+++E-Access Bulletin - Issue 113, May 2009.

A Headstar Publication. http://www.headstar.com/eab/ .

Sponsored by: Ford Motor Company ( http://www.ford.co.uk ).

Please forward this free bulletin to others (subscription details at the end). We conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard: http://www.headstar.com/ten/ .

++Special Notice: Building Perfect Council Websites '09- Accessibility On The Agenda At Headstar/Socitm Conference http://www.headstar-events.com/councilwebsites09/

Contents.

Accessibility of pdfs and online forms; and implementation of the new international web access guidelines WCAG 2.0 are among workshops on the programme at Building Perfect Council Websites '09.

The conference, now in its fifth year, is the major annual meeting for local authority web professionals - around 300 attended last year. Facilitators of our accessibility sessions include Ted Page of PWS, a leading accessibility expert who has worked extensively with the BBC.

A partnership between E-Government Bulletin and the Socitm Insight Programme, this unique event draws on the collected wisdom of ten years of Socitm's annual 'Better Connected' review of all UK council websites. Have a look at our website today to see the latest programme details, and book your place: http://www.headstar-events.com/councilwebsites09/

[Special notice ends].

++Section One: News.

Contents.

+01: Analyst Urges New Approach To Technology Inclusion.

Technology designers should move away from providing add-on 'accessibility' tools for people with disabilities towards designing with all users in mind from the outset, technology broadcaster and analyst Bill Thompson told delegates at Headstar's E-Access '09 conference ( http://www.headstar-events.com/eaccess09 ).

Instead of thinking about accessibility as a separate design aspect, designers should consider the concept of 'affordance', defined as what a technology can allow all users to do, whatever their abilities, Thompson said in his keynote address.

"After all, technology is there to mediate between us and the world, and all technology is about changing, enhancing or correcting our bare capabilities to allow new things to be possible.How many of you can see the moons of Jupiter with your naked eye, or run at 80 miles an hour? The additive power of technology is as true of the telescope and the car as it is of the internet."

A focus on 'affordance' would lead to a more flexible approach that would help everyone bridge skills gaps, he said. "Affordances matter equally to the 'abled' as to the 'disabled', and so the same design methods can be used, and outcomes can be evaluated in a much broader way. This allows us to start to move away from the current model, in which we have 'assistive' technologies to overcome 'deficits' that make some users 'abnormal', to one in which we all have skills and abilities that vary along a large number of axes."

Moving technology companies towards such a change in approach might require incentives, Thompson said, but these need not be negative, such as imposing a tax on failure. Instead, "We could nudge them to do the right thing by offering benefits and tax breaks for those whose choices are more in line with this point of view, perhaps limiting access to government support services, guaranteed bank loans and the other benefits that businesses are currently calling for to those who will offer tools, sites and services that can be used by all taxpayers and not just those with 20/20 vision and high levels of manual dexterity", he said.

Ultimately, everyone would gain, Thomson said. "We've taken the easy path so far, but I would speculate that interfaces designed for all will not only be more usable by mainstream adopters, they will be more powerful. And they will unleash a wave of creativity not only from those of us who are already well served but from the millions upon millions who are currently excluded."

For a full edited transcript of the speech, see section three, this issue, or see our EAB Live blog: http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=287

+02: Accessibility 'Not Fringe Issue' For It Purchasing.

Accessibility to people with disabilities should be a primary factor driving IT purchasing decisions within the public sector, a leading expert in the field told Headstar's e-Access 09 conference. Sean Smith, who leads on accessibility policy within HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), told delegates: "Disability is not just a fringe issue. What we have now is going to be here for many years to come, so we've got to work hard at making sure that what we buy is accessible."

In a large organisation with thousands of staff and providing hundreds of online services, it is far cheaper to ensure systems are accessible at the outset than to make changes later, Smith said. "Cost is an increasingly important facet. We have a large number of staff, around 170,000 pages of content and 100-200 online services, so whenever we have to make a change, it's expensive and we have to make sure we get our priorities right."

