So how do you know which badge to pick? What is the actual value of these badges to the organisations that buy them, and to the disabled people who use their sites?

These are questions I get regularly asked by my clients, so here’s a guide for how to choose the best accessibility accreditation for your website.

1. Why is there more than one accreditation badge?

Yes, there are lots of badges to choose from.

While WCAG 2.0’s level A, AA and AAA badges are close to a de-facto Standard for accreditation, many organisations that carry out accessibility audits soon become aware of the limitations of WCAG’s conformance levels and come up with their own-brand accreditation badges as a value-add for clients, based on their own experience.

In the UK most major organisations that offer accessibility audits have their own badge: DAC’s Accreditation, Shaw Trust’s Accreditation, RNIB See It Right and Surf Right badges and RNIB logo standard with UseAbility.

Accreditation in the United States happens somewhat differently, with VPAT certificates of compliance with Section 508 guidelines often the result of accessibility audits.

And, in December 2012, the Hong Kong Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) launched a Web Accessibility Recognition scheme, which encourages local businesses, NGOs and academia to apply for a free accessibility audit and award of accessibility accreditation badges at new Gold and Silver levels that they have defined.

Unless harmonization occurs in the accessibility audit market, there’s likely to be more, not less, options for accessibility accreditation in the future.

So, when you’re choosing an organisation to audit and accredit your site, ask them the strengths and limitations of the benefits that their badge will bring to you, as well as the costs.  And choose the badge that gives you your preferred balance of costs and benefits.

While costs are easy to assess, benefits are harder. You’ll need to consider two dimensions of benefit:

• value to you – the company owning the website; and
• value to the disabled and elderly users of your website

2. Does the badge bring value to the company owning the website?

Accessibility conformance badges make organisations feel more secure about accessibility.

Chances are you’re interested in a badge because you feel it gives you some sort of external, independent proof and public recognition that you’ve achieved a particular level of accessibility.

If you’re investing in an accessibility audit, you might as well pay a bit more for a badge that summarises the results of that audit in a simple way you can share with your users.

All such badges promise this, other than the WCAG 2.0 conformance badges and Section 508 VPATs whose value has tended to become debased because, unlike other badges, you can award them to your own products, rather than have to pay someone else to do the testing and accreditation for you.

This sense of security is valuable, especially for your organisation’s reputation management and PR. Displaying the results of having tested against a set of accessibility metrics tends to prove your statements declaring the website’s commitment to accessibility have actually achieved good results that have been independently verified by an reputable auditor.

But part of this sense of security is also potentially misplaced. Having a badge doesn’t necessarily mean your site is usable by disabled people. It won’t guarantee you won’t get sued under discrimination legislation, or save you from having to deal with accessibility complaints from disabled users via email, twitter or Facebook.

So, when you’re choosing an organisation to audit and accredit your site, ask for details on how their audit and badge is going to give you the level of accessibility security that you desire (and are willing to pay for).

3. Does the badge bring value to the user using the website?

It’s more important for a website to be usable and an experience that users would want to repeat than to have a badge put on it.

In my experience, once the user has arrived at a website they will work out pretty quickly whether the site is accessible to their needs.

The presence of a badge on the site doesn’t really help. On the contrary, if a disabled person can’t use your website, but sees a badge on it, that person is likely to become confused and annoyed – they know they aren’t getting a good experience, but some organisation out there that claims to speak on their behalf has said they should be.

What is useful is the testimonial aspect of the badge. To give an example: if I were a disabled person in Hong Kong and I was looking for an online retailer, what would really help me would be the equivalent of a price comparison website that informed me of the accessibility badges that various competitor retailers had achieved. I’d then be able to see which was the most accessible, and use that information to help me decide which websites I would want to visit.

Accessibility badges are more like a Which? Product Review or Kitemark – the mark is of little value when you’ve already bought the product (or, in this case, visited the website); you need it when you are choosing which of the products that are available (websites to visit) will be most suitable for your particular set of needs and preferences.

So, when you’re choosing an organisation to audit and accredit your site, ask whether they will add a link to your site to a directory of sites they have accredited (like DAC’s Accredited Sites Directory or RNIB’s Accessible Website Directory) and ask how well they promote that directory.

If the Hong Kong government wishes to “show appreciation to businesses and organizations for making their websites accessible” they should create an accessible directory of the sites they accredit, as this would be a useful guide for the disabled people the government wishes to help, and will help drive disabled people to the sites that have done the work to gain the ‘Gold’ level.

After all, ‘gaining more users’ is a much more tangible reward than ‘appreciation’.

Of course, the creation of one directory that amalgamated details of all accredited websites in each country, whichever accreditation badge they achieved, would be even more useful for users and organisations.

Such a directory wouldn’t be difficult to create, and – based on the limited number of organisations that have taken the trouble to get their websites accredited so far – wouldn’t currently be that difficult to maintain.

However, the value of such an amalgamated directory to users is constrained by one complicating factor – with so many different badges being used, will users be able to work out what each badge means?

4. What does the badge actually mean? – what were the testing metrics

The most important ‘meaning’ of a badge is the testing that it summarises. Its value is totally dependent on the value of the metrics being tested against.

Different badges differ in the checkpoints (usually known as ‘success criteria’) that sites are tested against:

• WCAG 2.0 A, AA and AAA badges are awarded for conformance with WCAG 2.0’s success criteria, which are allocated to different conformance levels.
• Many other badges are effectively critiques of the relative importance of the various success criteria that make up the different WCAG 2.0 levels, and WCAG’s insistence that sites achieve all success criteria at a given level. For example: the Hong Kong Scheme’s Gold badge includes a mixture of some WCAG 2.0 AA and some WCAG 2.0 AAA checkpoints. This is no doubt based – as are the metrics behind other badges – on the views and experience of those who set up the scheme on which checkpoints really matter to disabled people, and which may be too costly to implement in practice.

Secondly, badges differ in whether testing is done solely by experts, or includes some testing by disabled users:

• Some badges just test the technical accessibility of sites – such as general WCAG 2.0 audits and RNIB See It Right and Surf Right badges. However, as any accessibility specialist worth their salt, and recent academic research, can tell you, WCAG 2.0 audits can miss numerous problems that disabled people experience with web pages.
• Thankfully, an increasing number of badges – such as JISC TechDis Accessibility Passport, DAC’s Accreditation, Shaw Trust’s Accreditation and RNIB’s logo standard with UseAbility - also include user-testing by people with disabilities, to test whether or not good technical accessibility results in usable experiences for disabled and elderly people.

So, when you’re choosing an organisation to audit and accredit your site, ask what success criteria they will audit against, and whether they will include any user-testing with people with disabilities.

5. What does the badge actually mean? – transparency and ease of understanding

The second important aspect of the ‘meaning’ of a badge is whether disabled people can easily understand if the badge will predict whether a site will work for their particular needs.

While disabled people may be interested in how well a website meets the needs of all disabled people, they are much more likely to be interested in whether it will meet their own particular needs.

And this is where almost all badges fall down.

Different groups of disabled people have very many different needs from each other. So, ideally, a useful badge would indicate clearly whether a site is suitable for a particular group’s needs.

Unfortunately, no badge that I know of does this, other than JISC TechDis’ accessibility passport for eLearning resources, which includes information on how accessible a resource is for people with different types of disability.

WCAG 2.0 conformance levels and all other accessibility badges mix up the success criteria that different disabled groups are particularly sensitive to. This means disabled people need to understand which success criteria are particularly important to their needs, and then work out what level each accreditation scheme assigns those success criteria to.

This means it is essential for accessibility accreditation badges to be transparent about what they mean.

DAC’s clickable accreditation badges (for example: see the DAC accredited badge at the bottom of the WY Metro Accessibility page) that link to a Certificate of Accreditation explaining what was tested, and when, is a good start.

Ideally such certificates would also include more details of the success criteria tested, with any deficiencies in the site’s accessibility – arranged by disability/impairment – clearly and simply highlighted, as recommended in BS 8878’s advice on How to Write an Effective Accessibility Statement.

So, when you’re choosing an organisation to audit and accredit your site, ask what mechanisms they will provide for disabled people to easily understand how the badge will predict whether a site will work for their particular needs.

Final thoughts – will the Hong Kong scheme impact accreditation more widely?

The Hong Kong government scheme is a bold and interesting initiative, and could be a great chance for its web industry to move forwards in its understanding and implementation of accessibility and inclusive design.

It will be useful in the future to see what the results of the scheme are:

• Whether free audit and accreditation results in more accessible sites in Hong Kong.
• Whether there are lessons that can be shared with other governments considering doing something similar.
• What impact (if any) it has on other organisations that provide accreditation services.

I’ll certainly be tracking what information they release later this year.

Need help?

If you need any help in deciding what accessibility accreditation is right for your organisation, or whether user-testing will be needed to bring you the peace of mind regarding your site’s accessibility that you desire, please contact us, and we’ll be delighted to help you.

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• It’s finally become ratified as an international Standard (ISO/IEC 40500:2012)
• It’s been directly included in legislation such as the EU proposed directive on accessibility of public websites, Canada’s AODA, and work going into the refresh of US Section 508
• At the same time it’s had its value questioned by academic research, and the achievability of its AAA level questioned by a number of voices in the accessibility community (building on articles from as far back as 2006 that accuse WCAG 2.0 of being ‘unrealistic and unproven’)
• Calls for it to be updated are also becoming louder and louder (from WebAIM and the PDF/UA community, amongst others)
• And frameworks like BS 8878, in which WCAG 2.0 can be more successfully integrated with the practicalities of real-world web product development, are gaining support in the commercial world and in the academic world

So, for 2013, I thought it was time to summarise WCAG 2.0′s strengths and weaknesses, what strengths other national standards have that it may lack, and what will be needed to make it a much better ‘harmonised Standard’ for the future.

