Panel: To Comply Or Not To Comply

Speaker: Robin Christopherson

Moving into the last session then. That will take to us the close about 20 past 5.00pm when we'll just do a little bit of a rounding up.

So, it's the panel now, another panel. It's entitled 'To Comply Or Not To Comply.'

And Kath Moonan, our very own Kath Moonan, who requires no introduction whatsoever is going to be chairing the panel. I will pass over to Kath in a moment and Kath can introduce the panelists individually. Give us a shout when you are ready. Knock your heels together three times.

Without further ado, I will pass you over to Kath to pick it up from here.

New speaker: Kath Moonan

Hi everyone. Everybody said to me don't try and do the panel as well as organising the conference. You'll put yourself under too much pressure. And I've got selective hearing sometimes and I decided not to listen to that bit.

This is great, because the whole day, what I have been I able to do is just surround myself with people that I think are absolutely fantastic and doing brilliant things. And this panel is made up of those.

I am not going to be a neutral chair, you may be surprised to hear. I am going to - shocked? Yeah. Horrified! I am going to throw a few polemics into audience.

I am going to - Henny is going to keep time for us and then we are hoping we will have some time at the end to open it up.

But, just to say, we realise some the things we are talking about are worthy of a conference in themselves, so this is probably just the start of discussion. So just a bit of alt text. On the slide is… I co-parent a whippet, how Hackney is that? My whippet is called Harvey Nicks of Hackney. And there she is, and she’s wrapped in toilet roll. So I am not too sure what that means about the panel but you can make of it what you will.

One of the really exciting things about accessibility and the web, is it never stops changing. So, it's an industry that you really can't get bored in, unless you are doing a 40 page audit and then you can get bored very easily but then you know it is going to end soon.

Apart from that it is constantly interesting and evolving.

The WCAG came out in 1999, the second version spent about what? Three or four years in draft, Bim? Something around and about like that? It took a long time. In that time, loads of things happened, web standards became standards - funnily enough. The web became complex, much more complex. What was more worrying for me is my mum started to use the web. Now, I don't want the web to be accessible to my mum because I don't want her to know what I get up to in London. So please keep making it too difficult for a lady in her 70s with arthritis who finds the web difficult to use. That's a request!

New speaker: Christian Heilmann

Shall I stop e-mailing her then?

Kath Moonan:

My mum goes to mass three times a week and she uses Google now, it is dreadful. Anyway, so apart from my mum...

Christian Heilmann:

She found Jesus and Google?

Kath Moonan:

Exactly. What else happened apart from the mum thing, the 1.0 of web 2.0 is largely inaccessible to many groups of people and they quite rightly get the hump about it. There is now a huge gap between the rock and roll web 2.0 and the grumpy accessibility people.

Here we all are giggling and laughing, where does this come from? Some own goals have been scored on both sides.

For example, a couple of years ago, pathetic arguments about whose fault accessibility was instead of focusing on the issues.

Difficulties with guidelines that don't address the requirements of designers, information architects, user experience, web editors.

Rock and rollers lose interest and think accessibility was something we did in 2005 and now because we know how to use CSS we know it all.

User experience testing becomes embedded into many standard practices. Great.

Many mainstream user experience conferences project an image that people with disabilities are not part of mainstream UX because user experience is the real rock and roll now and rock and roll is like whippets and Guinea pigs - apparently - it doesn't match.

Meanwhile back in the real world, many of you here are website, you work on websites in the real world. Not every team has a flame haired geek warrior. You have more and more demands on you for less and less resources.

You work on huge complex websites with massive layers of bureaucracy and difficulties.

Nowadays we have WCAG 2.0 AA with maybe one round of user testing as the de facto but is it an appropriate strategy to achieve accessibility?

I continue.

The testing happens only once the sites are built and everything is too expensive to fix. And besides, it wasn't in the specification to go and ask people with diverse needs 'what would you like?' We are still many times deciding for them.

So, in the real world, have we missed the boat? Why is it that so many technical websites are still unusable? Hmm…

Christian Heilmann:

What was that about Guinea pigs?

Kath Moonan:

The bit about Guinea pigs was the rock and roll and the user experience and the diverse users.

Christian Heilmann:

Rock and roll Guinea pigs was just disturbing.

Kath Moonan:

Let's talk in the pub later. Bim, tell us about..

(Laughter)

Tell us about … go on, yeah yeah, go on. Bim, boss lady RNIB.

