Christian Heilmann
AbilityNet - Accessibility 2.0 Conference

Robin

Brilliant, so the next speaker taking us up to lunch at one o’clock, is Christian Heilmann who again needs no introduction for the vast majority of people in the room, he has been a web developer for over 10 years now, loads of enterprise websites such as MacDonalds, Hewlett Packard, Visit Britain, read several, …erm written! [laughter] several books and numerous articles on web development, age acts accessibility etc.

The talk he is doing at the moment is called ‘Fencing in the Habitat’ and it’s about some of the technological solutions that companies have found to the issues of accessibility, so without further ado I would like to introduce Christian.

Audience

[applause]

Christian

Thanks. First of all, if I look a bit more dishevelled than normal and if I fall asleep later its because I’m still on Californian time. I arrived yesterday and luckily I got my luggage this time at T5, so that was good.

Audience

[small laughter]

Christian

And erm, yeah, I always feel sorry for Steve, cos he has all these hi-tech presentations that always trust Windows to work and Assistive Technologies to work and it never works out. Wouldn’t it be ironic if my Mac now crashes, but fair enough.

Audience

[small laughter]

Christian

Yeah, these presentations will be online later on as well and I’m rather happy that I can actually use nice fonts by now.

So, erm, ‘Fencing in the Habitat’ is a talk I’ve been wanting to do for a long time because I’ve been an accessibility consultant and accessibility expert in several companies for so many years that I just got tired of saying the same things all over again. A lot of what I am going to talk about will annoy some people in here but I’m doing that on purpose because some people have to wake up its about time that we see accessibility as something that should be easy to sell to people but it isn’t and that’s the biggest problem that we have these days, and partly its because we make fast solutions for people or things that makes us happy rather than things that create accessible solutions that are usable and that’s my biggest concern with the whole accessibility thing. It’s a bit outside the normal IT budget, we spend money on really stupid things but we never have the budget for accessibility and that’s partly because we approach it the wrong way and try to sell it in a fashion where it shouldn’t be sold.

We are here at an accessibility conference so I’m actually making a bit of an assumption that you guys are interested in the matter and have read a bit about it, so I’m not going to go in to details but all of you want to create accessible products and know why we should do that and that’s the biggest first step. The amount of time I go to people and say this is not accessible, and it’s just not basically accessible and ask why is that and they say why should it. The biggest problem is starting to sell people why we want to do accessible products so this is the first step where we fail because most of the time we try and fear them into something, saying “you can be sued” or “you’ll lose so much money” in essence making an accessible product is making a good product and making a product for everybody, and that’s where we should start selling it, the problem is we can’t quantify that with numbers but you can do it with other bits. So generally usable and accessible sites and products are very rare, we have some poster child websites and some poster child products, but most of the time we did something for accessibility and then its ugly or we did something for usability and its actually far too much and its really hard to get out there and sell somebody accessibility by showing them some products out there, because most likely they will come up to you and say well ‘msdn.com’ doesn’t work for me or those companies do that wrong and this company does that wrong, why should I do it when the big companies do it wrong as well. It’s really tricky to get around; the good thing now is that a lot of big companies by now actually do it right so we have some good points to show. Sites that claim accessibility and companies that actually claim to make products accessible are not really that much of a problem to find, because lets face it accessibility also means money, a lot of companies out there sell accessibility products or sell accessibility consultancy without really providing any usable products in the end but make a lot of money with that and make the client happy as well. Because most of the time you have a client that’s just says I need to be accessible, I need to tick that box to make my boss happy, rather than to make an accessible product for the end users and that’s where a lot of companies come in with fast solutions.

People only grudgingly embrace the need for accessibility, first of all most of the time people say its extra work and then there’s the subconscious thing with designers as well. If you go to somebody who really loves there brand or really love their imagery and then you tell them something about people who cant see, subconsciously that’s a fear that they have, they never want to not be able to see the cool stuff that their doing, so when you tell them about these people there’s like a subconscious barrier there, so you have to find a way around that one.