Here’s a menu of the aspects of WCAG 2.0 that we’re going to consider:

• the strengths and weaknesses of having harmonised accessibility Standards
• the strengths and weaknesses of WCAG 2.0’s success criteria
• the strengths and weaknesses of WCAG 2.0’s conformance levels
• the strengths and weaknesses of WCAG 2.0’s stability and static-ness
• where WCAG should go next, and what needs to support it to become a full solution rather than the partial solution it is now

Strengths and weaknesses of having harmonised accessibility Standards

I’d agree with the W3C that there are many benefits that can be achieved by harmonization of accessibility Standards globally:

“Formal approval by JTC 1 of WCAG 2.0 will increase deployment, reduce fragmentation, and provide all users with greater interoperability on the web.” (W3C)

“Such recognition is expected to increase internationally harmonized uptake of WCAG 2.0 by governments, business, and the broader Web community.” (Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO)

“We also expect that ISO/IEC recognition will encourage greater convergence around WCAG 2.0, further driving development of supporting tools and software.” (Karen Higginbottom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1)

The claims that harmonizing around WCAG 2.0 is likely to increase WCAG 2.0’s current poor uptake – addressing one of the critiques in Power et al’s research paper earlier this year – are well founded. And this will allow WAI to make more progress in their ‘carrot and stick’ work to encourage adoption:

• governments globally will be more able easily to place WCAG 2.0 in legislation;
• more uptake may allow WAI to provide more business cases of the benefits of accessibility to organisations– so far they have only managed to persuade a few to quote any ROI figures (although the OneVoice report in the UK is another useful source of case studies)

But the most important question that seems to have been glossed over is: what affect will that have on the accessibility of websites worldwide?

Because none of their quotes claim that making WCAG 2.0 an International Standard will actually improve disabled & elderly people’s experience of using websites worldwide, that WCAG 2.0 are the right (or only) Standards that should be harmonised around, or that wiping out existing non-WCAG Standards won’t also involve losing useful insights.

So is WCAG 2.0 a great set of guidelines to harmonise around?

Strengths and weaknesses of WCAG 2.0 success criteria

In general, each of WCAG 2.0’s individual success criterion is very useful.

From my experience of using them with website creation teams, there’s a couple of obvious improvements that can be made:

• each success criterion would be more useful if it gave an idea of which disabled audiences would benefit from conforming with the criterion, and a rough idea of how much it might cost to conform to it
• the criteria could also be made easier to read, and it would be useful to structure them via job-roles so it’s easy to know which member of a website creation team needs to deal with each criterion

The main weaknesses, however, are WCAG 2.0’s incompleteness and lack of future-proofing.

The Uni of York paper found that numerous problems that disabled people experience with web pages are not covered by WCAG 2.0. This is certainly true, especially for the needs of people with cognitive, learning and literacy difficulties – disabled groups that were under-represented in the creation of WCAG 2.0.

So, covering more problems than WCAG 2.0 currently addresses could potentially improve WCAG, if it’s to be used on its own to improve accessibility.

However the paper’s assertion that ‘we must address all the problems that disabled people find on web pages’ is over-stated, as the variety of disabilities that people have, and the interaction of those disabilities with those people’s length of experience in using the web, means that it may be impossible to address all problems.

Moreover, it’s debatable whether many of the missing success criteria to address those missing problems are accessibility or usability issues.

I agree with WAI that including all potential website usability problems, whether shared by disabled and non-disabled people or not, in a notional future WCAG may not be the answer.

But the distinction between ‘issues that block access or interfere with access to the Web more severely for people with disabilities’ and ‘general usability issues’ can be rather murky, especially for WCAG 2.0′s very useful success criteria on error conditions for forms and headings (see Roger Hudson’s great blog on ‘the absurd distinctions that are sometimes made about the usability and accessibility of web content’).

So, if it’s not totally clear which issues should be allowed in WCAG 2.0 and which shouldn’t, I think it’s important to be clear that conformance with WCAG isn’t the only thing website creators need to do to make sure their sites work for disabled and elderly people.

And it’s important to be clear that WCAG is never going to be complete or future-proof. The web is too fast-moving for web guidelines to ever be complete. WAI did a great job attempting to make WCAG 2.0 technology agnostic, but they didn’t future-proof it with regard to mobile/tablet sites.

But it’s also important for WCAG to at least try and keep up with technology. As Richard Morton contributed on linkedin:

“I would also say that unless the WCAG 2.0 guidelines are updated to remove some of the anomalies, and make it fit for purpose with the changes to the web scene over the past few years since it was released (e.g. much more mobile/touch based access, responsive websites, apps), then it could create more problems, and result in a backwards step.”

If the aim of accessibility is to give a great web experience to all people, including those who are older or who have disabilities – which is how WCAG 2.0’s proponents are selling it - WCAG 2.0’s success criteria will need to be frequently updated, because currently it just isn’t enough to do that.

And it needs to balance how often it gets updated to become more relevant, true and complete, with ensuring its slow-moving enough to give website creators a target they can hit.

Strengths and weaknesses of WCAG 2.0 conformance levels

While I’m a great fan of WCAG 2.0’s success criteria, I can’t say the same for its conformance levels.

The idea of conformance levels is definitely attractive:

• it gives website creators an idea of the importance of complying with each individual success criteria;
• it gives websites a means of ‘badging’ their level of conformance, which is also very useful for regulators and legislators

However, the implementation is fundamentally flawed.

Assignment of the level to each success criteria

Let’s start with the assignment of levels A, AA and AAA to each success criteria.

This is currently flawed as a practical tool for helping website creators prioritise their accessibility work, as the levels don’t take into account two important aspects of modern website creation:

• the vast variety of purposes of a website – especially for media-rich and user generated/social content
• the cost-benefits of each success criterion

To give the simplest example of the problem of purpose:

• Criterion 1.2.5 requires all pre-recorded video content to be enriched with audio description. What this means is that for a site that includes video to achieve AA it needs to include audio description on all its pre-recorded video. So, for example, a user-generated video sharing site like YouTube could never achieve AA without requiring all of its users to include that audio description themselves. So YouTube’s owners would need to change the site’s purpose, or decide that WCAG 2.0 AA isn’t worth bothering with. To deprive websites of using video and social media because of unreasonable accessibility constraints is the type of bad guidance that enables web developers to claim ‘accessibility is anti-creative‘.

And here’s a simple example of the problem of cost-benefits:

• The number of people who benefit from captions being provided for video content is huge, and the cost is reasonable. Comparatively, the number of people who benefit from audio description (or an ‘alternative’ to video) is very small, and the cost is large. And yet none of this essential information is mentioned in the success criteria, and both are set at level A in WCAG 2.0.

WAI’s assignment of levels to WCAG 2.0 success criteria only really considers the needs of individual disabled users (specifically the users whose needs where championed in WCAG 2.0’s creation – so, not so good for cognitive, dyslexic, learning difficulties), and doesn’t include an idea of the number of people who will benefit from following each criterion (e.g. how many people there are in those disability groups), or any idea of the cost of implementing each criterion.

While it is sometimes hard to pin down how much each different group of disabled people would be helped by each success criterion, as criteria regularly help more than one group, WAI don’t make it obvious that any cost-benefits thinking was involved in their thinking, despite publishing useful statistics of prevalence of different disabilities.

This means that individual organisations trying to make their sites accessible often have two options:

• Stick dogmatically to the level of each individual WCAG 2.0 success criterion, however much they think it does or doesn’t make pragmatic sense (this is generally done by organisations that have WCAG 2.0 compliance required of them – let’s call them ‘Category 1 organisations’); or
• Do their own cost-benefits analysis of each success criterion, to decide whether or not they are going to comply (this is generally done by every other organisation that is allowed to come up with their own accessibility aims - let’s call them ‘Category 2 organisations’)

Conformance levels and logos

And, unfortunately, WCAG 2.0’s conformance rules makes things even worse, as conformance is marked against perfection in achieving all success criteria at a given level.

This means that, for WCAG conformance purposes, it’s no better to have a site that obeys all but one of the many Level A success criteria than have a site that doesn’t even know that WCAG exists.

So, to use my two types of organisation, from above:

• Organisations in category 1 tend to try and conform, then ‘wriggle’ and try and come up with ways of getting around problems using exception processes like the “comply or explain” principle in Holland’s national accessibility guidelines.
• Organisations in category 2 may make the hard task of deciding which of the success criteria is sensible themselves, hoping no-one’s going to argue too strongly with their decisions; or, more likely, take WCAG 2.0’s lack of commercial pragmatism as the perfect excuse to not comply with any of WCAG.

WCAG 2.0’s emphasis on needing to score perfection on all the success criteria on each level to get the level conformance logo completely mis-understands the realities of web product development – in website development perfection is not something you strive for; you aim for continuous, pragmatic improvement over versions.

It also places huge strain on the committee making sure that the success criteria are perfectly categorised into levels, as one mistake considering the reasonableness of assigning a success criterion the right level can (and, as we’ve seen, does) make it impossible for some websites to achieve any level of conformance.

The fact is that while idea behind conformance levels is attractive to anyone creating a Standard, and to those wanting simple metrics for governance, I’ve never seen a categorisation of success criteria into levels that created more positives than negatives.

Detlev Fischer nicely summarises the positives in his comment on my EU accessibility law blog:

“The advantage of WCAG is that it is out there as a recognised international standard, ready to assess a site’s status regarding many vital a11y requirements, and ready to inform many significant improvements. Good usability is much more context-dependent and harder pin down, so compliance to an augmented set of guidelines would be much harder to impose and measure in the way that WCAG 2.0 level AA conformance might be imposed and checked…”

But here are the negatives from my response:

“The worry is that WCAG 2.0′s flaws and inflexibility are going to make each case where WCAG 2.0 AA compliance is unreasonable into a shouting match that may give accessibility a bad name.