New speaker: Bim Egan

Surf Right. Kath wanted me to say a few words about Surf Right. Have I got the microphone too close? Cool. Anybody who knows about RNIB and our involvement with web accessibility, probably knows that for quite a few years we have had an award logo called 'See it Right' which is based on WCAG 1.0. It wasn't an exact match to AA, but now that we have got WCAG 2.0 we thought we would rebrand and try and get away from the 'see it' right bit.

So we are now 'Surf Right.' So that we've got something distinctly different because it was kind of a feeling that RNIB, oh well, it's only about blind people. It isn't. Basically the web access team and web accessibility is pan-disability, it can't be anything else.

Basically, this will be something approximately the same but hopefully written more plainly. To do that, what we have had to do is… for those of you who have had a look at WCAG 2.0, you will understand what I am about to say. For those who haven't yet, believe me, I know what I am talking about.

We have ripped up the idea of organising by 'perceivable, operable, understandable and robust' and we have reorganised 'success criteria' and sometimes had to re-write the 'success criteria', so that they come under things that developers and designers actually do, such as write web pages, do headings, look at images.

And we've done that, which is almost bringing it kind of back to WCAG 1.0 order of things but on auditing, we found that WCAG 2.0 ordered so that people understood what they were doing to web elements was fine, except that, for instance a form of part of a form can come under 'perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.' So you just keep going round and round and round. So it was from a workflow perspective it was appalling. So, that's really what we have been working on.

Kath Moonan:

I've got another question for you, but what I think we will do is move on. Okay. Mark. I've got a question that I prepared for Mark earlier and it is something that, by the way, first of all please… Lisa gave a great book recommendation before…this book is just rocking my world at the moment.

It is called "Design meets Disability" by Graham Pooling and it is mainly about product design but also has lots in it about the iPhone and things like that and it is about designing for inclusion, and thinking about that... Christian showed some sites earlier on and they were sites that were mainly aimed at people with impairments and none of the sites were very good looking. Like you wouldn't get a tee shirt printed or a tattoo with any of them done, because they are really not very nice.

And I have been thinking about this, why is it that people with disabilities are left with things that aren't very nice to look at or touch or hold and it is almost like people become design second class citizens. And one of the things I would put to you is that it is the twin enemies of bureaucracy and poverty mean that websites and design artefacts aimed at people with disabilities are doomed to be forever ugly.

New speaker: Mark Boulton

What do you want me to say to that? I agree, actually. I think the notion of aesthetics and product value and um… So, a couple of weeks ago I was judging the Cardiff design festival. There is a Cardiff design festival! And one of the entries was a wheelchair and it was like an Audi.

There's no mistake, I mean most of the…how many Dads in the room? Yeah, ok a few. Did you buy your child's pushchair? I bet you did. I bet you had a hand in the decision. A lot of pushchairs are aimed at actually… men. Because men make the purchasing decision on... especially high value pushchairs. It’s because of the design that goes into them and the aesthetics.

This wheelchair was a thing of beauty. I mean it was wonderful. It was like a cross between an Audi and an Aeron chair. It was just stunning. Why is it that just because somebody is in a wheelchair, the best we can do… the best that we can do is give them a cushion? I mean, come on! So I think bureaucracy is an issue, I think there has been a lot of talk today about culture and medical.

Two sides of that looking at accessibility I think that perhaps a lot of products that are designed are fulfilling a medical requirement and not the cultural requirement. And I guess could be the same for websites. They are perhaps fulfilling a technical need as in: Is this accessible, does it tick these check boxes? But they are certainly not fulfilling a cultural need.

And it goes on to, it raises questions about what is design and what is aesthetics and that kind of thing. Yes, design is making beautiful things but it is also a really important part of culture and it should be involved in every level of design.

Christian Heilmann:

Can I quickly pimp 'Enabled by Design' on that. enabledbydesign.org is a winner of the social innovation camp and it’s basically about living aids for people with disabilities and designer contests to make them pretty as well. It is a great way of showing people what people need to live and that it can be pretty as well. It is a great way of new designers that come from university to do something that matters and not just build another razorblade or whatever.

Mark Boulton:

Does that answer your question? I don’t know, I kind of went off on a rant.

Kath Moonan:

It does, I mean I think it’s an ongoing discussion really but it does and very interesting point.