Smith said procurement should be used as a method of bringing about change in the IT industry, by influencing suppliers to make their products more accessible. HMRC chairs the Business Taskforce on Accessible Technology (BTAT), an organisation formed by the influential body representing both public and private sector organisations, the Employers' Forum on Disability. "We are, fundamentally, just a buyer of software, but within the business taskforce we can use our combined commercial power to influence the industry to make more accessible products."

As well as compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), there are genuine business and financial gains to be had from incorporating an accessible approach to IT, such as better retention of staff and more efficient service provision, Smith said. "Yes of course we want to be DDA compliant, but there's a lot more to it than that. We also see, fundamentally, that there's an absolutely solid business case in making systems accessible and usable."

Note: This story first appeared in our sister publication, E-Government bulletin. You comment on it now, at: http://www.headstar.com/egblive/?p=216

+03: Call For Tougher European Access Laws.

A more solid European legal foundation is needed to enforce technology accessibility, a leading software expert from Yahoo! told E-Access 09.

Artur Ortega, 'accessibility evangelist' at Yahoo! Europe, said that ensuring more accessible products were developed would be a challenge, but that a legal basis for accessibility would actually impact positively on suppliers.

"At the moment, we can only preach accessibility, because there's no legal requirement as such. If more and more countries get a legal foundation for it, I think the IT industry would say - okay, it's a requirement, we're going to [uphold] it."

This would ultimately improve product design and lower costs, Ortega said

Nina Warburton, director of design consultancy Alloy ( http://www.thealloy.com/ ), urged an end to over-complicated design for everyday products such as mobile phones, saying all technology should be intuitive, comfortable and easy-to-use. Although numerous products are created with the intention of making life easier, for many users - including those with disabilities - the opposite is often the case, she said.

"Inclusive design is just good design - it's as simple as that. We need to make inclusive design the mainstream."

And you can comment on this story now, on EAB Live: http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=290

++News in Brief:

Contents.

+04: Skill Share:

Assistance with digital skills should be offered to those with disabilities via a nationally co-ordinated volunteer network, delegates heard at the National Digital Inclusion Conference, hosted by UK Online Centres and DC10plus. One conference workstream worked on drafting a digital inclusion manifesto, to be published in the summer: http://fastlink.headstar.com/diginc2 .

+05: Orator Correction:

Contrary to our report last issue, the Orator - a text-to-speech screenreader for BlackBerry phones - has not yet been released. The device is still in 'pre-alpha' stage, and an alpha version will be showcased at the US National Federation for the Blind convention in July: http://fastlink.headstar.com/blackberry1 .

+06: Techshare Call:

A request for papers has been announced for Techshare 2009. Hosted by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), the London event, on 16-18 September, will explore how digital technologies can support people with disabilities. Anyone wishing to submit a paper should contact the RNIB before 15 May: http://www.techshare.org.uk .

[Section One ends].

++Sponsored Notice: Adept Transcription- Alternative Formats At Affordable Prices.

Contents.

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[Sponsored Notice ends].

++Section Two: 'The Inbox'- Readers' Forum.

Contents.

Please email all contributions or responses to: inbox@headstar.com .

+07: Foolish Moves:

Richard Morton of consultants Accessible Web Design has contributed online to our ongoing debate over whether publishers should be allowed to disable the text-to-speech function on electronic book readers (see http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=244 ).

"Although I can see the arguments from both sides, it seems foolish for publishers to object to the text-to-speech facilities," Richard says. "They may well have a legitimate case, but the negative publicity generated will be bad for everyone.

"As has been pointed out, synthesised speech is not of the same quality as, say, Stephen Fry's voice and is unlikely to be so in the near future. My money is on the publishers giving in eventually, and probably trying to claim the moral high ground."

+08: E-Book Lament:

On a related theme, regular reader and stand-up comedian Chris McCausland writes in to lament "the complete inaccessibility of the world of e-books."

