2009: The year websites become accessible to all

• Tags:
• Standards,
• W3C,
• Web Development,
• Accessibility

Bruce Lawson, Opera

Published: 21 Jan 2009 15:42 GMT

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

...by all the browsers, the main screen-reader manufacturers, and by JavaScript libraries such as Dojo, the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Library and, partially, jQuery.

Nate Koechley, a front-end engineer at Yahoo who works on YUI, agrees that 2009 could prove a tipping point: "Tools have caught up with trends, and Aria has answered Ajax. Also, the body of knowledge is now sufficient to do what needs doing".

Before Aria it was practically impossible to make Ajax applications accessible; now there is no reason or excuse not to.

Legal ramifications
The third factor at play here, as well as technical developments, is the legal side of accessibility. In the US, for example, an out-of-court settlement in California was paid by Target.com, in a case brought by the National Federation for the Blind. A lawsuit had been filed because the Target website, powered by Amazon, was coded in a way that made it inaccessible and therefore unusable by a blind shopper.

Target agreed to pay $6m (£4m) in settlement claims and to redevelop its website. While $6m is peanuts for the company, it is a huge amount for lots of smaller firms, all of which have spent the past few months either nervously checking their HTML or with their heads in the sand, exposing their posteriors to the lawyers.

The fourth factor raising the profile of accessibility is that the august British Standards Institution has just published the draft of its first British Standard for accessible websites [disclosure: I was member of the drafting committee]. While this is not law — the Disability Discrimination Act and associated guidance already refer to websites — British Standards are well-regarded in industry, both at home and abroad.

This guidance is not aimed not at developers — it simply refers them to the WCAG guidelines — but to the organisational owners of a website: the suits in marketing who want maximum exposure but don't have the technical knowledge to judge the competence of suppliers to deliver inclusive sites. It is open for public comments until 1 February, if you want a sneak preview.

Mobile accessibility
As more and more companies look at making sites that are compatible with mobile phones, developers will need to get out of the 'desktop only' mentality and become used to writing sites that can be accessed on non-traditional devices.

Sites that are accessible to disabled people are much more likely to be accessible to users on their handheld devices too — the W3C has published a mapping of the WCAG guidelines and mobile-web best practices that reveals just how far one reinforces the other.

In these difficult economic conditions, ignoring disabled people and the increasing number of older, less web-savvy people coming online — the 'silver surfers' — would seem foolish. In the US the number of internet users who are over 55 years old is about the same as those aged between 18 to 34, according to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Tesco and Legal & General have already seen significant business benefits from investing in accessibility.

There is every reason to develop accessible sites and more and more guidance on how to do it. 2009 will be the year that accessibility becomes mainstream, and the sites that get there first will be the ones that reap the rewards. You heard it here first.

Bruce Lawson works as an open-web-standards evangelist for Opera. He's been involved in standards and accessibility since 2002. The views expressed in this column are his own.

• 
• 
• 
• 

• Share this article:
• Digg
• Slashdot
• Del.ici.ous
• Stumble
• Reddit

• Most Recent
• Most Popular