Going on to you, Léonie. I know that the work that you guys do at Nomensa is very similar to Abilitynet in some ways and I know that a lot of your clients are local authorities. Not just local authorities, you've got clients in all sorts of different sectors. I think that the people in the room who work on those sites, I think you have a real difficult problem like managing how you integrate accessibility into all the different demands. What kind of advice are you giving clients now?

New speaker: Léonie Watson

Good question. A lot of our clients tend to come to us with their accessibility requirements pretty clearly laid out. Central government, local authorities come with a AA requirement that has been placed on them. It is not really that different amongst people in the private sector that come to us as well.

So what we have to do is work within their requirements, within a brief, but also try and educate and encourage looking beyond those as well. We were talking about this in the break. You know, where the guidelines fit in to the messages we give to our clients and to the community in general. For me the guidelines form a very good basis. They’re are a good place to start, they're a useful educational tool, they help people get to grips with the fundamentals but they can't be and shouldn't be the be all and end all of everything. I know this kicked off a bit of a discussion when we were talking earlier.

For me, if we take a look at the name of this presentation: 'To Comply Or Not To Comply'. Shakespeare had the parameters, the guidelines of the language to work by, but he didn't let that stop him innovating. He invented countless different words. He carried on 'To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…' What a fantastic piece of language is that? But it's constrained by the guidelines and the parameters of the language.

New speaker: Lisa Herrod

What does it mean?

(Laughter)

Léonie Watson:

That's been keeping people occupied for about the past 400 years!

My point is and what I think we try and encourage our clients to see is that guidelines are good, they have their place but they are a starting block and not the ending place.

Christian Heilmann:

You can write a compliant website and it is no quality whatsoever. Semantics cannot be validated by a W3C validator.

Kath Moonan:

Christian. You know this isn't just for Christian, can all of the developers put your hands up please? I’ve got some chocolates here and they are called Heroes.

Christian Heilmann:

But you're a stranger...

Kath Moonan:

Veronika where are you my love? What I would like you to do, I would like you to go round the room and give each and everyone of the developers in the room a chocolate. Because what I think is another one of the problems is that we are leaving everything up to the developers and it is wrong, because you can't throw anything at a developer and say 'As long as you do this in standards compliant semantic HTML and CSS, it’s going to be accessible and we tick all the boxes'.

That's just my sharing with you, Christian, but my next question is: can we clone you? And would we want to?

Christian Heilmann:

A lot of people say looking at the output on my blog, what I bring out there must be more than one of me anyway, which all ways confuses me.

We are at the Microsoft headquarters I don't know what they are doing at R&D but it can't be far off from cloning so, we can ask. If you want to that's another question, you can ask the people at the office if it is a good idea.

I always get a bit confused by that because I don't think I do much more than any other developer does out there, I am more vocal about it and I am more pragmatic about it. So a lot of developers live in their own little world about development and actually discuss with each other things that nobody cares about, rather just than building things that work and building things and working with designers to make that work.

We had this discussion earlier. I had talk in Atlanta where I was with Dan Rubin and we did a talk on making accessibility sexy. So we looked at some of the accessibility hacks that I built and he made them pretty and we talked to them together and then we discussed for hours, yes like we have to do cool shit now for the next five weeks. We're going to great stuff and it will be such movement again. We're going to start something cool and then everyone went back to the cocoon and it didn't work out.

So designers and developers can do something for a short period of time. But it seems the stamina to pull something through and work together on accessibility products is really not that easy to achieve and that is something we have to work on.

He wants to expose himself to the public all the time, and I think developers should do the same thing. A lot of developers have an amazing amount of talent but nobody gets the chance to coach them to actually vocal, be vocal about their talent as well and get the chance to say in a meeting like 'No sorry, we should be doing it like this'.

So a lot of developers are basically in the corner like 'here code monkey, do your stuff and do it in two weeks because you are better than the other guy. He did it in three weeks.' So people play the pride of developers rather than just giving them credit for what they do.

Chocolate helps but in the end we should really give people a chance to do what they do best and assign them to parts of the project about what they are passionate about. If you are not passionate about a product you will not build a good thing no matter what you try.

Kath Moonan:

Great. I will go to the question for Lisa and then we will move... Which one am I going to ask out of the two? Now you have come all the way over from Sydney, across the world, on a plane, here to London to share with us all about Deaf and mainly culturally Deaf users because I think we all need to wake up and smell the coffee on this and I hope that it creates some change.

