Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Jay, I agree with your view on testing v/s user behavior. This is one of the things that I always highlight to my clients that accessibility is experiential and the user navigation and interaction behaviors must be kept in mind when building accessible systems. The problem traditionally as I have seen is that most companies and organizations are really looking for minimal compliance to guidelines and do not have keen interest in investing dollars on deeper aspects which empower people. Cheers Alok Jain http://www.iprincipia.com

So how do we reframe the issue so clients become disinterested in compliance and develop the interest in empowering both their clients, as well as themselves? In a similar vein, how do we break the idea of accessibility away from disabilities and explain it as part of creating a cost-effective, loosely coupled client-side software system that preserves value for their enterprise architecture?

"When is a true, live accessibility strategy going to matter to enterprise software companies?" Right, wrong or grey area, the answer to this one, with regards to resource efficiency obsessed commercial business, is simple. Companies will more fully embrace accessibility when embracing such a strategy has some clear gain or not doing so has a real risk of loss. In the case of loss, companies that want to develop for the U.S. govenment may risk some contracts for non-compliance. In the case of gain, clearly niche products that serve a particular market in need is one obvious area. More generally, it's conceiveable that sites designed for accessibility may be more portable by their nature, hence easier, (meaning less expensive), to port to multiple user-agents.

Scott, I think this is true if you're trying to sell Accessibility to the parent organization. However, if your accessibility becomes a byproduct of how you create interactive products (I'm thinking about the web here), then it's just icing on the cake. I was just re-reading one of Dan Brown's old wireframe articles, and he had a catchy turn of phrase I think applies here: if people are fighting over pie, make a bigger pie. In this sense, if they won't buy accessibility, sell something they will buy where accessibility is just a part of the package.

I'd be interested in reading this. But I am having a hard time understanding the train of thought. In my experience, accessibility is about making sure that people with disabilities can interface with the product and ingest the information. But making a site accessible does not necessarily make it useful or user-friendly. Making something user friendly is on us, the designers, not the software and how it generates code. Perhaps that’s the point you are trying to make and I just didn’t read it carefully enough. Again, very interesting topic, go for it! Cheers Andres

"In my experience, accessibility is about making sure that people with disabilities can interface with the product and ingest the information. But making a site accessible does not necessarily make it useful or user-friendly." Maybe true. Are you sure? What are we really talking about here in terms of accessibility? Chances are we're really mostly talking about sight-impaired or wholly non-sighted users. And it does seem true that making sites more accessible in this regard does involve some overhead. (Using image/text hiding/visibility techniques with CSS and so on.) As to your comment about accessiblity not necessarily being useful or friendly... Using CSS and truly structured content the way it's supposed to be, making an accessible site shouldn't HURT the primary design goals. Certainy accessibilty includes the simple reality of something like 100 million in the U.S. over age 40 and some vision degradation in large segments of the population. Glasses/contacts/laser notwithstanding, isn't it best to not used fixed fonts that can't be easily adjusted by a user? For that matter, you're also concerned about users increasingly upgrading to higher res monitors who may also have problems with fixed fonts. (Due to how graphics adapters and operating systems end up rendering them.) Beyond basic readability, deeper accessiblity in order to be readable by more esoteric user agents likely takes more effort. So how does expending this effort add enough value that development teams will expend the effort? Maybe... maybe it helps cut costs in an unknown future. (Which is admittedly a hard sell.) But think about it; accessiblity is essentially about making sure content elements are available to various user agents/devices that can in turn provide the content to people. (Or maybe meta data about elements to search tools.) In a world where new devices in all shapes and sizes are showing up every few months, you could make an argument that an accessible site is more likely to require less re-working to accommodate such devices. (Hey, I said it was a stretch. But at least you could argue - from a future cost/risk mitigation standpoint, that 1% - 3% more effort to achieve better accessiblity is a worthwhile upfront cost.)

"Using CSS and truly structured content the way it’s supposed to be" Vague enough to fall in Ezra Pound's category "if a writer uses terms vague enough to make you believe you may concur with him, don't concur". So, there is a way Css is supposed to be, and another it is not supposed to be: and yet the way it is supposed to be is murky enough to be not self evident (otherwise, why announcing such a differentation like something fit to haunt Css implementations?), and yet nonetheless the fact it is not self evident should be blamed not upon the procedure itself but imputed upon the alleged negligence of the developers. The way Css is supposed to be, but it is having hard times to be. Content, "truly" structured. Because there is structured content, but it is not truly so. Who decides? The blind, the dumb, the deaf? No, because this is predicated by one who sees, who understands, who hears. He decides. Or maybe, if the blind can understand, the dumb can hear, the deaf can see, it is truly structured. Or isn't it? Because if, on the contrary, via our "truly structured" Css "the way it is supposed to be" the blind can see, the dumb can understand, the deaf can hear, that's not "truly" structured css as it is "supposed to be" - that's Jesus Christ. It sounds like socialism with a human face: "if it is so difficult to give a human face to something, I don't want to have anything to do with it". If Css has a way it is supposed to be, and a way it is, the way it is should not be considered as implicit or surreptitious evidence against the developers, but as evidence against those who have made of css a fetich capable of surrogating where medicine fails (100 millions of americans can barely see, gee: do they have social assistance?) - at times in the name of making "accessible" to the utterly blind a blog about my experiences in a strip bar, and describe to him/her the pics. Css, the way it is supposed to be: a totem, and a taboo. Css the way it is supposed to be, that is: the Css that doesn't exist. "Truly structured css as it is supposed to be", ought to include parrots too if it wants to be true to the absolutist paradigm of "being truly". Miracles happens: Css, the only craft we have learned recently, empowers us to perform them. Some like it hot, some believe that, some sponsor it.

Hi All from Downunder :) I am disabled. Visually impaired (and getting worse - Multiple Sclerosis / Optic Neuritis) and a full time electric wheelchair user. I spend a large part of each day studying xomething or other and updating my web site )which caters for my own needs) - http://www.mswebpeople.com/ - always open to comment. It seems to me that General Accessibility - has a lot to do with "Can I read it, can I enlarge it? ......... From their it is a range of things, many of which are on the road ahead for me.