How many times for example have you been asked to provide the number of how many disabled people your website has. Every time I go to a company and say accessibility is a big concern, they say can you tell me the percentage our users that are disabled, I say back do you know how many of your users are Asian? Do you know how many are coloured? You never know these kinds of thing, its not worthwhile because you can’t play the number game. The biggest number game that people say is that we have so many disabled users out there they’ve got so much money we don’t make because were not accessible to them. It’s just dirty, these are human being that have input, that have information, that want to read an understand your products, not how much money they have. Number games you can always play yourself you can always make up random charts and numbers, for example you can say there’s zero madness and there’s 100% spa time, or you can say that 70% of statisticslie, 4 out of 6 people know that. I’ve done that in meetings and people are like ‘Aaah, aaah, aaah’.

Audience

[small laughter]

Christian

Here’s a classic accessibility software sales pitch, like whenever I was sitting with other companies, they came up like this. So they’d say you have an old broken and unloved product lets say a lot of contact sites or a lot of sites with a lot of text, like local councils come with 150,000 hard coded pages and things like that. Then these companies come in and they do something like they do the 3rd party science and technology there is some magic happening, the accessibility pixies will come and do everything for you and you don’t have to do anything yourselves and if you spend a lot of money and some time on it that will be a shining, modern and total accessible product and will be very inviting for everybody. Now if the same people, which of course we think is completely not true, if the same people to come to us, the guys in the know, we basically say that there’s no technical possibility to batch, convert, you have to do something yourself to make your site accessible and it starts with content. It’s amazing how many times we do this, we go to these guys and say like,ok it’s going to be hard to make this product accessible, its best to start from scratch again. I’ve managed to do this in 3 projects so far in the company that I’m working for at the moment and we said sorry this is just not doing it anymore we have to start from scratch, but most companies do not have this opportunity. Then we start ranting on about semantic html and structuring the stuff and links and forms, most of the time the people with the money that make the decisions about accessibility don’t want to hear about it, they don’t even know what html is, these are the kind of people who send you a whole email in the subject line rather than just have a proper subject in there or has a secretary who prints out the email and they answer in the margins and then they type it in for them. This is the problem we always g down to the low level, you have to start semantically, instead of asking who write stuff for your web and why do they do that job and who gave them the training to write thing for your web. I have a background in radio journalism and I learnt a lot that writing for the radio is a lot like writing for the web because nobody cares about your content, nobody is glued to the radio and listening to what you are saying people just fly by, driving or doing the ironing or whatever they do when listening to the radio and the same is on the internet people think I’ll write my stuff and everyone will read and love my irony and sarcasm I use in my text, and no they don’t because they don’t get it. Lets start from a content level before we start telling people how to mark up the pages because most of the time that’s some content management system they don’t have any control over, and spent a little money on it already so its not good to go to somebody and say that £250,000 you spent on Documentum or some other enterprise level software, is not really good because you can’t do this with it. They’re not going to believe you.

So who will gets the job? Most of the time its people who say magic . Spend money on us and we’ll do everything for you, that’s why we have all theses ruins of websites out there that claim accessibility but really don’t have any. Regardless of what is right and that these companies should die in a fiery death. Regardless of what is right, we want to make the world accessible, we are the do-gooders, we are the hippies, we are the tree huggers, we basically want to make the world accessible and want to make the web a real web for everybody out there.So we have to find a way to sell it to people to who are just not wanting to hear about the technologies that drive the web. So we have to find a way of doing that and that’s stooping down to their level, as I said, talk about content first.

In order to achieve that we need to find a way to sell it. Accessibility is not about creating a habitat for disabled users, that’s what we do right now a lot of the time and that’s what old school IT talk was like before browsers were really good, people said we have to use Java script but now we’ll make a text only version for the site for disabled people. And that’s not on because its not a habitat for disabled people we don’t put them in their own little room and let them be happy there, we invite them to come with us. Disability is nothing more than a hardcore usability test of your product. If your website can be used with assistive technology, if can be used by someone who can only use a keyboard that’s a great test that means you have written a good website, it doesn’t mean you’ve done something extra because, this should be for me, the start of your product not the end of it. The other problem that people say is, we have a non java script version for the screen reader users, not realising that screen readers understand as much java script as the browser they are based under, so people test their html stuff but they don’t test their java script and what they generate with java script with screen readers, which is why its great that we have people like S Lemon and Steve that go for that and do the testing as well and there’s a lot to be learnt.