How can we all, as a community, take the lessons away and just make sure that we start to integrate Deaf users more into our practice? What's our homework?

Lisa Herrod:

I think we just need to include them when we do our user research. The main thing, actually the thing about… The thing to focus on is that we are really talking about people who have English as a second language and that encompasses such wide range of people.

And in fact, not only does it encompass or include people from other non English speaking backgrounds but also in every country we have such a problem with literacy and it is something that is not spoken about. And I guess it comes under the umbrella of learning disability sometimes, but when we are addressing any sort of access to information and language and making it easier to read or scan or anything like that, that in itself, sorry, I guess… I think what I'm trying to say is that we will cover a whole range of groups of people, not just one small group if we include them in our user research.

Conversely, I guess you could go the other way and do user testing with people who do come from non English speaking backgrounds but it doesn't then include the whole area of the need for sign language interpreting of video and that sort of thing.

Kath Moonan:

We are going to open it up now but I want to throw out one question to everyone as well, which is: Are we testing at the wrong time? And you can just take that...

New speaker: question from the floor

I was interested in...

Kath Moonan:

What is your name and where do you come from?

Speaker from the floor:

John Waterworth and centre for HCI design at City University. Before taking some time out for post graduate stuff I have been running groups of developers and a few people have mentioned some of the web standards work we did. We got that through to developers because we had three things. We had relatively simple, relatively small set of things that we wanted them to do, we could explain to them why it would help them produce a better result and we could explain to them why it would make their lives better.

So basically you had this nice set of things that could convince people it was a good thing to do. I think we talked a bit about why we think accessibility might be stuck and why there might be some of these conflicts and I think we don't have those three things. I don't think we have a simple set of things that we can give to a set of developers to explain what we want them to do. We have trouble explaining why it is going co produce a better result and we have trouble explaining why it is going to make their lives any better.

So I think we are definitely stuck, and I would be interested in people's ideas in how we get through that impasse. Particularly I was really interested in the idea that the RNIB would be producing a more digestible form of WCAG that we might actually one day be able to explain to somebody.

Lisa Herrod:

I actually looked into... this will maybe answer some of your question or comment.

A couple of years ago I was looking at doing research around WCAG 1.0 and the guidelines and I had a look through priority 1 and 2, the checkpoints and found that actually not all of the checkpoints are relevant for developer work.

And I think it is really unfair that we continue to expect developers to be responsible for the accessibility of a website as according to the checkpoints. In actual fact, there are some checkpoints that are only appropriate for content developers, for the people who are writing the content.

For example, why should a developer be responsible for the alt text on the website? They code it, but they shouldn't be responsible for checking if it is appropriate to match the image. There are other checkpoints that are more relevant for IAs and JavaScripters to be working on together, but not necessarily frontend developers who are doing HTML and CSS.

So the thing is, as a whole, we are not taking responsibility ourselves as individual roles. And we can categorise, not to say we should focus on the checkpoints but when looking at it at that level and developers do, we should actually say these things are what the IA should be looking at. This is what the visual designers should be looking at. This is what the frontend developers should look at. And guess what, sometimes you get to work together. So we have a much more holistic approach, people have a better understanding of what each other does and I think that in the end it is a better result overall, so I guess that's a that of a rant from me. Does that answer anything?

Christian Heilmann:

A bigger problem is that developers are responsible for everything. Like, when I'm a web developer I build the interface.

Normally I get in normal design agency that I used to work for I get the design from the design team and that one already doesn't have any labels next to fields. That one already doesn't define any alt text. That already doesn't really define anything. People don't really want to know how I implement it, it just should work.

Anything that shows up on the website in the end is my fault. If that text came out of a database from a wrong translation, that doesn't matter, I get the bug file and I have to fix it.

That is something that when I look at guidelines and people say let's test against guidelines… The guidelines should be there, if ever, before I start building the whole thing. They should be part of the paper prototypes. They should be part of the visual design, before I even start defining what HTML or what system to use. But in the end it is like developers should check these this things and put some alt text in to make the guidelines work out, rather than really build something that is usable.

Again, it's communication. Sitting next to each other with the design team and we had this in another discussion before, that a lot of development nowadays is agile and design is just not agile. It doesn't work with the same methodology. That’s why we tried for every three scrums in development we did one scrum in design and that worked out quite nicely. But when push comes to shove and something has to change quickly, it messes up with whole agile approach. Developers get annoyed and designers say they 'well we can't work with those guys'.