I’d also agree that compliance to an augmented set of guidelines would be harder to impose and check. But I think imposing and checking against any set of site creation guidelines slightly misses the point. It’s the results of following the guidelines that are important, not the following of them itself. Put it this way – you wouldn’t assess the usability of a website by assessing the guidelines the design and build team used to create the site; you’d measure the usability of the site itself, in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction defined by ISO 9421-12. So the only reason that assessing usability for disabled people should be any different is if the cost of doing such usability measurement is unreasonable itself… different types of testing/measurement methodologies have different cost-benefit dynamics, and so the site owner themselves should define the amount of money they think is reasonable to give them the level of confidence they need that their site has achieved its inclusion goals.”

Strengths and weaknesses of WCAG 2.0 stability and static-ness

So, if WCAG is useful, but needs improvement, is that improvement likely soon?

One of WCAG 2.0 main strengths is its stability. Certainly WAI promote its stability in this quote from their press release on its approval as an ISO/IEC standard:

“As an ISO/IEC JTC 1 Standard, WCAG 2.0 is now also available from ISO/IEC, while it remains a stable international W3C standard with extensive supporting resources. JTC 1 recognition neither changes nor supercedes the existing standard, which remains freely available from the W3C website along with multiple W3C authorized translations of WCAG 2.0.”

Reliability and dependability are very useful aspects of WCAG 2.0’s stability. And it’s questionable if WCAG 2.0 would have become an ISO/IEC Standard if it wasn’t stable.

However, another aspect of stability is ‘resistance to change’ and, for want of a better term, static-ness. And it’s this static-ness that is WCAG 2.0’s main weakness, as it tends to divide accessibility experts into two extreme camps:

• defenders of WCAG, who tend to see any questioning of the Standard – including any critique or research that points out any flaws in it – as an attack to be rubbished
• critics of WCAG, who tend to look at WCAG as the orthodoxy of accessibility to be critiqued and questioned, sometimes with an unfortunate undercurrent of ‘we weren’t invited to feed into WCAG before it’s adoption as a standard, so we’re going to throw stones now’

It’s a reflection of WCAG 2.0’s success that, like any successful, influential thing in history – whether it’s a document, a movement or an ideology – it attracts both devotees and detractors.

But, as much as I dislike the under-appreciative tone of some critiques of WCAG, I really hate the attack on new research in accessibility, if that research doesn’t ‘fit in’ with the orthodoxy of WCAG.

Like any good idea, if WCAG is a great set of guidelines it should be able to stand up to rigorous critique.

And like the best ideas, if that critique finds WCAG wanting, it should be big enough to flex to accommodate that new thinking.

So the whole accessibility community should welcome the publishing of new research, like that from York and Norway in 2010, especially as much of the best research done on accessibility is commissioned for companies that are reluctant to publish the results for commercial reasons (at the BBC, I had similar research done into how well WCAG audits could predict problems identified by user-research, and found it similarly wanting).

All such published research adds to our understanding of the complex relationships between disabled users, accessibility guidelines, assistive technologies and usability outcomes.

As someone who has gone through the no-sleep-for-months hell of getting a Standard out there, it’s obviously frustrating to the drafters of WCAG 2.0 for the its value to be questioned.

However, WAI shouldn’t push criticism away. No Standard is perfect. And having your baby’s imperfections pointed out is only threatening if you don’t have any possibility or intention of fixing those imperfections.

W3C’s current way of ‘fixing WCAG 2.0’ seems to create supporting documents like Understanding WCAG 2.0 that can be updated more regularly than the Standard itself.

But more than this is needed.

A better way forwards

So can we imagine a better way? How about this?

Imagine a future where, instead of the crude A, AA and AAA, you could:

• Score a site’s accessibility against how many accessibility success criteria you’ve achieved (even including a multiplier for their importance based on the number of people affected), rather than whether you’ve reached a certain level so you can get a badge. Your step-by-step advances in accessibility through a site’s versions can now be reflected in its increasing accessibility score.
• Score the site’s accessibility against the needs of different disabled groups – e.g. a video site which doesn’t include audio description may be perfectly accessible to most disabled and non-disabled people; it’s deficiency is just a problem for blind and VI people. You can now let disabled people know these specific deficiencies in the site’s accessibility statement (the ‘limitations’ recommended by BS 8878), which will be much more useful to them than placing a WCAG conformance logo on the site.

Imagine a future where this release from crude conformance levels and notions of completeness allows WCAG to cease to be the static battering ram that it is now, but allows it to flex over time (possibly moderated by the proposed International Society of Accessibility Professionals):

• New success criteria can be added, when they are proven to have an impact on users, and when sufficient techniques are proven to lessen that impact.
• Existing success criteria can be promoted, demoted or removed as they are found – by the best research we can find – to be more or less important than we first thought.

Moreover, imagine a future where WCAG 2.0’s technical approach to accessibility is placed within a framework that allows accessibility to be more effectively considered from a product perspective, from an enterprise programme perspective, from a technology strategy perspective, and from the high-level national and global perspective of how governments can legislate and encourage accessibility.

That is what BS 8878 provides, and I would suggest that all legislators take a good look at it, because it:

• provides a more nuanced model for measuring accessibility, and for sensibly handling situations where the website development team can reasonably manage all of WCAG 2.0’s AA success criteria except one or two;
• provides a way of enabling organisations to embed accessibility considerations in their working practices so they can consistently produce accessible products.

How do we make this happen?

The problem with WCAG 2.0 isn’t that it’s not perfect; the problem is that it’s static and WAI are resistant to updating it, so its imperfections are argued over, rather than improved upon.

Having led the creation of a Standard – BS 8878 – myself, I know it’s not a trivial thing at all to try and create an updated Standard. And it’s not guaranteed that a WCAG 3.0 would automatically be better than WCAG 2.0, even with the insights we now have into WCAG 2.0’s deficiencies.

But I think it’s worth an open discussion to see whether there is consensus for a new direction for WCAG 3.0.

And, in the meantime, we have to go forwards with what we have – warts and all.

We can’t afford to wait for the perfect accessibility Standard to come along – it will never exist.

The problem isn’t that WCAG 2.0 isn’t any good; the problem is that it is being used for things that it’s not designed to do well. It’s a mistake for anyone to claim more than it can do, especially when advocates start using huge numbers of disabled people to motivate organisations to follow WCAG, when WCAG 2.0 doesn’t sufficiently make clear how its success criteria guarantee to help each of those audiences, or the cost-benefits of doing this.

What we need to do is to be very careful about how we apply the best accessibility standards that we have at any one time – making sure we use them for what they’re good at, making sure we don’t use them for what they’re not good at, and using the best insights we have to know the difference, with the courage to have the humility to say when we just don’t know yet…

So, what do you think?

Is WCAG 2.0 fit for legislation? Or do you also have concerns?

Have you experienced occasions where WCAG 2.0 has clarified exactly what you need to do to make your website accessible?

Or have you found it less useful?

Let us know by commenting below.

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This will require twelve categories of EU public-sector websites that provide ‘essential public services to EU citizens’ to comply with W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 at the AA level.

The proposal also makes clear that this level of accessibility support is desirable for all public sector websites.

The directive arises from the European Digital Agenda and the European Disability Strategy 2010-20, which themselves build on the EU and most of its Member States (including the UK) having ratified the United-Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which states that:

persons with disabilities have the rights to access the digital environment to the same extent as anyone else.

The directive could establish a law centred around a clearer definition of ‘the objective set of criteria for determining what an accessible website looks like‘ that many accessibility advocates have been wanting for years.

So what does this proposed directive mean for developers, disabled & older people, and website owners in the UK?

Is it going to get disabled and older people the benefits they want, without burdening website owners with unreasonable costs that prevent them implementing it?

The laudable intentions of the directive

The Commission’s intention – to speed up progress towards accessibility of all digital sites and services across Europe – is a good one.

I’m also delighted that the directive also mentions benefits for the IT industry as a whole, and not just for disabled and older people. The directive mentions a number of different categories of audience who will benefit from it:

1. the 80 million citizens with disabilities, and the 87 million Europeans aged over 65, who would have better accessibility to sites
2. developers, who could offer products and services across the entire European Union “without extra adaptation costs and complications”

Let’s look at the second of these first.

Will web developers benefit from the directive?

It is definitely true that the developers of website creation tools and content management systems will benefit from being able to sell the one set of tools as fit for purpose to create accessible websites and content throughout Europe, which is a good thing (although why the directive doesn’t mention ATAG 2.0 – W3C’s accessibility guidelines for authoring tools – is a bit of a mystery). Quite rightly Adobe and Microsoft have already welcomed this.

Developers of websites and content (and the people who train them) will also benefit from Europe agreeing on one set of technical standards that they should gain competency in. However, most of these developers will be left wondering why WCAG 2.0 doesn’t really cover the accessibility of mobile app development, which is quickly becoming a key competency their clients are requesting.

It’s also worth noting the two other essential components the European Disability Forum and Microsoft – who met to discuss it in early December – proposed as being part of a wider solution to speed up progress in accessibility:

1. a discussion forum where both users and ICT companies can discuss accessibility issues; and
2. a professional society related to accessibility that could define necessary skills and provide a network for exchanging best practice and knowledge.

In general, this proposed directive will clarify accessibility matters for developers, and establish a ‘level-playing field’ across Europe, which is a good thing.

Will disabled & older people benefit from the directive?

Disabled and older people across Europe will also be encouraged that the EU have proposed this directive. The European Disability Forum have already welcomed it.

However, they may be frustrated that the Commission has restricted the scope of the directive to apply solely to public-sector websites.