It’s about making sure that our products work for as many users as possible. I’m doing the same as Steve’s thing, I’m going a lot further than my slides We have to make sure of this regardless of disability, location and technical environment, that’s a harsh statement to make and that’s how accessibility was defined by Tim Berners Lee, we can’t say that we support all the old browsers out there, that’s why in the company I work for we do things like graded browser support, which means browsers that we don’t know what they are don’t get any css and don’t get any java script because we don’t trust them, they will do evil things with it, we basically don’t give them any of that because we don’t know what they’ll do out of it. It’s like sending them to an outsource company without knowing the quality of what they are doing. You don’t have to support every crappy browser out or hardcore test environment out there but you have to make sure that these things work on a level where people can use it and if your html without java script is not usable then you have a problem and that’s what people still don’t realise. I made money with java script books, I love java script to bits but I don’t trust it that much. I totally disagree that anybody could say my application needs java script, if your application needs java script then there’s a problem, if java script is necessary to make your application a lot smoother than it is, then that’s a different issue. For example, expense systems, I don’t want to spend 15 clicks when I can do it with 3 with a bit if java script, but that’s the other side of things people keep it hardcore basic because they think java script is not accessible.

We will not be able to cater for everybody, you cannot cater for every disability. I mean people with learning disabilities ,might have different needs to blind people and sometimes these things clash. I’m quite sure someone has done the research into it but it doesn’t matter about the numbers, but you have to make sure that every disability has it different needs and that you can get most of them with an accessible site, but you cannot make sure everybody is happy, unless you make sure you built things for everyone of them and then you have to habitat again. What we do now is actually not helping because most of the time we do little things to our websites that actually make them more accessible. Most of the time these things are not there to make them more accessible and more usable for people with disabilities, but there to so we can show we have done something. My favourite example, font resizing switches, you can select 3 different sizes or plus minus and resize the font on our website because our designer thought it was a good idea to take 9 pixel font from the beginning. My favourite is people that use these font sizing widgets with 10 by 10 pixel icons, light grey on darker grey, hey we’ve got this tool but you’ll never find it, but look we’ve done something for accessibility, we’re great!!

[small laughter]

Font resizing widgets are basically back when IE5 was still around there was a need for them, but only partially, there absolutely more ironic when teaching your users how to use their web browser and their site. Most of the time people who come to your site who need a bigger font size will have had a bigger font size before they came there, so you make it small again and ask them to press buttons again. Its like urrrgh!

[small laughter]

You can detect a font size of a browser and you can detect the font size in scripting as well, but actually the easiest way is to make your font readable from the start and then have a website that really, if you need to be legally accessible, make a website that explains to people how they can resize the font of their browser and that’s what most clever people do, including the AbilityNet website and the BBC as well. The other thing is skip menus, skiplinks are great and skiplinks sadly are still necessary. Skiplinks are necessary for people who are blind but also for people that use keyboards and that people who use mobile phones. I love skiplinks on mobile phones because the scrolling is sometimes really annoying so I use the skiplink instead. But then you find things like skip menus where people have 12 skiplinks, skip to this part of the page, that part of the page and that part, so do I get a skiplink to skip over the part of the skip menu.

[small laughter]

Sometimes when I look at the source of websites where people say we did a lot for accessibility look at that, and I say ‘yeah you put in a lot of links in that nobody needs’ if your structure of the website is clever from the start most of them will be redundant and actually a skip menu is really redundant, that’s something assistive technology should do for you automatically maybe with a wide area role but we haven’t been there yet but that would be an interesting thing to go for.

Then we have the clever plugins that read out text which is quite ironic, I’ve seen that the question came earlier, which yes, there are used cases for it but its spending money for a very small amount of users and the people really need voice for websites will get distracted by it, so I’m skipping over that. I wanted to rant about it, but we could do that in private later.