We have to communicate more before we even start developing, not like what's the guideline about? I don't care about guidelines really any more.

Kath Moonan:

To go on from that, Bim, just to pick up on what the gentleman said there and to referring back to the RNIB, are we as an industry, are we stuck at the moment?

Bim Egan:

How do you mean stuck?

Kath Moonan:

In terms of you, if I...

New speaker from the floor:

There doesn't feel to be the right momentum, or movement. It is not something that seems to be greatly talked about in developer/designer circles, it is mentioned now and again.

Lisa Herrod:

It can't be because, I mean all the responsibility is from the developers. So first of all too much responsibility, they get burnt out, they are responsible for things that they shouldn't have to be and then people who should be involved aren't involved. How can there be a mass movement?

Kath Moonan:

I think also, and I know I've given you the mic, Bim. But just to say that I really think that another reason for this as well is that accessibility has become marginalised from mainstream web practises. One of the reasons why I wanted to get this conference together is because I was fed up with going to web conferences and being really excited by what I was being shown, but not hearing anything to do with diversity any more because it is like 'Oh we did that five years ago' and it is not important any more. And I think that while we need to think more as an industry about the way that we communicate, we need to get the, because it is like why…

I think we need to have the mainstream actually stand back and say 'no, this needs to be an ongoing dialogue'. And it is not about just having one speaker do it once four years ago and then that's it. We actually need to have this stuff move back into the mainstream of web where it belongs as well.

Christian Heilmann:

This is another communication problem. The conference is over and the accessibility people go home and don't communicate with the development world anymore because they are annoyed they didn't hear anything about accessibility, rather than signing up for developer mailing lists and saying 'hey, where were the accessibility talks?'

It’s the same with why don't we test with deaf people? Trying to find a blind tester, just from a mailing list is absolutely impossible because, with good right, they don't want to be known as a blind developer on a mailing list because then 6,000 people send them requests to test things with JAWS.

Kath Moonan:

It also that if you are testing with a screen reader user, the last person you want to test with is a developer. Because a screen reader user as a developer will use the screen reader completely differently, from what I have experienced, from a screen reader user is an actress or something like that, and just wants to use it to use the computer.

Christian Heilmann:

Who do we test for? Do we get all five of them?

Bim Egan:

You test for the screen reader user, you shouldn't be assuming expert knowledge. If you've got somebody who is so web savvy, so computer literate that they can be a developer then they are more than probably also an advanced user on their screen reading software and are not a typical user. A typical user gets somebody else to install it or installs it straight out of the box, makes one or two small changes on settings and then over time as they become more familiar might go from the default beginner to the default intermediate. But very few will go to the default advanced.

Christian Heilmann:

But this is what we said about web standards. We said people use Internet Explorer 5, install it once and will never go for a browser that supports web standards, so why should we bother using them?

We proved that wrong, because operating systems changed, then came the new browsers, they came cheaper and easier to install. And it's a technology problem, it's not like a poor person can only install JAWS once in his life and never be able to upgrade their computer.

One thing I wanted to do, which I sadly couldn’t do because I was flying late in. I wanted to bring a laptop with me and install live here on stage in the 45 minutes of my talk, in a Linux distribution with a screen reader. Without interfering with the laptop because you can do that nowadays. These are the accessibility articles you never hear about, these are the tutorials you never find. Because we whine that JAWS 4.0 doesn't work with newer accessibility or web 2.0 websites rather than looking at the technology and bringing tech people in and saying 'this screen reader sucks, and it’s really really expensive. Can you help us build a better one that is cheaper and easier to install?'

Bim Egan:

Building one that's cheaper and easier to install will benefit everybody. But we have never ever told people to work with any one screen reader in fact we tell them not to design to any particular screen reader.

Yes, testing with any screen reader is handy but if you are designing to a screen reader you are not designing to an accessibility standard. Because every screen reader behaves differently, every browser behaves differently, that's why we need standards.

But if you work to one, you are going to trip up another. It’s like concentrating on one area of disability. A lot of sites concentrate on making the sites really accessible for JAWS users or screen reader users and they trip up the people with impaired mobility, because they've put in a whole load of stuff that, if you haven't got a screen reader you can't hear it and it's hidden off screen.

Lisa Herrod:

This is really important because it is something that we've missed, that is being misunderstood even on this panel. You mentioned something about screen reader users and the blind developer doesn't want to be identified so he doesn't have all developers sending him stuff.

