Comments on: Web 2.0 vs Accessibility

By: Steve Dale

Steve Dale — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:57:42 +0000

Sharon,
thanks for sharing this – and you’re right, accessibility has far wider cohort than the visually impaired. In fact, I have a meeting later this month with someone who wants to set up an online community of practice for those with learning disabilities. This is breaking new ground for me, and I’m anxious to understand more about the needs of this particular group. Whether I’ll be able to meet these needs remains to be seen, but I do want to make the opportunities available through social networking/social media websites as inclusive as I possibly can.

Steve

By: Sharon

Sharon — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 09:27:02 +0000

What’s also interesting is the rise of sites that people with disabilities use that are anything but accessibility compliant. Take SecondLife for example – there have been a few reports over the past year about people using it to both raise awareness of their disability and also to have an avator on an equal playing field with others. Accessibility shouldn’t just be about vision-impaired…

By: Steve Dale

Steve Dale — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:51:24 +0000

Robin,

Thanks for the comments. I agree, and note that the Public Sector Forums have had a lots to say about this recently.

One example of my particular problem is that users are asking for support of tables in wikis – yet if I implement this feature I’m causing accessibility problems. I’ll probably go ahead with the change, but seems there will always be this dichotomy between functionality and accessibility.

By: Robin Cannon

Robin Cannon — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:22:45 +0000

There’s an excellent article highlighting a number of the accessibility problems of social media sites in this month’s .NET magazine also.

Given how poorly defined Web 2.0 is – and to be honest I see it as no more than natural evolution of technology rather than something genuinely “new”, I don’t really see that accessibility should be any greater problem than it has in the past. I think part of the problem is the rush towards “new exciting flashy stuff” at the expense of genuine functionality – given that Flash is only now really achieving any kind of improved accessibility, the chances of new applications that are being integrated into a lot of ‘Web 2.0′ material having accessibility as a concern are low.

That being said, in relation to your work with government, having done a lot of work with public sector in the UK myself, both local and national, it’s amazing how often they themselves fail to adhere to even the most basic accessibiltiy guidelines. Even being wedded to W3C’s actually quite antiquated 1.0 standards in terms of their demands, its amazing how many government sites fail the most simple tests even with material that should have no difficulty being presented in an accessible way.