He writes: "Despite PDF files being accessible in Adobe Reader, the protected PDF formats via Adobe Digital Editions are completely inaccessible to screen-reader users. This seems a bit silly as electronic text is surely the way to make hundreds of thousands of previously inaccessible texts accessible to blind people.

"This inaccessibility is also something that is not advertised, mentioned or even alluded to on the Adobe website or any of the sites of the e-book retailers.

"I am still in the middle of quite possibly the worst case of customer services I have ever experienced, from both Random House and an American company called ebooks.com. Despite the book I purchased being a Random House publication and the book being purchased through a link on their site to the third party retailer, Random House refuse to even look into the accessibility issues on their e-books and see if the security settings can be manipulated to allow screen-reader access.

"On the other hand ebooks.com seem to have the policy of putting their fingers in their ears and two months on from the purchase, I still don't even have a refund from them. It seems to be the biggest case of legal inaccessibility to information, next to the touch-screen. It is driving me insane!"

+09: Moodle Mission:

Rachel Ethier Rosenbaum, president of the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, Massachusetts and an "avid reader" of E-Access Bulletin, writes in seeking advice on accessible use of the e-learning platform Moodle, for an exciting new project.

In 2003, she writes, the Carroll Center began providing courses over the internet on how to use Microsoft's workplace applications such as Internet Explorer, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word for blind people using screen-readers and for the partially sighted using magnifiers.

"Then in 2004, we discovered that the Washington State School for the Blind in Vancouver, Washington was also developing online courses, so we formed a consortium in order to avoid duplication, share ideas and agree on a priority list for future course development."

Rachel continues: "As time went on, it became apparent that what was really needed was standards on accessibility and usability, so that programmers and web-developers would have reliable guidelines to create (or amend) web pages that do not inadvertently "lock out" the blind users by the nature of their designs.

"In 2006 a formal consortium was formed, now called CANnect. In 2007 we adopted Moodle - which we initially heard about through E- Access Bulletin - as our learning management platform.

"We are currently porting all of our existing courses over to Moodle, and will be using the software exclusively for future course development. We are now seeking other organisations or individual programmers who have already started tweaking Moodle to create more accessibility and usability for blind/visually impaired users, so we can learn from you and perhaps interest you in using CANnect to post your already-developed courses.

"If you are that person or are aware of such an organisation, please email our executive director, Cheryl Edmonds on Cheryl.edmonds@cannect.org . We are really eager to learn about your efforts."

[Editor's note: if you do respond to Cheryl, please copy us on at inbox@headstar.com so we can report back on progress to our readers.]

+10: Chair Talk:

Julie Howell, director of accessibility at web designers Fortune Cookie and former chair of a committee developing a British Standard on web accessibility [BS8878], writes in to respond to comments made in last issue's Inbox by Gustaw Kon, who questioned the reasons behind Julie's recent decision to step down as committee chair.

She writes: "After six years working on the development of PAS 78 [the 'publicly available specification' that is precursor to the standard] and then BS 8878, I felt it was the right time for me to step aside and give another member of the committee the opportunity to lead the progression of this crucial work.

"I was extremely pleased to be the founder chair of [the British Standards technical committee on accessibility] IST/45, and am very satisfied that my contribution in putting the committee together gives the new standard the very best chance of success. I have complete confidence that under the acting-chairmanship of Jonathan Hassell, the committee will continue to succeed in its aims."

[Further comments please to inbox@headstar.com].

[Section Two ends].

++Special Notice: Fortune Cookie- Web Sites That Really Work.

Contents.

Fortune Cookie's dedicated web accessibility team makes sure that everyone finds the web sites we design easy to use. As well as being accessible, Fortune Cookie sites are beautiful and deliver stunning return-on-investment. They're award-winning too. In 2007, our work was nominated for major web design awards 11 times.

Legal & General, Kuoni, Diabetes UK, FT Business - just some of the big name brands on Fortune Cookie's client list.

Every business can benefit from making its web site more accessible. If you'd like to know what accessibility can do for your business, talk to Fortune Cookie.