It’s not about gadgets, it’s not about the cool things you put on a website to say that you’ve been accessible. And there’s’ two problems with that, the first problem is as with the text resizing widgets they don’t make sense most of the time but they just make you feel good and not the disabled user that comes to your website. But the biggest problem is that they actually cost money. They are an extra thing no one plans for the font resizing widget from the start, we say we do something for accessibility, we do this font resizing widget, give us 6 hours to do that and then we test it and we go for it, we put these gadgets in and they cost money and need to be implemented and they will sooner or later fall out of the maintenance plan. Because websites are living things, websites never die and never actually should be stagnant if your website is stagnate then you haven’t understood the media. So every one to two years you will have a re-brand of your site you will do something with it, so when push comes to shove, which is never defined when that is, people will not take these widgets on any longer. So, we had a fast sale, we did something cool for accessibility, we patted our own back and we’re great accessibility consultants, I made people put something in there for disabled people and then in the next round of the website it will actually be ditched because no one wants to support it any longer or the only guy that wrote it has left the company. It’s not about adding these things it’s about making the whole thing more usable from the start then it will be maintained in the future as well. These gadgets are great solution for a quick sale but not really anything that will be maintained.

It’s about smart implementation and to learn about smart implementation it’s good to look at stupid implementation. Here’s a picture of a hotel lift I was in the other day and it shows these big black buttons with Braille on it. These are not the buttons to select the floor you want to go to, the buttons that are next to the ones with the Braille button are actually the ones you select. They hardly have any bevel on them and they also don’t have much contrast to the rest of it. I thought there is reason to that, because it actually means they didn’t want people to accidently press the button by reading the Braille, so they made sure the Braille is not on the button that you activate. Which is a problem that we had, for example, in the office, a colleague of mine is blind and he actually went through all the coffee machines and printed out from the Braille reader, printed labels for the coffee machines which coffee’s are available for you. Our internal people saw that and thought it was cool as it did something for accessibility and decided they should do it as well, so they printed these labels that are transparent and put them on the buttons and because the buttons were these sensor buttons basically by the time you had read what the coffee was you had 5 of them already.

[small laughter]

So the hotel did it right but at the same time wrong because the button didn’t have any bevel and I tested it and the Braille didn’t say activate right of this button, if you do this then it would be great but this way it was really useless, and I saw blind people trying to press these black buttons and I had to say actually its next to it, sorry about that.

My other favourite example is a steak house. They had a toilet and had to make it wheelchair accessible so they took out one of the toilets and actually made it wheelchair accessible that way, what they didn’t do was move the toilet rolls to the right side. So you could sit down on the toilet and then need a 2 metre arm or a servant to get you the toilet paper or take it with you. It cracks me up because you see the tiles on the floor where they took the other toilet out and instead of thinking maybe we should get rid of the other one, no no its fine go for it!!

Now here’s a very smart assistive technology, what’s the most used assistive technology out there? The speaker. The speaker was invented by someone who was hard of hearing or had someone who was hard of hearing he wanted to do something for, now it makes people hard of hearing! And now it makes sure that you can hear me without having to shout. That’s just the kind of assistive technology we have to think about, this makes sense for everybody but also for disabled users and this is an easy way to sell. Accessibility and other best practises should be a no brainer to sell; it reaches more people it makes it easier for everybody, cool idea. But as we go for that we make it for screen readers, we make it for people with learning disabilities and this and that it doesn’t make it easier for everybody, it just makes it special for some people and that’s what business people don’t want to hear unless they know the figures that they’ll make millions from it. The main reason it’s hard to sell is because people do not understand the need, why is accessibility needed, and most of it’s because of technical implications. So what’s the main drive of websites with semantically valuable mark up that we need for accessibility, progressively enhanced interaction, good internationalisation and localisation, what would be the main driver of that?