So, we are thinking of someone with technical expertise and you were saying and maybe we're better off getting an and actress rather than a developer with a screen reader.... the point is, and this is so important: If we're talking about inclusive design we don't recruit anyone that doesn't fit in that user group of the site.

So if we are going to do user research and it's going to be inclusive design, then what we do is, normally recruit end users in that user profile. It doesn't matter if they are deaf, or blind or whatever their needs are. When we recruit users that are blind use screen readers it shouldn't be are you not a developer or what screen reader do you say use? It should be do you fit in the user profile of this site. Maybe it’s a little bit harder, it can be, but...

Kath Moonan:

Léonie, do you want to pick up on that because I know that I think with the work you do at Nomensa. Like us you do usability and accessibility. I completely agree with you Lisa. What are your thoughts on that?

Léonie Watson:

Lisa's point is absolutely spot on. I come at it from a even more peculiar point, I spent a lot of my time as an expert screen reader user working with other developers, trying to fathom out how the hell these screen reader things are supposed to work.

Steve Faulkner mentioned earlier, ARIA support in JAWS at the moment, yes it's flaky, I'll go on record as saying that. But it took me fiddling with a screen reader and one of his colleagues, Gez Lemon, writing up some scripts with ARIA for us to get our heads around it. So I think there is a time and a place for testing with people who have knowledge of both domains.

That aside, if you are going to test in traditional usability testing sense of things, Lisa is absolutely right. You need to look at user audience and the group of people irrespective of disability and target your people on that basis, not whether they are an actress or developer.

The other thing we are missing and it's a simple rule: test early, test often and test with as many people as you can. I think that's something we can still improve on in our processes at the moment. Whichever disability we are testing with or whether it is with people with disabilities or not.

Kath Moonan:

Absolutely. Do you think that kind of approach is, do you think this is where user testing with diverse users needs to go next?

Because I think that it is like... From my opinion, user testing with diverse users started to mainstream about the time that the DRC report was written in 2004, because in the UK, it was one of the main recommendations. Then a lot of organisations started to write it into the specification. And now we have got to a stage where I think it’s matured more and it seems to be going into a user experience rather than 'let's get eight people with an impairment and a pulse to test the website'. Actually, we need to start getting more complex than that.

Christian Heilmann:

Is that the case? I don't work for agencies any more but I don't know with the recession right now if people really spend money on user testing at all, even if it's testing with users with disabilities. Probably asking the room is the wrong audience, because they are already at accessibility conference. If you ask at a design conference like 'hey how much user testing do we do?' They're like 'we do one round and then it's pretty because we’re great designers'.

So, I don't know if that is really applicable at all. If it is one of the questions or one of the polemic things that you ask, is one round of testing with users right? I haven't worked for any agency yet where we really had testing with diverse users, we just had like oh who is going to buy that product? Invite five of them in a room and show them the logo, if it is pretty or not.

Mark Boulton:

For the Drupal project that I worked on before, we worked on drupal.org in August and then that finished in December. And then Drupal 7 UX from January/February through 'til August. And throughout that entire process the drupal.org process was agile-ish. Iteration based, weekly sprints, it was a killer schedule, 12 weeks and we tested every round, every sprint. We did that again with Drupal 7 UX.

I think what is hard about it, and it is hard. And I think that's what we all have to remember, this stuff is difficult, which is why we are all struggling with it. I think what's hard about it is, it is a cultural change. And changing culture is really difficult. It has to happen with momentum from the bottom up a lot of time which is why web standards was successful. Which is why a bunch of other standards... Maybe it takes one guy with vision but then it takes a bunch of other people around that guy or that woman to push that forward.

Lisa Herrod:

You said this stuff is difficult, what did you mean?

Mark Boulton:

I mean inclusive design and I mean changing culture. So, I think there is a lot of people who have been in the industry that carry a lot of baggage as to what accessibility is and what it means. I think there's a lot of people in the industry, content creators people like that, who have no idea.

I worked in a department full of 60 journalists at BBC and throughout four years I worked really really hard to instil a to it. And that then instigates a cultural change, in no matter what institution or company you are in. That's just hard going, that’s just slogging away for months or years sometimes and that stuff is difficult.