Visit our web site at: http://www.fortunecookie.co.uk

Julie Howell is our Director of Accessibility. Email Julie at: Julie.Howell@fortunecookie.co.uk .

[Special notice ends].

++Section Three Opinion

Contents.

+11: Accessibility Versus Affordance

[Editor's Note: The following is an edited transcript of Bill Thompson's keynote speech to E-Access '09, Headstar's annual conference on access to technology by people with disabilities.]

Unasking The right Questions

By Bill Thompson.

Accessibility has always been an issue for information and communications technologies, but for most of the 60 or so years we've had stored-program digital computers, it was a secondary consideration.

Getting physical access to early computers like EDSAC and ATLAS involved being in the right room in the right city at the right time, whether or not you were a wheelchair user or had poor vision.

When the number of people with easy and affordable access to the new technologies of desktop computers, network access and online publishing tools was relatively small, accessibility for those who needed special provision could be handled using one-off solutions, often built by those concerned since they were technical themselves.

Over the years this has led us to design systems for the majority and then adapt them to work for those who are somehow different, and we keep thinking about 'accessibility' and 'usability' as separate, almost orthogonal aspects of design. Unfortunately, this remains the dominant model, and it has now become a barrier to future progress because it encourages designers to think about creating tools and services for the 'normal' population before considering accessibility.

We need to change this approach, and to move away from solving the 'problem' of accessibility to a view of design in which it stops meriting separate consideration.

We need to stop giving designers the opportunity to talk about 'accessibility', and instead collapse the distinction that is causing us so much trouble.

Instead of thinking about 'access' at one end and 'usability' at another, we should attempt to recast our debate in terms of what technology does for all of us, not just those whose have 'special' requirements.

After all, technology is there to mediate between us and the world, and all technology is about changing, enhancing or correcting our bare capabilities to allow new things to be possible, transforming the otherwise inaccessible and unperceivable into sense data, or subjecting the physical world to the influence of enhanced motor skills.

How many of you can see the moons of Jupiter with your naked eye, or run at 80-miles-an-hour?

The additive power of technology is as true of the telescope and the car as it is of the internet. Technologies sit between us and the world and allow us to perceive it more intimately, measure it more precisely, influence it with greater precision and scope, and reach out to others without concern for distance or - in many cases - language.

They do that for us all, irrespective of our capabilities. But different technologies offer different affordances, depending on where we encounter them and - most importantly - our own capabilities. We can only use a telescope to see the craters of the moon if we have adequate vision, though of course interpreting the data from a radio telescope does not necessarily require this.

We have too often been content to build technologies which only serve to enhance the capabilities of the 'modally-abled', those whose physical and cognitive abilities cluster around the modal value for modern humans. We clearly disregard those whose abilities are much lower than the norm, but also tend to forget those who may be better - they tend to cope, of course, and do not usually ask for special attention.

So how should we frame our debate if we move beyond what I think is a dangerous attempt to retain the distinction between 'usability' and 'accessibility'? I think it is time to explore the idea of 'affordance', as it could offer us a way forward.

Bill Gaver, Professor of Design at Goldsmiths College, has an interesting take on this. In a 1996 paper, he wrote: "Affordances go beyond value-free physical descriptions of the environment by expressing environmental attributes relative to humans. For example, the physical measure of height, which has no inherent meaning, can be recast in terms of the affordance of accessibility, which does. Because accessibility emerges from the relation between elevation and people's physical characteristics, it is an objective fact about a situation."

The idea of accessibility - here used to mean whether a shelf or window can be reached - as something which emerges from a relationship between a technology and a user is one we might build on in our attempt to reconcile the usability-driven design approach and our concern over whether people can use specific technologies.

The key is the interaction between the technology and what it offers and the ability of the user actually to make use of that offer, as it allows us to sketch out a model of augmented capability that covers all of us, not just those who might be classified as 'disabled' in some way.

If we start to frame the issues facing users whose capabilities deviate from the norm in terms of affordances rather than simply of accessibility, this might free us from the 'modal totalitarianism' that infects so much design, whether in products like screens and keyboards or on-screen in websites, widgets and services.

