carried out accessibility testing, we found there was still work to be done. There were many issues that the guidelines did not address and some of these turned out to be major barriers. The testing showed that:

• Users of screen magnifiers found it hard to navigate pages that had large areas of white space between content, or between text and the related buttons. Users were forced to scroll around the screen excessively – taking much longer to perform simple actions.
• Text that stretched to fill the page was hard for people with dyslexia and users of screen magnifiers to read. While users could have reduced the size of the window, they usually didn’t think to do that. It made for a tiring and frustrating experience.
• The screen reader Jaws, when used in table mode, couldn’t identify links that were also table headings. This meant that screen reader users lost part of the page functionality altogether.

An accessibility audit is vital to avoid tests being wasted on problems that can be quickly spotted by an expert. But once companies have achieved an appropriate level of technical compliance, they should consider testing a natural progression. Apart from identifying new or overlooked problems, testing makes clear just how significant these barriers are for people attempting to conduct business online.

On 30 April, ‘Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0′ (WCAG 2.0) was published as a Candidate Recommendation, confirming that the W3C was happy that it had addressed all substantive issues and that the document was ready for trial.

Following nearly nine years of effort to officially update the original WCAG document published way back in May 1999, it’s finally time for developers and designers to begin implementing some of the key improvements in these latest guidelines and to grab an early lead over any less engaged rivals. WCAG 2.0 is expected to go live by the end of 2008, but for forward-thinking testers, it’s vital to get ahead of the pack by building the latest practices into new projects today. Read more…