Léonie Watson:

That's something we come across a lot actually. You know, corporate inertia for want of a better word. We talk to a lot of people who are accessibility champions in their organisations for want of a better term. They're really enthusiastic, they really get it, but they're just this tiny little voice in the thousands across the company and for them the inertia that they are facing in their organisations is a big part of the battle, I think.

Kath Moonan:

We've got six minutes to grab a couple of quick questions.

New speaker: question from the floor

I wondered about the discussion with the panel, the previous panel but I think it's more relevant here as well. Because, you're talking about developers owning responsibility for accessibility - why is it only developers? I am very happy to go back and take responsibility; there is no problem at all to take the responsibility of making the site accessible.

This is more to appeal to browsers, browser makers like opera, Microsoft and Google because I feel and this might be shared with quite a few developers around, that 70% of our time is involved in making the sites work in ten browsers and presenting it to the client. And what it is does, is that it pushes our deadlines to the end and then we realise after ten browsers we have to look at accessibility.

So, if these big companies get together or share among themselves and come up with some standards which make our developers life much easier, I think we should have more time to basically look for all these kind of avenues where we can enhance the web for more...

Mark Boulton:

I think that comes down to business need and accessibility being part of a core business objective right from day one.

When it's considered and lumped in with usability testing, which it quite often is, then as budgets and timelines get squeezed because of the fluid nature of the development process, then things are always going to fall off the cliff and unfortunately accessibility is going to be one of those things. Because the business need is not identified as a core part right from day one.

I think that is a big failing, perhaps of the industry as a whole, is educating clients. Recently I got - last week - a 50 page requirements document. And I am not kidding, accessibility was in that, it was about eight words, one line. Must comply AA. That was it, in the 40 pages. Ridiculous. So, I’m going to go back to the client and say 'you may want to consider this a little more'.

Christian Heilmann:

Also a short word about the browsers, about the ten browsers. It is about time we educate our stakeholders in the company, that when you build a website that looks the same across all the browsers, you are doing it wrong.

Websites are there to adapt to the environment. They are not there to look the same everywhere. This is the power of the web.

(Applause)

If you want to support eight different major browsers, build it on top of frameworks. All the frameworks out there are there to make browsers not suck. That's the only reason why we build frameworks. When browsers are good all that can vanish. But right now if you start from scratch write your own CSS, you write your own JavaScript and you hope to make it work, you might as well just spend your time on an island because you're as effective. It's just not working out.

Build on top of libraries, it doesn't have to be YUI, it can be any of them out there. But start with that and stop trying to make the web work across all the browsers the same way. It shouldn't have to. It actually makes much more sense to make things work and work better in newer browsers. Maybe people will upgrade as well. It doesn't matter if the browser vendors sit together and agree on a standard, because we still have those companies that don't upgrade IE6.

Bim Egan:

The thing to remember of course is that the only people, really, who see your website in more than one browser is you and other developers. The users use one browser. As long as it works, as long as it looks good, they're not going to be checking the pixels to see if you've got one extra pixel in one browser or not.

Kath Moonan:

I hear you but what about if you have got one computer at home, one computer at work, and the internet on your phone?

Christian Heilmann:

If you get the experience everywhere, you use the web.

Kath Moonan:

I am not saying people don't know, they probably just think it's the internet, because most people aren't bothered about what a browser is, except us lot. Anyway, next... I told you I shouldn't be allowed to do this!

(Laughter)

New speaker from the floor:

Hi, Sally Cain from RNIB. I do a lot of work with software developers. I assure you they know a whole lot less about accessibility than web developers do. I wanted to quickly say, there seems to be, as we've seen today, a change in the way the web is being used with rich internet applications and this is going to bring a whole new set of challenges for people. Not because of the fact of underlying accessibility, because we have ARIA, but because fundamentally people are going to start using their browser and the web more like a desktop. And I think that developers and testers need to understand it is a different kind of user experience people are having in that way…

New speaker from the floor:

My name is Susan Quick and I lead a group called Enabling Radio, and we are in the process of developing a fully accessible website. I want to ask Mark Boulton, I agree it would be great to keep on testing and testing but I have got a question. How and in what way do you devise the tests? How are you going to make sure you cover the full remit of impairments?

Mark Boulton:

That's a really good question.

Christian Heilmann

One user with all disabilities?

(Laughter)

Mark Boulton:

I think you can only do the best you can, right? So the testing we have done on the project, the Drupal project for a year, is very lo-fi. We haven't gone into a lab, we have done a lot of qualitative work, a lot of interviewing and that kind of thing.