This is a pragmatic move on the Commission’s part. Getting public-sector sites to respond to EC directives is always going to be easier than getting private-sector sites to comply, especially as the UK is the only EU member state I know of whose existing disability discrimination legislation applies to private-sector websites as well as public-sector ones.

And the move is necessary – the Commission is right in describing the current situation of only one-third of Europe’s 761,000 public-sector and government websites being accessible as “dire”.

So, looking at public-sector sites is a sensible place to start, with the Commission no-doubt hoping that the up-skilling required of website developers to make compliant sites for the public-sector will spill over into their work for the private-sector.

However, the Commission should keep aware that disabled and elderly people, like everyone else, spend more of their time on private-sector sites (those of their banks, utility providers, retailers, entertainment suppliers etc.) than public-sector sites (those for benefits, taxes, health, education or car registration).

Private-sector websites are the ones disabled and older people would most like to be accessible, and this directive does not address this at all.

And there is another lingering question that needs consideration: will getting public sector websites up to WCAG 2.0 level AA give those 167 million disabled and older Europeans the websites they want?

I’m afraid the answer is unfortunately no.

As I’ve previously written, disabled and elderly people want what everyone else wants – to have a usable experience of websites, not an accessible one.

And WCAG 2.0 level AA unfortunately doesn’t ensure this.

Earlier this year Christopher Power and a group of researchers at the University of York caused controversy in the web accessibility community by publishing a research paper which questions WCAG 2.0’s place as being a great way of predicting potential accessibility problems on websites. While the research in the paper was only done with blind users, and so any conclusions based on its findings must take that into account, the following statement should cause concern for the usefulness of the proposed directive:

‘results showed that only 50.4% of the problems encountered by users were covered by Success Criteria in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0)’

This isn’t the first such paper to question WCAG 2.0′s value when separated from usability and task-based user-testing of products with disabled people. Dagfinn Rømen and Dag Svanæs’ paper Validating WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 through Usability Testing with Disabled Users asked similar questions back in 2010.

While WCAG 2.0 is a great set of guidelines for guiding website developing in producing accessible websites, its levels A, AA and AAA are fundamentally flawed as metrics for measuring how easy it is for disabled and older people to use websites in practice.

So, while WCAG 2.0 level AA is a tempting, clear metric to use to mandate accessibility, it’s not reliable enough to bear the weight of what’s being expected of it, without a usability and task-based user-testing framework around it.

But maybe that’s a reasonable price to pay if the directive finally gives website owners a clear requirement for what they have to do…

Will website owners benefit from the directive?

Unfortunately, while WCAG 2.0 AA provides clarity, it’s very questionable if it is consistently implementable for website owners in the real world.

Certainly the Dutch government don’t think so.

A useful article on webwereld.nl (in Dutch – use google translate or chrome to get this in English) details the clash between Dutch Minister Plasterk and the Commission on this issue.

The essence of Minister Plasterk’s objections are that:

1. too many departments of government are making too many different websites for them all to comply;
2. new web technologies & techniques are making it increasingly difficult to meet accessibility requirements;
3. the rules aren’t pragmatic enough, and so a “comply or explain” principle needs to be allowed.

These objections are not new. Most accessibility consultants will have heard them time and again in early meetings with organisations going on the journey to accessibility.

But Minister Plasterk’s concerns are valid.

If the ‘rules’ are to change, they need to be pragmatic and implementable for public-sector website owners.

And, unfortunately, I cannot find evidence that the directive that the European Commission wants to replace National guidelines like those already existing in Holland properly addresses any of his objections.

So let’s look at them one by one.

The ‘too many sites’ objection

While this concern seems about the cost of implementation, my experience tells me it’s more to do with the cost of embedding and governing accessibility across all sectors of government, all teams in each department, all projects (both internally and externally developed) in each year’s budget.

Nothing in WCAG 2.0 or the EC directive addresses this concern, but it’s the number one worry of any large organisation.

Thankfully, BS 8878 – the UK Accessibility Guidelines that provide a framework around WCAG 2.0 – provides a model for doing this embedding and governance as you can see in my BS 8878 Implementation Case Studies slideshare.

The EC would do well to reference BS8878 as an implementation mechanism for their directive.

The ‘new web technologies & techniques are making accessibility increasingly difficult’ objection

Minister Plasterk is right – accessibility is getting harder and harder to achieve as websites become more interactive and include more rich media. While accessibility techniques like WAI-ARIA and mechanisms to provide captions or audio-description are trying to keep pace, they are not simple or cheap to implement.

The EC would do well to consider whether using static guidelines like WCAG 2.0 in legislation will quickly make that legislation outdated and unhelpful.

The issue of whether the rules are pragmatic compared with Holland’s “comply or explain” principle

While it would delight accessibility advocates (especially those in Holland) if it was never reasonable to “explain” why it wasn’t pragmatic to make a site WCAG 2.0 level AA accessible, it’s not difficult to find places where complying with WCAG 2.0 AA isn’t pragmatic, most noticeably around its lack of sensible cost-benefits thinking in its recommendations on video accessibility.

The cost-benefit profile of accessibility solutions changes with every new technology introduction. At present, high-cost checkpoints like audio-description become quickly unreasonable where lots of video content is included, but technological breakthroughs could change that situation.

Static guidelines like WCAG 2.0 can never handle this changing pragmatic landscape on their own. They weren’t designed to. See my blog The future of WCAG – maximising its strengths not its weaknesses.

So to center accessibility legislation on a blanket WCAG 2.0 AA requirement without including an exception process based on whether the requirement places reasonable cost-benefits on any particular website is bad legislation.

How BS 8878 could help bring pragmatism to this situation

A middle way between the Commission and Minister Plasterk’s views is needed – clarity alongside pragmatism.

So I’d therefore suggest that:

• the EC avoids using WCAG 2.0 as the sole basis for their directive;
• they include metrics that encourage justifiable pragmatism in accessibility decision making;
• they include metrics that bring together usability and accessibility to assure that the 167 million people they intend to benefit from this directive can use (not just access) the sites the directive applies to; and
• they suggest an implementation framework to enable public-sector organisations to embed accessibility within their structures, policies and processes.

In short, as John Knight’s tweet response to TechCrunch’s article on the directive said “@TechCrunch @riptari That should be BS 8878:2010 Web Accessibility Code of Practice then @jonhassell”

BS 8878 can provide much of what is missing in the proposed directive so far.

Without that, wiping out National Guidelines that understand pragmatism to replace them with EU Directives that don’t may backfire and only set-back the progress the Commission quite rightly wanted to accelerate.

Let’s hope the Commission are listening…

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And this year’s theme is “Removing barriers to create an inclusive and accessible society for all”.

So it was good timing that last Friday afternoon I was invited to speak alongside IBM, Panasonic, Ribot, the BBC and AbilityNet at an event staged by the Royal London Society for Blind People, advocating ‘Everybody Technology‘ – mainstream technology that can meet the needs of 100% of the population.

Here’s a video of my presentation on how taking into account the needs of disabled people when you are creating a product can prompt innovation – or “why the great Zombies, Run! owes a debt to audiogames pioneered by the blind community”:

Or read the ‘Beyond Inclusion can go Mainstream’ transcript.
 

I also spoke to Kevin Satizabal after the event on how the proposed Everybody Technology Group could potentially provide a great resource for organisations interested in the innovation possibilities of stepping up to the challenge of creating products that everybody can use:

Or read the ‘How the Everybody Technology Group could help’ transcript.

More from the event

Many tweeters were in the audience, so you can get flavour of the full event on its hashtag: #EveryBodyTech.

Particular highlights for me were:

• being reminded of how great Ribot’s Threedom phone could be;
• seeing the first real innovation in blind people’s screenreader access I’ve seen for years in Dale Lane’s (IBM) conversational internet prototype
• and it’s always great to have Stephen Hawking behind a great initiative

So, what do you think?

Is designing mainstream technology for everyone uncommercial, or just too much of a challenge?

Or, have you like me experienced occasions where including the needs of disabled people in your creative ideation process has taken you into innovative places beyond the same old functionality that your competitor products have?

Let us know by commenting below.

Need any help?

We at Hassell Inclusion are very experienced in enabling organisations to take their first steps into creating ‘Everybody Technologies’, having worked on the creation of a large number of these technologies including the award-winning BBC iPlayer, created the UK Standard for digital inclusive design BS 8878, and presented on these ideas for years at conferences worldwide.

If you need any help in getting started with ‘Everybody Technologies’ please get in touch and we’ll be delighted to help.

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Transcript: Beyond Inclusion Can Go Mainstream

Julian Dailly (Director of External Affairs, RLSB): I’d like to ask the panel a question – I know Jonathan you’re going to answer this in greater depth than the other two – but how does imposing more challenging constraints at the beginning of a design process lead to better products?

Jonathan: So there are two things I wanted to note on that particular subject… I have a couple of categories of product that I always like to pick on: one is inclusive products; the other one, as you can see on the screen, is what I term ‘beyond inclusive’ products.

Inclusive products are those you design for everybody. The idea is that you’re designing them for the greatest majority of people. That obviously makes it harder. It makes it a real challenge. There are a lot of edge cases out there. How would you do that?

So, the first thing I’d want to say on this is that my understanding of innovation is that challenges are good.

I’ll give you an example of this: about a thing called fixation. If you’re the manager of a product and you’re trying to build a new version of that product, what you do is get your best people into a room and go through an ‘ideation’ process. And, in general, what people who do this find is that everyone, all over the world, including all of their competitors, comes up with the same seven product ideas. You just can’t get out of your fixation with what already exists. So you make one step in each direction but don’t really get anywhere. This is a real problem that people encounter.