It’s geeks that care, its people that put more effort in than they’re asked to, its people that lie to their product manager and say I need 5 days for that because they want to put some extra effort into it and do it right in the first place not in 2 months time when they are asked to fix it again. And geeks that slip all of these in on the sly, nobody asked us to do a javascript; people ask for a javascript fallback, they don’t ask for progressively enhanced javascript solutions. But we do it the right way because we are lazy we don’t want to do it again so we do it right the first time and that’s why when you come back and you have a good website and you have good progressively enhanced javascript go back and hug your developers. Because they’re cleverly lazy and there doing this extra work that no one gives the money for and they get into trouble taking more time than they should have needed, but these are the guys that make the web more accessible and better.

We need to do the same with accessibility, so if we want to make accessibility we need to make it beneficial for all. What’s the easiest way to sell accessibility, search engine optimisation. Search engines are hungry beasts that read text and follow links, and that’s how stupid they are and that’s basically what they do best. They read a bit of flesh and they read a bit of javascript, it’s just a testing phase at the moment. Text and follow links and right headings, search engine optimisation. Do it the right way and you’ll have a more accessible product as well.

Page titles are terribly important but the amount of websites we find out there with untitled document or brand name on every website. People don’t realise how much they are actually used, so show people where text is used, I’ve done this for an SEO conference actually. So, this is a title of one of the wikis that I am running, I went through it and you see it in the title bar of the browser, you see it on the tab of the browser, you see it on the rollover of the tab of the browser. You see the same title in search result pages, you see the same title in your bookmarks and you see the same title if somebody uses, for example, delicious for social book marking, this is where your title shows up as well and you see it when somebody builds a little widget on top of an API, that’s where you see your title. So if you go to a money bag man and show him 12 channels where you see that title so lets make sure we do it right, that will show a lot more than saying we need good page titles. Because the whole thing about content distribution is something that makes you a lot of money if you do it right, and if you don’t have a title that people understand they will not click it.

Alternative text is another big thing; we always say put ALT text on your images. Use ALT tags, the next person that uses ALT text in any text should be strangled by me, there is no tag called ALT, a tag makes it a technical thing. What’s a tag? It’s in the back of my shirt right!! Use alternative text, if you have an image, make it a text that a search engine can find, make it a text that makes sense, and make sure you have something like this – so we have a 33jpeg and we have the alternative text ‘ a nice pair of tits’ and is Christian bold enough to show them? Of course I do, because it’s two nice blue tits on a bird feeder in my garden. So the alternative text makes sense, does it makes sense in context or is it misleading? So make sure when you tell people about their alternative text that they write alternative text that makes sense for these kind of images as well. So what can we do to battle bogus accessibility software sellers, those like pixel magic and you don’t have to do anything we do everything for you our testing platform does it, Bobby is dead, I was so happy about this! Watch Fire now do security testing of websites and they’re doing an amazingly good job in that. I always think that security testing must be lonely geeks because words like penetration testing, port sniffing, it’s just wrong! So what can we do to battle these guys, what I do with that is technology hypes, I could show my I-phone if I had one but this is the same thing. Talk about mobile availability and about touch interfaces when you talk about accessibility. Because this is what people want, all these cool new kids have these really expensive phones and they want to do something for them and if you tell them that these interfaces need roots that are applying for people that can’t use their mouse properly either, that’s a really good selling point and that gets them interested as well. So you have to pick some perfect layouts with miniscule interface and no breathing space, like K10K for example is great that way, and you battle that by using the FFS, which is not what you think it is. It’s the fat finger syndrome, the amount of times I use my I pod touch and I select the wrong things because my fingers are not the smallest and somebody though it was good to make a 10 by 10 pixels rather than 20 by 20 pixels, is staggering, and that’s exactly what we have to show people. Look on the I-phone it’s not easy to use so if we make that 20 pixels instead is that ok, yeah sure people on the I-phone will have it, millions of dollars coming in, awesome!!