We tried to establish a panel of users to regularly go to throughout the process, which really helped because they could see the process grow and they bought into that. We can still test on a bunch of others users as well.

Lisa Herrod:

How many of them had disabilities?

Mark Boulton:

I don't know. Do you know, I think one or two but not many, actually, not many. I don't know if that's an issue in the recruitment side of things.

It's an open source project of developers, so that was quite hard in itself. It's more of an issue of recruiting I think. If you are doing lo-fi work and you're not relying on an agency to go out there and recruit an accurate sample, then that's always going to be a struggle, because that process costs lots of money, generally. If this move towards more guerrilla usability testing, how do you gather your sample, which is probably what you are saying.

Speaker from the floor:

That's what I am asking. Given there is massive… I have got something that is called a head injury, which means I have got a lousy memory and I'm half blind ..... But that’s just one sort of impairment.

I have got friends in wheelchairs, friends who are blind or deaf. I know one guy works on a computer. He can't use his hands, he does it all with his head. He can't speak. Yet he can use a computer. How on earth are you going to test the development of websites to be accessible to all of us?

Mark Boulton:

That is one of the things I was talking about and one of the challenges is with inclusive design you are designing for everybody. Which is opposed to the design process of trying to establish one or two, if you are using UCD and personas and that kind of thing. Is have primaries and secondaries and make sure you are designing to the 80 per cent of your target audience. In that sense you can't include everybody. How can you?

It's a really tricky, balance….I am sure Lisa has got something to say on that. Grinding her teeth!

(Laughter)

Kath Moonan:

We are going to get spanked by Microsoft if we don't leave. Because there is another Abilitynet event on in here.

I think what we'll do, is we maybe just take some points from the audience to finish rather than questions. So, that gentleman there and then just a couple of quick points and then we need to... Because they told us that we are going to be severely punished if we are not out of here.

Christian:

They've given us Internet Explorer 6 for eight years…

New speaker: question from the floor:

I will make a couple of points then. I think, Mark you hit the nail on the head. It is impossible to design a site for everyone. You would end up designing a million different experiences. You have to group people in to groups or personas and base things around that. And I wonder if here potentially we are talking the wrong people here, we are preaching to the converted.

What I'm hearing is a lot of problems. You have got designers who are not very good at asking for help, developers are probably 10 times worse. You have got issues with lots of different browsers, and sorry and I totally disagree with you about IE6 because we work on sites where we inherit sites with IE6 and there's inherited stuff and you are trying to fix problems, you know, the whole thing is a minefield and a nightmare.

And what I think this industry needs to two things. We need some quick wins. We need quick things that we can adopt. They're not going to fix all the problems in the world, they're not going to make it right for everyone. But we need quick wins, we need basic things, principles that you can do just that take a site from being not 100 percent compliant to 80 per cent, sorry, from being 0 per cent compliant to 10 per cent, 20 per cent. Things that people can do easily and quickly.

We need also, I think, to base it a round business cases and I mentioned this earlier. The owners of the site, the people who hold the purse strings.

One of the questions, I do have a question: we mentioned one in seven people have got a hearing impairment. You add into that people with visual impairments as well. And you add into that people who are older and who are older age groups, people less web savvy and find it just harder to comprehend technology. There is probably a massive business case for people to make sites just easier to use in general, whether you're talking about strictly accessibility but just making sites easier to use.

Lisa Herrod:

But that's what accessibility and usability is.

Christian Heilmann:

Legal and General is a good case. What Mike has built. They made a lot of money by making their forms easier and accessible.

Speaker from the floor:

But if you can say to a businessman look, if we do these few things, it won't solve it for everything, but we will open a site out, we will get X many more people can buy our products. That is how I think we need to address it, to make the people with the purse strings realise that this is a smart business thing to do.

Kath Moonan:

But to be honest though, that knowledge has been out there for several years. We've got Mike Davies here who developed the Legal and General and there was a huge business case done. So you're right, but it's there already. It exists and all the figures are there and they are all proven.

Léonie Watson:

Another problem with that though, is that you have to get in at the right level. Almost level one. That case study has been out for years and those of us that know about it know about it. The problem is the people in the boardrooms, you know the FSTE 100, they still don't really know about it.

Speaker from the floor:

We are not talking to the right people in the right way then?

Léonie Watson:

Yes, that's what you have to do. The right people in the right language…