I did some work with Siemens-Bosch – they make lots of white goods, fridges, that sort of thing – and we were looking at ovens. And I said, “How about this for getting past fixation? Let’s take a real interesting challenge. I want you to come up with an oven that would support the needs of someone who’s older, who can’t physically hold up the thing they are trying to put into the oven – the casserole dish or whatever…”

And suddenly they are in a completely different space in terms of their imagination. And what we came up with, pretty quickly after about ten minutes, was the idea of an oven that was actually in your work surface. That you pressed a button, and the oven came up out of your work surface until the shelf that you wanted to put things into was at the right level. So you could then push the dish from the work surface onto the shelf. You’d then press a button and the oven would go down until everything was cooked, at which time it would rise up again and you’d be able to slide the dish out again.

That’s one example of what they regarded as one of the most innovative ideas they’d ever had for what to do next for an oven. That how to take challenges from a wider community and make better products from them.

The second example I wanted to give was from ‘beyond inclusion’. Beyond inclusion is my term for the sorts of products that Damon was talking about earlier – assistive technologies, that sort of thing. Products that are created specifically for someone with a particular need. So they are not inclusively designed. The great thing is, though, that because you are doesn’t something very specific and precise to someone’s needs, they tend to be innovative, they tend to be incredibly different from the sorts of products available in the market. That’s great, but you can’t sell them to that many people.

But the good news is that some of the products that you use, that we all use, actually came down that route. So, here’s two examples:

At the top of this slide you have someone writing, some time in the 18th century. And that was the problem: for a blind person, how are they going to write? And that was the genesis of the idea for the first working typewriter. The first working typewriter we know was created in Italy by one guy for a Countess who was blind. He created it for her, to make sure she could communicate. And, obviously, that product initially created for someone who is blind, is now part of everything that we use. I mean, here’s my iPad and that’s the keyboard on there.

Bringing it more up to date, what we’ve got at the bottom of the slide is a challenge I was set around 2005. I was trying to create games for blind kids, to help them learn maths skills. What I was trying to do was create games you played purely through your ears. So, very different, very unusual. Completely worked. We created a game called ‘Sos and the Big Maths Adventure’ that really did allow people who were blind to learn maths purely through what they did on a keyboard and their ears. On the right we have something called ‘Zombies! Run”. Has anyone played ‘Zombies! Run’?

[someone in the audience shouts out yes]

Jonathan: Yeah. Okay. So, er, it’s cool. So you might be sitting there thinking, ‘why would anyone in the mainstream want a product that is all about what you can hear’. Well, you know what, everybody’s blind when they’re jogging. Because if you’re looking at a screen, and you’re jogging, you’re not jogging for that much longer. You’re bumping into something and falling over. So, you don’t want to be looking at a screen. So how do you make jogging interesting? Well these guys came up with the idea that you’re being chased by zombies. How’s that for motivation for you? So they wanted to make sure that that experience – the narrative experience of being chased by zombies – was available to you when you were jogging. So they couldn’t put it zombies on the screen. So they thought about what anyone does when they’re jogging, which is have your earbuds in your ears. And thought, ‘okay, let’s do this via sound’. Effectively the games output is sound going into your ears: if you’re not jogging fast enough, they’re getting close, and you might get eaten. And your input is what you are doing with your body, where you are in terms of your GPS.

That’s one example of somebody taking something that came out of the blind audio-games community and saying, ‘you know what? That is the solution to a mainstream need’. And, fundamentally, it was so innovative and fresh that lots of people love it.

So, those are just a couple of examples of the sorts of innovation that can happen when you actually think creatively about the different needs we all have…

Transcript: Interview with Kevin Satizabal on how the Everybody Technology Group could help

Kevin: So here we are with Jonathan Hassell – one of the speakers at today’s event. So it was very interesting what you were saying about the challenge of going ‘Beyond Inclusion’ and also about the challenge of mainstream Inclusion. Could you summarise that, and explain how joining this network is going to help that?

Jonathan: There’s so many innovation opportunities for people who consider the needs of the broadest group of disabled people. Not just blind people – which there are a lot of here today – not just people with vision impairments, but all the way through to people with Aspergers, dyslexia… all of these sorts of conditions.

My experience is that a lot of companies are scared when it comes to people not like themselves – that they find it quite intimidating thinking about that. And yet, when I’ve been able to get people past being scared, the sorts of different needs that are out there tend to make them change the way they think about technology. And that makes them more innovative.  Because, if you’re stuck in a way of thinking about your product, which is exactly the same as all of your competitors, if someone comes in with a really challenging question to say “it would be really cool to think about how that works for someone who can’t see or who can’t read…” [interrupted as someone asks if I want red or white wine]

All of the big companies are trying to make the most innovative products that their competitors don’t have. And I’ve had a lot of success of going into companies and saying: “You know what? If you think about the needs of people who aren’t like you guys, suddenly you’re in an advantage over the other companies, because you can’t just get away with the sort of stuff you normally do.”

Now that, I believe, is the sort of thing that this Everybody Technology group could help with. Because one of the ideas that came out of today was people saying: “We don’t know what people need. I don’t know what a blind person needs from the sort of product I’m creating. If you told me, I might be able to do something about it. So can you put some of those needs online somewhere? Like in a little bank of really challenging ideas for how you would make a product work for lots of different people…”

Kevin: So, basically, raising awareness to the companies, and challenging them by giving them something to innovate from, is the key.

Jonathan: Yes. Everyone’s looking for a Unique Selling Point for their product.

We had Panasonic here today. Panasonic make tellys (televisions). Lots of people make tellys. If you were thinking about how you would make your telly different from everyone else’s, there are certain things that everyone’s doing. My telly is bigger than your telly. My telly is brighter than your telly. My telly has 3-D. My telly lets you plug the Internet into the back of it. You know what? Because everybody’s doing that stuff, even those who got there first probably only have two months before everyone goes “Putting the Internet into the back of a TV? That’s not innovative. That’s just convergence – sensibly looking at what’s happening in TVs and computers, and bringing the technologies together.” Everyone’s aware of that – it’s the equivalent of putting Twitter share buttons on every website in the universe. Everyone’s doing it.

So if you want a Unique Selling Point, well, what do you do? How do you find that?

What we’re saying is, maybe the fact that their tellys talk is their Unique Selling Point. Now, certainly it’s going to work for lots of blind people, who Panasonic had in their minds.

And I’m looking at it thinking that, whilst there are two hundred thousand blind people in the UK, there are 2 million dyslexic people in the UK who have a very similar need when it comes to the fact that there’s text on the screen that they can’t easily access. A blind person can’t see it. A dyslexic person maybe can’t read it. What they both want is something to read it for them. So, in doing something for two hundred thousand, Panasonic potentially – if they market it right – may get six million people (including those with vision impairments, low-literacy, or English as a second language) saying their telly is better than the rest because, while they’ve never been able to easily read the Electronic Programme guide, they don’t need to with this telly.

That’s cool. That makes sense. That hopefully will make Panasonic loads of money. And any company working in these areas, the more money they make from doing this sort of thinking, the easier it is for everyone else to say: “This is a no brainer any more. Why wouldn’t we do this? It makes no business sense to not do it.”

Kevin: Thank you so much. Thank you. Excellent.

Jonathan: You’re welcome.

Netflix Inc. and the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) have submitted a joint Consent Decree to a federal court in Springfield, Mass., ensuring closed captions in 100% of Netflix streaming content within two years (more information on this historic agreement is available on the NAD site).

So what does this mean for Netflix, NAD, the hard-of-hearing that people organisations like NAD represent, and the web industry in general?

A ‘reasonable and workable’ model for how Netflix will reach 100% captioned programmes

“We’re so pleased that Netflix worked jointly with plaintiffs to devise a reasonable and workable way to achieve 100% captioning. The Decree is a model for the streaming entertainment industry,” said Arlene Mayerson, Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund’s Directing Attorney. “DREDF hopes that this is the beginning of opening the internet for deaf and hard of hearing individuals in streamed entertainment, education, government benefits, and more.”

This gives one cause to wonder what this “reasonable and workable way to achieve 100% captioning” is.

Let’s hope that Slashdot’s story about Netflix ‘stealing’ DivX subtitles from Finnish Pirates is not it.

More likely, as highlighted by Media Access Australia, is that part of Netflix’s solution is crowd-sourced captioning via a community built on Amara – an open-source, non-profit project that promotes the captioning of online video content.

This is an interesting initiative. It’s certainly a cost-effective one. But I’m not sure whether a community of 30 volunteers (the current capacity) will be able to caption the remaining minimum 18% of Netflix’s archive of 50,000 movies within 2 years…

It will be interesting to see if Netflix has other models up its sleeve to live up to its commitments, especially as the agreement requires them to ensure by September 30th 2016 that all programmes on Netflix (whether they had pre-existing captions or not) have captions available no later than 7 days after launch.

Impact on other video-on-demand suppliers

There’s a lot of sense to this combination of encouraging programme-makers to make online captions for the programmes they license to Netflix, and Netflix adding captions to those programmes that don’t in a cost-effective way.

If it works, it should hopefully set that ‘good model’ for the rest of the video-on-demand industry, even if it’s not the solution for faster-paced news programming.

And let’s hope it does work, because the existence of this ruling could be seen to undercut any reasoning video-on-demand companies (like LoveFilm in the UK) have used in the past that providing captions/subtitles is “prohibitively costly”.

It will be interesting to see if this settlement impacts the panel discussion between various UK and international media companies on business cases for accessible video at the CSI magazine User Experience Conference 2012 Accessibility Summit that I’m speaking at in December.

So, if the costs of providing 100% captioning have been considered “reasonable and workable”, then what benefits will companies providing this level of captions enjoy?

Who could benefit from this captioning?