Affordances matter equally to the 'abled' as to the 'disabled', and so the same design methods can be used, and outcomes can be evaluated in a much broader way. This allows us to start to move away from the current model, in which we have 'assistive' technologies to overcome 'deficits' that make some users 'abnormal', to one in which we all have skills and abilities that vary along a large number of axes.

This is going to be very important in the near future, as those of us who first encountered digital technologies when we were young and able- bodied, begin to age. I wear glasses to read from the screen, and I know that my high-frequency hearing has been damaged by years of gigs and loud music in headphones.

I can feel my cognitive abilities going, and can see a world where I will be, as Shakespeare might have put it, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans keyboard, and in the near future I will need assistive technologies even more.

If we think differently about design and consider issues of accessibility in terms of affordances, then we may move closer to another goal - that of exposing and understanding the impacts of the negative 'externalities' of unusable sites and services.

To an economist, externalities are effects on parties that are not directly involved in a transaction, such as the impact of a polluting factory on the health of non-employees in the surrounding area. The costs of the transaction do not therefore reflect its full costs or benefits, once these externalities are taken into account. Externalities can be positive, such as the network effect that comes from more and more people using an online service, or negative.

By and large, businesses will try to bring more of the positive externalities in-house - we might see battles over copyright as an attempt by rights-holders to internalise all the benefits of creative reuse - but keep negative externalities away, and off their balance sheet.

A more integrated approach to design, however, one that classes all users as equal and equally deserving of service, could make it harder for those who disregard the needs of the non-modal population to treat the costs as an externality to be met by extra funding, charitable engagement or personal expenditure on assistive technology. And by bringing the costs back to those who have given us this world of dysfunctional technology, we might persuade even the accountants and management consultants who have for so long disregarded the needs of anyone outside the mainstream, that there are sound financial reasons for becoming more inclusive.

We would not even need to tax them to achieve this (though this would be one approach): we could nudge them to do the right thing by offering benefits and tax breaks for those whose choices are more in line with this point of view, perhaps limiting access to government support services, guaranteed bank loans and the other benefits that businesses are currently calling for, to those who will offer tools, sites and services that can be used by all taxpayers and not just those with 20/20 vision and high levels of manual dexterity.

The transition from the current approach, which we could call modal oligarchy, to one of design for all, will not be easy. Those of us within one standard deviation of the mean may worry that elegant tools and desirable products that 'just work' will no longer be available, that innovation will be limited and that we will have to work harder to get what we want from websites.

But no user interface is intuitive, no keyboard obvious, no website 'natural'. Just as learning language rewires the human brain, so learning how to use network computers requires us to link old skills in new ways. We've taken the easy path so far, but I would speculate that interfaces designed for all will not only be more usable by mainstream adopters, they will be more powerful.

And they will unleash a wave of creativity not only from those of us who are already well served but from the millions upon millions who are currently excluded.

If we believe in the transforming power of these new technologies, if we want the network revolution to succeed, and if we desire the best and brightest to join us in this brave new world, then we need to ensure that the barriers to access are removed at all levels. That means campaigning to bring down all of the digital divides, not just the one between rich and poor but between the majority of users for whom most technology is designed and those of us whose capabilities lie more than one standard deviation from the mode.

The conversations taking place at this conference, e-Access '09, are part of that process, but I think it is time to push for something more. I think that this should be the last e-access conference. Next year I hope to see you all here for e-affordance 2010.

[Section three ends].

And you can comment on this story now, on EAB Live: http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=287

[Section Three ends].

++Special Notice: Web Accessibility Forum.

Contents.

Accessify Forum is a discussion forum devoted to all topics relating to web accessibility. Topics cover everything from 'Beginners' and 'Site building and testing' through to projects such as the new accessibility testing tool WaiZilla and the accessibility of the open source forum software itself.

All you need to register is a working email address, so come along and join in the fun at: http://www.accessifyforum.com .

[Special notice ends].

++End Notes.

Contents.

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