Another example how simplifying the interface for humans spell success, and I love how that happened, is from the game console market. In games consoles for a year, or two years, Sony and Microsoft and other people went head to head and actually said ok what do we do, how do we make the best console out there, better graphics, better sound, faster animation engines and then somebody like Nintendo comes around and creates the Wii which looks like crap, but is so much fun to play. That’s a You Tube video of pensioners in the US trying out the Wii for the first time, they didn’t give them any instructions, they just put the Wii controller there and said go for it. Within about 2 minutes all of them started playing with it and had loads and loads of fun. I gave a Wii to my family for Christmas and my parents wouldn’t touch any computer and they were playing it with my godson and my brother and the whole family, 3 generation were playing bowling with a computer thing that they wouldn’t touch, because it’s so much fun to play and it’s so easy to access this system. If you put an X Box there and you press A C F 4 22 and then you start playing they would never do that, if you say ‘you swing the thing around and it plays’ awesome! And this is how we should sell accessibility, first we would say is this as easy as implementing that, don’t write your whole emails in the subject line.

So web 2.0 is bad for accessibility. We had the whole AbilityNet test, they said all the sites are really hard to use, and it’s true. But, and this is a big but, web 2.0 to me is a methodology or it’s a mind set, it’s not a technology. Its a read, write web its opening your systems for people to access and write their own content and access it on as many levels as possible, as many different channels as possible. So web 2.0 is bad if your interface doesn’t make it fun to add good content, because that’s the other side. One of the biggest problems in accessibility is not that our interfaces are in-accessible, that’s a big problem, but the biggest problem is that we don’t even have the content there that is necessary to make it accessible. Loads and loads of photo sites out there don’t have any alternative text, videos don’t have any captioning because it’s really really hard and costs a lot of money to put these things in and that’s why people don’t do it and that’s where web 2.0 is great for accessibility because its fun for people to add things and there’s ways to do it.

How to make your PowerPoint and PDF’s accessible? You can go through the documentation and just want to kill yourself after half an hour. What I do with my PowerPoint’s and PDF’s is upload them to slide share, slide share is a website that allows you to share your slides and for people to embed a flash video of your slides on to the website. What slide share also does is converts it into these flash movie but also creates html descriptions of your slides for it, so if you put good text in there you will have it as html in there. The problem right now is that the site is a bit annoyed and problematic to read in a screen reader so these things are not as accessible as they could be, but this is html which can easily be made accessible. I talked to them last week and they’re going to write an API that you can actually access the same URL when you embed the video and get these descriptions out of it as well and then you can make an easily accessible version of your PDF that way. You can also make it distributable for other people to put it on your website as well and get lots of search engine love for it. This is basically a great example of a web 2.0 company that are completely open to input, when I went to them and said, can we have an API for that because that would make it really accessible, and they said sure. Right now they have a DOS attack from China so they’re a bit busy but in a few weeks they will be fine

What about online video? Online video is the biggest problem is that people upload videos but do not write any titles for them. What search engines in assistive technology would find of that video first of all is the header, the descriptions and the comments, and most of the comments as we know are ‘yeah dude that’s a cool picture’ . The problem with it is comments are actually made out of context, comments are just like talk about the whole video, duh why would I want to do that, it’s a monkey peeing we all know that. So when you have a company like Vidler for example that allows you to stop the video and get a comment field, to give a comment about that certain moment in time of the video and when you look at the quality of the comments on Vidler and You Tube for the same video they’re actually a lot better because people write abut that little part of the video and not the whole video. It’s not captioning, it’s not at all captioning but it’s getting there. At least I can read through that and know what the whole video is about before I have to watch it and that’s a great start. It’s time we took off our blindness and expand our accessibility solutions horizon. We always say it has to be accessible java script evil, flash evil, java script people weird, ok that’s true,.They have to understand that java script and flash used in the right manor can increase accessibility. I can detect to a certain degree if a screen reader is in use with flash and there is a library called flash 8 that would allow me to find out that that’s happening and I can do something with it. That’s something we can’t do in java script alone we have to use java script and flash to help us with that. Of course you have the problem that some people have one or the other not turned on, but if you write them progressively no problem what so ever because you test before you apply them.