It’s disappointing that NAD, in their press release, don’t talk about all the audiences who benefit from captioning – it’s not just the 48 million deaf and hard of hearing people that they highlight…

In recent research I’ve been doing into the audiences for captions/subtitles and organisations that create captions (such as STAGETEXT – an organisation that provides captioning and live speech-to-text services in theatres and other arts and cultural venues in the UK), I’ve found even more audiences that benefit from captions including:

• many people for whom English is a second language;
• young children learning to read;
• people on the autistic spectrum who find it difficult to differentiate between different people speaking in a scene;
• people in shared-offices without headphones;
• and a growing majority of older people who may not consider themselves hard of hearing, but may have difficulty hearing dialogue over background noise and music.

Including captions and transcripts also results in an increased ability for video to be found by search engines – CNET reported a 30% increase in traffic from Google after providing transcripts for its videos – a compelling business case that should be more known than it is.

So what benefits will Netflix get?

Well, the lawsuit has gone away… And Netflix have “only” had to agree to pay $755,000 in legal fees and $40,000 to NAD to help them monitor the agreement between the two parties. This is a much lower figure than the $6m Target paid in damages to the class action claimants represented by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in 2008.

Netflix is also likely to benefit from its captions attracting and retaining some of the audiences listed above to use their service, especially if they promote it to those audiences (something which is, unfortunately, rarely done).

However, it is questionable how many of the “48 million deaf and hard of hearing people [who] will be able to fully access Netflix’s Watch Instantly services” will actually do so, if this comment from ‘Emmett’ to news of the settlement is at all representative of the views of hard-of-hearing Americans:

“Since 2010 I do not use NetFlix. I am HOH. I will not give them another chance. They are only doing this because federal judges made it known NetFlix were in the wrong.”

This comment reveals the potential loss of ‘brand value’ that neglecting to listen to disabled communities causes, as I predicted in my blog on the damage caused to BMI-Baby’s brand due to their lawsuit with RNIB in the UK earlier in the year.

In this particular case, the comment was added to an article revealing that Netflix are doing better than competitors like Blockbuster’s On Demand movie service. It seems the damage may have already been done. And the manner of Netflix’s decision to turn around and provide better accessibility has not impressed all hard-of-hearing people.

This is the danger of leaving accessibility to a “version 2″, or until disabled people complain: that whether or not you then fix the accessibility problem, you may have already lost the disabled community’s trust… and their spending power.

How to recover the trust of disabled audiences

There are three possible approaches you could take to gain and keep the trust of your disabled audiences:

1. Achieve perfect accessibility right from the start, which is pretty-much impossible.
2. Be up-front about what you’ve been able to make accessible and what you haven’t, right from the start, and say why. Treat disabled people like adults, and be transparent with accessibility information (for example: one of the Netflix settlement criteria was that they make it easier for people to find out which programmes have captions, and which haven’t). Saying why you haven’t been able to do everything, what you are planning to do about it, and how people can contact you keeps useful dialogue going with your disabled audiences so they don’t leave while you improve matters. This is why BS 8878 advises you to put this information in your site’s accessibility statement.
3. Hide what you haven’t been able to do, and hope disabled people don’t notice. And then try and get your annoyed audiences back on-side through a massive PR battle to replace, in the minds of the individual disabled people, the bad PR you’ve just subjected them to, with good PR messages about how you’re sorry that you got it wrong, and that you have improved things now.

Think of this like new Apple vs old Apple. Old Apple would not admit their failings, hoping Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field would make you question your own judgement that anything was wrong. Whereas new Apple, post-Jobs, responds to the failings of Apple Maps with falling-on-sword apologies and promises to do better.

Part of this change at Apple is style, but it’s also a reflection that it’s questionable whether you can get away with the old way of doing things these days. Social networks allow people of any particular ‘tribe’ to distribute messages virally – and deaf and hard-of-hearing people can be seen here as a tribe like any other – and negative messages usually buzz around a network quicker than positive ones.

So, for Netflix to really win, they need to think of the $40k they are giving to NAD to monitor their progress as the downpayment on the start of a PR campaign in which they ask NAD for some advice and ambassadorship to rehabilitate their reputation with deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences.

That way, it’s even possible that their return on investment on providing captions, including the damages in the legal case, could still be positive.

And that should be what all deaf and hard-of-hearing people want, for their needs to be better supported by the video-on-demand industry.

The moral of the story…

As it is likely to be impossible to create products that delight all your potential disabled audiences from day one, you need to take as much, maybe even more, care over your communications to disabled people as you do for everyone else.

Need any help?

We at Hassell Inclusion are very well-versed in enabling organisations to gain and retain the trust of their disabled audiences, mostly from Jonathan Hassell’s experience of doing this with the wide and vocal disabled audiences of the BBC.

If you need any help in understanding and connecting with your disabled audiences, please get in touch and we’ll be delighted to help you.

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“Yes, but what about our legacy content?”

That’s one of the biggest barriers to doing something about accessibility that I have to get most of my clients past.

“Do we have to do everything? And, if we can’t make everything accessible, where does that leave us?”

When we initially meet, many organisations that work with me are usually embarrassed about their fragmented history of dealing with accessibility. They reckon some parts of their website (or sites) might be accessible, other parts really concern them, and yet others they haven’t got a clue about.

So it always comes as a relief when I tell them that this is pretty much the case with all organisations of any size, even with those who really care about accessibility.

And the fact that they’ve called me in to have the discussion means that they’re already more committed to the idea of accessibility than many organisations out there. So they’re on the right track.

So let’s throw out the thing which keeps people in embarrassed stasis, shall we?

It is impossible to make your website, app or organisation “perfectly accessible”, however you want to define accessibility.

Voltaire was on to something when he said that:
“the perfect is the enemy of the good”.

So out goes perfection.

For me, Inclusive Design is all about art of the possible. Doing all you reasonably can to make your products work for as many of your potential users as you can.

And that sounds much more achievable than perfection.

Feeling better?

Good. Let’s move on…

The thought-enabler of drawing a line in the sand can help us to move forwards in creating an achievable accessibility strategy.

Here are some lines in the sand that I’ve found to help my clients:

Line between new-build and legacy

It’s quite alright to say that you are going to draw a line in the sand between the way you’ve used to do (or not do) accessibility and how you’re going to do it from now on.

The biggest barrier for implementing new quality standards – for that’s really what accessibility is – is the worry that you’ll have to do it retrospectively for all the things you’ve already created.

This is for good reason. Especially in the agile start-up world of the web, no organisation wants to be weighed-down spending much of their attention revisiting their old products.

Moreover, the way you do accessibility for new-build projects is completely different from how you add it to existing legacy content and tools.

Doing accessibility for new-build projects is generally cost-effective, if you plan it in from the start, following an Inclusive Design process such as BS 8878.

But adding accessibility to non-accessible legacy tools and content can be difficult and costly, especially where:

• the technologies used in them don’t facilitate accessibility easily;
• the creators of the tools’ code have left your organisation without good documentation;
• or the tool has been provided by a third-party supplier as part of a contract that did not mention accessibility as a requirement.

So it makes sense for your accessibility strategy to draw that line between new-build and legacy.

And it makes sense to let your users know that you’ve drawn this line by putting it in your accessibility statement.

Most accessibility statements are used by organisations to trumpet what they’ve done to try and make their websites accessible. But they are read by disabled people who only look for the accessibility statement when they’ve found the website isn’t accessible to them.

So, what better place than this to acknowledge to your users that you are aware of deficiencies in your website’s accessibility, that you are working on doing better in the future, and that you’re happy for them to contact you to help you do this?

This provides much better PR, and a much better defence against legal action, than not saying anything to your users at all. The only way you can lose with this strategy is if you don’t follow through and improve accessibility of your new products, and don’t listen to the feedback your users send to you.

Line between worthwhile and non-worthwhile legacy

It also makes sense to do a cost-benefits assessment on all your legacy content and tools, looking into how valuable they would be to disabled users if you made them accessible, the costs of doing that, and only doing accessibility improvements on those that it makes business sense to make accessible. This sort of cost-benefits analysis links in with the idea of ’reasonable adjustments’ in the UK Equality Act 2010.

Again, this common-sense approach to help you move forwards with your accessibility strategy is something that it’s useful to put in your accessibility statement, so disabled people are aware of which aspects of your site you are working to improve, which you aren’t, and how they can let you know if they have a point of view about how you made the decision.

How to ‘fix’ the accessibility of legacy content and tools

Where you’ve decided that it may make financial sense to fix the accessibility of some legacy content or tool, but are being hampered by a lack of ability to easily change its code, a new generation of accessibility tools is evolving to help you.

I’ll blog about these tools as they start to prove their worth, in the future.

But if you have a need for cost-effective accessibility fixes for legacy content or tools right now, please get in touch and I’d be happy to take you through the possibilities.

Need some help with this?

If this blog has touched on issues that your organisation is having at the moment, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’d be delighted to help you move forwards in creating and implementing a cost-effective strategy to improve your site’s accessibility.

Want more?

I’m going to be blogging more soon on other barriers that organisations experience in moving forwards with an accessibility strategy – looking next at how to embed accessibility in complex organisations with multiple disconnected business-units or “silos”.

So, if this blog has been useful, sign-up for the Hassell Inclusion newsletter to get more insights like this in your email every other week or so.

And if you’d like me to blog on a particular accessibility barrier that your organisation is facing, please leave a comment or contact us and I’ll be happy to do so.

“We’re never going to see disability the same way again…”
Lord Coe, Chairman of Locog

Back in 2008 one of the worst things I read was a really offensive complaint by a BBC viewer about seeing too much of ‘these people’ on the TV, referring to athletes in the Beijing Paralympic coverage. I just didn’t know where to start in response.

Fast-forwards 4 years and I can’t believe Channel 4 are getting complaints about the huge amount of Paralympics coverage over the last 9 days. People didn’t want it to end.

The world has changed.

Britain is basking fabulous in a Paralympic and Olympic afterglow, and all the things I was hoping the Paralympics would bring seem to have happened, and much, much more.

It seems normal now for disabled people to be on our screens every night. Oscar Pistorius is no longer the only Paramlypian people know. The Weir-wolf’s selling masks. Jonnie Peacock’s given us our first British 100m gold-medalist since 1980. Sarah Storey would get a place in the Olympic cycling squad of any country other than England and Australia. And, for drama and emotion, Ellie Simmonds in the pool was only beaten by the astonishing ending of the 100m women’s medley.

And the categorisation which aims to make the competition fair has made people genuinely fascinated by people’s differences, now LEXI has enabled us to understand it.

Any moment someone’s going to suggest bringing the Olympics and Paralympics together, with the Olympic events becoming just another Paralympic category for ‘people with no impairment’. The two sets of athletes certainly came together gloriously in the victory parade watched by millions in London yesterday.

Now that’s inclusion!

And it’s not just been the athletes, but the comedians too… Trust Channel 4 to get this right. Someone give an award to the brilliant ‘Last Leg’ show with Adam Hills and their #isitok. Thousands of people have just got disability awareness trained in the most funny, real, disarming way. Owners of disability awareness courses should immediately contact Channel 4 and ask if they can get a licence to include clips to bring their courses up to the new gold standard.

Jimmy Carr summed it up well in the Closing Ceremony coverage: the Paralympics has become the weather – the one thing that total strangers can talk about on the tube.

Talking positively about disability has become normal. For a while at least.

So what impact does this have on accessibility and inclusion?

And how do we keep the momentum going?

How we got here – the inclusion journey

“We’re never going to see disability the same way again… That was what we set out to achieve in Singapore. I don’t think people really got it at that point. I may not have actually got the full impact of the Paralympics in Singapore. But I’ve understood it by the day. And that’s been great. And all my teams have been on that journey with me.”
Lord Coe

For a nation so accustomed to doing ourselves down, I think it’s worth just pausing to reflect on what we achieved! In terms of organisation and logistics, Locog and their army of Games Makers did the impossible, at an extraordinary level of excellence which I don’t think any of us were expecting. We’ve just seen how it can be when strategy, mindset and a belief in possibility are aligned.

When inclusion is included in the definition of the excellence you are striving for great things happen. For the most part, both the Olympics and Paralympics have been inclusive – from the representation of disabled people in the ceremonies as well as the track, the accessibility of the venues themselves, the accessibility of the transport infrastructure to get to the venues, to the accessibility of the BBC and Channel 4 websites keeping people up to date with events they’d missed. It wasn’t perfect, as the controversy around separate purchase methods and prices for wheelchair tickets, and the lack of captions on the Olympic Stadium screens showed. But that wasn’t for the lack of focus on the importance of inclusion.

Stephen Frost and the inclusion team at London 2012 have done a great job.

Because accessibility is a journey. It requires people creating products and services to constantly think beyond themselves and see the diversity of people’s needs and preferences. Paul Edwards – Product Manager for the Channel 4 Paralympics site – speaks eloquently on what he and his team learnt about accessibility through building the Channel 4 Paralympic site.

So to those who say that change isn’t possible – that silo’ed organisations can’t make the changes of mindset and practice needed to embed inclusion in all they do – well, you’ve just had a wake-up call. It is possible. We’ve just seen it done. And we’ve seen what comes from it.

As Lord Coe said on numerous occasions ‘you just need to get the environment right and make the athletes happy – if the village is good, then everything else will take care of itself’ – happy athletes give extraordinary performances, and those performances bring the ‘wall of noise’ from the crowd, the buzz, the euphoria, the sense that anything’s possible…

That’s why inclusion is so important. When organisations produce great services products that include all of their users, including disabled people, just look at what everyone can do as a result!

The importance of stewarding the Paralympic legacy

So the Paralympic legacy could be immense. Or a few wet months and dark nights might dampen the post-party buzz and bring us ‘back to normal’ as some commentators predict.

Have attitudes changed for good? Have the Paralympics changed the way people think and feel about disability? And is that about all disabled people or just the athletes?

In 6 months, will people still look at disabled people with the same respect they do now? Or will they start to lapse back into thinking of disabled people as Paralympians or scroungers and whingers?

Will they still get that the main challenge for most disabled people is to live the normal life the rest of us take for granted?

That’s the legacy I think that disabled people want – certainly it’s what I learnt from Yves Veulliet in my interview with him last week.

But legacy is a tricky thing, and so easy to get wrong.

When I went to the Paralympics last week, I went not to the Olympic Stadium but to the North Greenwich Arena, otherwise known as the O2. And known in a past life as the Millennium Dome.

I find the Dome fascinating. I completely missed it on its first incarnation in 2000. Whilst I was in London for the entire year, and the reviews of the exhibition in it actually turned out to be much better than everyone feared, like many people I just didn’t get around to visiting. What I did do, because my office moved to somewhere near it a year later, was to visit in 2001, on a lunch break. I think it was a Thursday. It was a ghost town.

I don’t know if you remember what the Dome was like between 2001 and 2007. For a while it was a millstone around London’s neck. It’s legacy was an embarrassment. No-one knew what to do with it. There seemed to be no stable plans in place.

Then, after enduring a 6 year doldrums, 5 years ago someone with vision transformed it into the best concert venue in the world. Nowhere else do musicians have quite the same residencies (maybe other than Vegas). The glorious place started off well, went down an extreme dip, rose from the ashes like a phoenix, and has now played a part in making the Paralympic wheelchair basketball the great experience loads of us enjoyed last Saturday.

So will the same thing will happen with the Paralympic legacy, and the part of that legacy that impacts all disabled people? Will the high water mark we have at the moment have to go through another trough before it’s resurrected in Rio? Is it possible that we could just continue on the trajectory London 2012′s established? If we kept the momentum so Rio could be even better Paralympics than London?

I’ve very little influence to keep the momentum going in sport.

But I’ve already done something to keep the Paralympic legacy going in digital inclusion…

BS 8878 – helping to secure the Paralympic legacy in digital inclusion

One of the main things that all digital inclusion champions agree on is that it’s hard to keep up the momentum and focus on inclusion over time – to build for the long term, and reinforce practices that have resulted in great achievements in inclusion.

Often organisations do great things but then staff move on and all the competencies the organisation learnt somehow get lost along the way. So, years later they’re having exactly the same problems that kicked off the learning in the first place. Staff relearn things that previous occupants of their jobs learnt 3 years ago. Organisations’ inclusion quality peaks up and down across product ranges and versions of the same product.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could retain the competency? Wouldn’t it be great if inclusion just became an ongoing part of your business as usual?

That’s what disabled people want, and what businesses want as well. They don’t want to reinvent the wheel every 3 years. They certainly don’t want to have a potential legal case arise, like BMI baby, and get rid of the problem, only to find the situation reoccurring.

Everyone knows it’s a good idea to learn from your mistakes. But it’s not just about learning from your mistakes. It’s about not forgetting what you’ve learnt. You don’t want to repeat your mistakes in the future.

So one of the ways of making sure the legacy is secure, that the lessons aren’t forgotten, is to embed the learning in organisations.

Here in Britain, we created BS 8878 to do just that, to allow organisations to embed inclusion in their work, so it’s not a new thing, an odd thing, a different thing, an added thing. It’s just how they do things.

It’s not just about getting accessibility right once, or even not just getting accessibility right with one set of people who happen to be creating your products at any one time. It’s about getting accessibility right over time, with whoever is creating your products, whether it be new teams or old teams, or even people outside your organisation who you’ve commissioned to create your products and services.

That’s what BS 8878 allows you to do. So if that sounds interesting to your organisation then please check out my summaries of BS 8878 and please get in touch with any questions. As the lead-author of the Standard I’d love to introduce you to how BS 8878 can help you get things right, not just in the short term, but in the long term – how you can establish an accessibility legacy in your organisation.

As Oscar Pistorius said: “the games here have forced the world to see disability through the eyes of the British”.

The Great British attitude to disability and thinking around disability is summed up well in BS 8878. It’s something those of us who worked on it are very proud of. Something we have to share with the world. Something to secure the legacy, to keep the buzz going.

So maybe it’s time for your organisation to find out more…

Want more?

If this blog has been useful, you might like to sign-up for the Hassell Inclusion newsletter to get more insights like this in your email every week or so.

And having them here in London at the moment is a major source of national pride in the UK.

The whole world is getting a huge dose of inspiration from disabled athletes showing what they can do – their capabilities not their disabilities. As one Paralympian said on the Paralympic show:

“Walking round the athletes’ village is quite some experience. To see so many disabled people with so many different technologies aiding them all in one place is initially overwhelming but starts to seem just normal after a while.”

As the uncle of a wheelchair basketball Paralympian in the making, I’ve been delighted by Channel 4’s great ‘Superhumans’ campaign, which has been difficult to miss in the UK over the last year.

It’s great to have disabled people talking on the TV about their preparations for the games most nights: the challenges… the humour… the character needed to excel in sports that most of us Paralympic audiences are still trying to get our heads around.

But not all disabled people are athletes, and it’s not only Paralympians who have amazing stories to tell about overcoming challenges.

So I was delighted to get a call from Yves Veulliet asking me if I’d read his book ‘Turning Point: The Fall and Rise’ about his experiences of overcoming the trauma of having an accident when he was 21, the impact of becoming disabled on his social and professional life, and how important accessibility and inclusion are to enable disabled people to have the same kind of opportunities as everyone else to be the best they can be.

I loved the book so much, and felt its messages were so timely, that I wanted to share some of it with you all.

So I managed to get time with Yves last week over skype to discuss some key messages from his book (the transcript is below, if you need it): the need for a more business-focused view of accessibility, whether the Paralympics and Olympics should be integrated to achieve real inclusion, how rehabilitation should care more for the emotional side of becoming disabled, and why being human should be enough.