These technologies don’t necessarily make it easier for the disabled user but actually for other users to use the system and make it more fun to use like the Nintendo Wii example and I’ve done some examples here. There’s You Tube for example, You Tube just recently created an API they have an API now that you can now control the whole You Tube player from java script, so what I’ve done with it, I’ve done the exact same example with Vidler. So every time you hit the stop button on the You Tube video you get a text box where you can enter a comment about that moment in time, you can delete it with the x button next to it and when you give me the transcript you get an adjacent object which is the time stamps with the stuff you have entered. I have talked with John Folliott of Stanford University, they’re writing an accessible flash player at the moment and they’re thinking about using this form for capturing and not the really complex ones that are standard. Because most of the time you just want that, it so easy, an adjacent object is so portable compared to a binary format. It’s really easy to write that together and several people have written some captions for it, I haven t had time to write the player for it but it’s possible with the API as well and I’ve been talking to Google that they could get this information in the API and actually automatically send it to a form field or actually inside the flash movie as well.

Another example is Twitter which is quite fun that he showed Twitter before. My problem with Twitter was that I have Twitter friends all over the place, there’s people in Germany, there’s people in France, there’s people in Japan and there’s people in England and if you don’t have a language attribute on your text that’s terrible because the screen reader will actually read it with an English voice and you don’t want French read out by an English guy or English by a German guy, it does not work that way, it’s not fun to use. So what I’ve done here is I’ve used Google’s java script translation API to inject the correct language attributes into Twitter updates so I used a Twitter feed and actually ran each of these feeds through the API that gave me a threshold, for example I’m 90% sure that this is English, I’m 90% sure that this is French, if I’m only 20% sure, it didn’t use any language attribute at all. This way I made Twitter much more internationalised and much more easier to read on a screen reader. I was inspired by my blind colleague again, it was quite fun because our search result pages didn’t have that either in there so search results in French were read out in English and that was just not making any sense at all so for an internal hack day he actually wrote a grease monkey script to do that for him and then we put it into the real live search result page, so they have natural language in there now and they really sound wonderful on a screen reader. But it takes a blind developer to write himself a grease monkey script to actually get people into action to do these kinds of things and that’s a great great example how it actually makes sense that we don’t under estimate people with disabilities because he shamed some of the other developers that day, it was great!

Another example is Flicker; Flicker is being shot down by everybody about being in-accessible and the click to edit things just don’t work on the screen reader, I’ve written some scripts that make it easier and possibly more accessible but actually it’s not that much of a problem because I see the editing, the headings and the descriptions of Flicker just as another data input and if people have an easy way and really intuitive way I click the heading, if I don’t know anything about computers or I don’t know anything about the internet, I click the heading and I can start editing it. That’s great, that’s a step taken away from somebody, most content management systems would like upload your photo, next step write the alternative text. If you could just see the photo in context, just click the heading and start editing it, which we do on Flicker, people will put proper things in and that is accessibility because that is information that anybody can consume, even people that can’t see these photos. So the Web 2.0 part of like putting data in is very much accessible if we just make it as data input and don’t see it as oh that doesn’t work with a screen reader so your website is not accessible. Actually if it allows people to write proper alternative text that’s more accessible than most content managements systems I know.

So technology is the solution but only when it comes natural and everyone benefits, so don’t try to bolt on accessibility extras like font resizing widgets or all kind of things. If it comes natural that it makes sense for somebody to get this information and it works with assistive technology, great, if it doesn’t think about it again because you will actually burn budget that you will not get for proper things that you have to do for translations and transcriptions.

So lets not ‘Fence in the Habitat’ for disabled users but let everybody benefit from what they need to access from your products, so if we manage to sell accessibility as making it easier for everybody else to use the product, and what Mike has done for Legal and General, if you want to talk to him later about this, is a perfect example. He had a form that had 6 steps really convoluted questions with no labels and nobody knew what the hell they were on about and they cut it down to 2 or 3 steps with proper English language and they had more non-disabled users sign up than ever before. This is what we want accessibility to be, not something people have to be scared into or thinking about it because of monetary reasons, and I think that is all I wanted to talk about and I thank you very much.

Audience

[large applause]

Robin

Thank you very much indeed Christian, that was fantastic, really good, I’m sure we’ve got lots of questions before we go to lunch.

Question

People often think that most people who need assistive technology have assistive technology or that if they need zoomed text then their text is already zoomed. I would like to really, very strongly disagree with this assumption, I think that I’d proper go with one example of dyslexia, which is a bit of a thing I bang on about being dyslexic myself. A lot of people think that it’s not such a big problem for people with dyslexia, its not a necessity it’s a preference and I would very strongly disagree with that, one on a legal level, being dyslexic does means you do fall under the DDA and you do fall under these regulations that mean you should be dealt with in a fair way in that an accessible service should be offered to you, but also in a very practical way I know from personal first hand experience that I simply cannot read certain websites. When I get there, even though I can get there, I can get there because I can see where the icon is for internet explorer without having to read anything, I can double click on that and up comes the browser and I know what to do and I have the ability to navigate to sites. But quite often if I’m confronted with an awful lot of text, especially if the text is small or it’s faint or has other issues with it, I simply cannot read through that text, so a widget to increase the text size or put it into a more accessible format for me is something that I find beneficial to me. I’m representative for nearly 10% of the whole population, certainly 5% and up…

Christian

I still don’t think that’s the problem of the site maintainer because then we’ll having millions of small widgets for everybody and everybody has to write a different one that fails in different ways,

Question

…or suits each site, you might need a widget for certain sites, but you might not need a widget for others, and once you’ve increased the size of the text or whatever the preference or the need is, then the message you want to give, I want to give and everybody wants to give of well this is how you use the browser to do this, can be given, you can the read the accessibility statement page.

Christian

The main need for widgets like that shows that there has been some stupid design decisions before that and so that’s why wher we should battle it. That’s a bit of a problem when you teach people as well and you have someone who is slow in learning what you want to teach them, a bad teacher will go there and just tell them and help them find it this time, rather than putting a bit more effort in to making that person find it on their own terms how to learn that. To me a widget problem like that is, we could do it for every page, first of all if there’s a need for it then they need to know that that’s a problem, that is another big problem that nobody complains or not many people complain about these issues or in user testing it doesn’t come up that much. That is my biggest concern about user testing is that people assume that 5 people are enough to say, this guy can’t use a mouse we are accessible now, it doesn’t work that way. But in general I think that these kinds of problems are of operating systems and browsers and not ours, I’m sick and tired of having to hack web standards because browsers don’t do it right and I’m sick and tired of having to find convoluted solutions to make assistive technology talk to browsers when it should be done by the people that create the operating systems and the browsers.

Question

The one think that really did irate me though was the Vidler example, about the little bits of text inside the flash video…

Christian

There you’re wrong because I had the same problem with Vidler, I was like why the hell would they put it in the flash movie, but they put it in the flash movie and on the page

Question

…they do but it’s still a problem; it’s not very easy to navigate on the page using those comments and that’s a problem…

Christian

But that’s not the point; the point is that you can read the whole video content before you start the video.

Question

… but those comments are very very small, I guess what I’m getting at is that although they’re useful to a certain crowd I don’t think there useful to aid accessibility, there actually probably more of a problem because once you’ve got a few of those comments all over the place it starts to become a bit of a jumble, a bit of a mess.

Christian

Well I guess they are 623.5% more usable than You Tube right now and the other video comments we have right now, so its about having the right content in there, yes I think people like Vidler and also the thing that I’ve built they’re very happy to get any input to make it better, and we’re actually working on some stuff as well and so does the BBC I guess. Its just one step, I love the way Vidler shows it as a cool little feature in the video for people to play with and at the same time it on the sly accumulates data that makes sense for anybody who cannot see that video and that’s the point I wanted to make with that, not that it’s 100% captioning or really really cool or a replacement for captioning but its actually making something look cool and at the same time a benefit for everybody not only the people that can play with the fancy interface.

Question

… I guess things have changed now there is an API for it.

Kath

Can I just make a quick point as I have the microphone; I think we need to be careful that we don’t spend to much time arguing about whose fault it is or who responsible because when that happens it always reminds me of when someone#s dropped one when there’s a dog in the room, you not what I mean, you either blame the dog or blame the people but what we should really be worrying about is how bad the smell is, rather than who can smell it worst.

Audience

[applause]

[ENDS]