Get the book

Like what you’ve seen of Yves’ story and want to read more? You can get Yves Veulliet’s book Turning Point – The Fall and Rise from amazon. It’s a funny, moving read, and includes more insight and inspiration into the highs and lows of living with a disability than an evening in the Paralympic Stadium. I’d highly recommend it.

Inspired? Have your say!

Now I’m sure Yves isn’t the only one who has an opinion on rehabilitation, accessibility and the Paralympics. In fact, I’d love to hear what YOU have to say in the comments section below.

If you agree with Yves that we need to look at accessibility from a business angle to be effective, check out my hints and tips for how to get beyond some common myths that often hold back this business-oriented view of accessibility.

If Yves’ points on the importance of listening to disabled people when you are creating products and services chimes with you, Hassell Inclusion can provide user research advice and services to help you do this.

And finally, if like Yves you think that organisations should not have to think about including or integrating accessible features in their products as it should be natural and mainstream, check out my summary of BS 8878 – the British Standard for embedding accessibility into organisations’ business-as-usual processes, which is another great thing the UK should be proud of.

Want more?

If this blog has been useful, you might like my blog on How to secure the Paralympic legacy or to sign-up for the Hassell Inclusion newsletter to get more insights like this in your email every week or so.

Yves Veulliet interview transcript

>> Jonathan: Hi it’s Jonathan Hassell, and you are watching a video blog from Hassell Inclusion, bringing you perspectives on how disabled and elderly people use technology so you can create products to appeal to this 20% of the population as well as everyone else.

Well, here in London the Paralympics are just about to start – you can feel the whole of the city holding it’s breath again for another huge opening ceremony tonight and hoping our transport infrastructure will triumph as well as the athletes again.

And the whole world is hopefully going to get a huge dose of inspiration from disabled athletes showing what they can do – their capabilities not their disabilities.

As the uncle of a wheelchair basketball Paralympian in the making, I’ve been delighted by Channel 4’s great ‘Superhumans’ campaign, which has been difficult to miss in the UK over the last year. It’s great to have disabled people talking about their preparations for the games most nights… the challenges – mostly those of being the best they can be at their sport, as well as challenges from their disability… the humour, the character needed to excel in sports that most of us Paralympic audiences are still trying to get our heads around.

As one Paralympian said on the show last night: walking round the athletes’ village is quite some experience. To see so many disabled people with so many different technologies aiding them all in one place is initially overwhelming but starts to seem just normal after a while. I’m hoping viewers of the Paralympic coverage and myself will go on the same journey over the next couple of weeks.

But not all disabled people are athletes, and it’s not only Paralympians who have amazing stories to tell about overcoming challenges. So I was delighted to get a call from Yves Veulliet asking me if I’d read his really timely book ‘Turning Point: The Fall and Rise’ about his experiences of overcoming the trauma of having an accident when he was 21, and the impact of becoming disabled on his social and professional life.

And I’m even more delighted that Yves can join me via skype today, to discuss his book, and the challenges he has in it for how society includes disabled people.

So, Yves, thanks so much for finding the time to chat with me today. Welcome.

>> Yves: Thank you very much Jonathan. And thank you very much for having me today and allowing me to speak a little more about my own experience and the lessons for the inspiration it could bring to other people.

>> Jonathan: That’s great. So, just an initial question: I know your job takes you lots of different places, you travel around the world a lot – we met via skype in Toronto. So where are you at the moment?

>> Yves: I’m based in Belgium. I work in IBM in Belgium at European and Global level, but my office is located in Brussels.

>> Jonathan: That’s great. So talking about your book – Turning Point: the Fall and Rise. I loved it. It thought it was great. It’s a funny, moving account of your story – of the accident you had when you were 21, your experiences of the different stages of rehabilitation after it, and how you made a path forwards for yourself to reintegrate with what you call the ‘main road’ of what you wanted your life to be. It’s a brilliant book. So firstly, can you tell us something about the accident you had, the emotions you went through in the first months afterwards when you didn’t know what you were and you weren’t going to be able to do as a result of the accident?

>> Yves: Actually, yes, I was 21 when had this motorcycle accident. It occurred in 1987. I fell down into a gully because the back wheel of my bike slid on the gravel. And I fell down into the gully, four feet lower, and I broke my spinal cord which, you know… When I work up at the hospital I was in a state of shock because I was completely lost. I had no memory at all about what had happened. And then, you know, when something happens to you, something really bad in terms of health issues or an accident, all human beings are going through the same stages. But not all of them do react the same way, because we all have the different personalities and education etc. So basically the stages that you are going through when something similar happens is: first, what I call the state of shock. You don’t know where you are. You’re completely lost. You’ve lost all your point of who you are, what you can do, what you cannot do, you’re completely lost.

Then comes the denial stage. You realise slowly but surely that your body has been damaged. You don’t know yet, how much you will recover or not… whether you will recover or not. Which means that it creates confusion. And also frustration. So you are in a state of denial. You know, when the doctor tells you, you know, “we’re not sure if you’ll be able to walk again” when you’re 21 it’s almost unbelievable. You cannot hear that. You cannot accept it. At all. You’re in the state of denial. Then, after, you believe your life is kind of at the end. If it’s true, that’s over, that’s it. For me, life is over. Then starts the frustration period. It’s like you see, you know, this eternal story of the ‘half glass, half full or half empty’. And, your glass, my glass was full. It’s like you can no longer dance with your girlfriend. You can no longer go to the swimming pool. You can no longer ride your bike. You can no longer walk. You can no longer dance. You can no longer enjoy your daily life. And so, I would say that this stage is certainly one of the most difficult ones to deal with.

Then comes the state of passivity. Then you realise that even if your life is not completely over, it’s going to be very difficult, very challenging for the rest of your life. Your next question is: shall I be happy, happy during the rest of my life? Will I find some moments of happiness being in a wheelchair? Because the idea you have is that you will be stuck in this wheelchair. And so, progressively, you start realising that your life will be more difficult. But you will find happiness.

>> Jonathan: Can I stop you there for a second because I was really interested in… So one of the things I always do when I help clients understand how to create products for disabled people, and services, is to start by listening to the people that we are creating the products and services for. So, one of the questions I wanted to ask was: did the rehabilitation treatment that you received make you… make you think your doctors, the nurses, the carers, really understood your needs, or did they kind of assume what you needed without asking you? And did that have an impact on how how well they cared for you, and how well you were able to progress through those stages?

>> Yves: Those specialists are very well educated technically. They can treat the disease or, you know, the damage your body had. However, when it comes to human interactions – listening to people, taking the time to listen to what you have to to say, what you have to ask – then it becomes very difficult because they are not trained, they are not educated to do that. They are technical specialists. And even when you speak to these pshychological experts etc. they do have so many patients to see, to treat, that they don’t take enough time. And it’s not really their fault. The issue is broader than only man-to-man relationship. It’s really about the way the society is working. And so the pressure on them is so hard, that for them it’s very hard to be able to spend 10 minutes with each individual patient, every day listening to them. So it’s really a source of frustration for people who acquire disability in their life. And they should be, you know, they should be trained about how to interact positively with any kind of people with disabilities. And, I think, in the long term it would benefit both the health community as well as the patient.

>> Jonathan: I would agree. And you talk brilliantly in the book, this part of the book, about the emotions. So we’ve had the emotions of shock and denial, frustration, depression, passivity when you are in rehabilitation itself. There’s a very moving part of the book when you start making those steps out into the ‘real world’ which is how you phrase it in the book. The emotions when you leave rehabilitation and start to think about how you, kind of, how your new reality works in the real world… where you live, with whom, whether you’d get a job, what you do with your time. And you were also saying you were experiencing a lot of barriers. That the world you were going back to wasn’t necessarily set up for the fact that you were now re-emerging from rehabilitation with a wheelchair. Can you tell me about how you coped with those barriers, and with thinking about what you were going to do with, if you life, your new life, the rest of your life?

>> Yves: I spent 8 months in the hospital. It was more than a hospital, it was a re-education centre. And so the objective of this centre was to help me being more confident interacting with the external world. And so, what is really difficult when you leave this protective place… because this hospital is a protective environment, people look at you as you as ‘normal’ as they are accustomed to interacting with wheelchair users, and any kind of disability. And the environment is also fully accessible, both virtually and physically. So, of course, you need to go through this stage in terms of being able to educate yourself about your possibilities and limits. And so it becomes very difficult the first time you get out of this protective environment. You… it’s a very strange feeling because the other world, the external world, the real world has not changed. But you have changed. But in your mind you have not changed. So, for me, when I was 21, before my accident, whether the narrow doors, the staircase, the high sidewalks was not an issue for me. I’d never thought of all this before. But then I realised how many different obstacles, especially in Belgium where the level of accessibility was very low, as compared to the US, or the UK or Canada. It’s very, very difficult.

It was even more difficult personally when you have to go back to what you thought were familiar environments. In other words, I came back home – I was living with my parents at that time – and then this house where I lived for 21 years, then you realise that this house is no longer a nice place to be, because the environment has become hostile. Because, you know, my bedroom… and, you know, all kids like their bedroom… my bedroom was at the first floor, and I could no longer go to the first floor. Which means they had to redesign the house itself so I was able to live on the ground floor. But then you realise that its no longer the nice place you used to know. It’s a totally new world, and a less attractive one. Because you are no longer familiar with it this world, You have to get accustomed to this new world as well. And, psychologically, it’s very very hard. You realise you have changed physically, but you realise that the environment, both virtual and physical environment, need to adapt to yourself, and this is not taking place, this is not happening. You need to speak again and again and again about the needs you have in terms of accessibility. And people do not always understand it, so you have to repeat yourself again and again. And it’s… it’s very difficult because it obliges you to look at yourself differently. So educating other people who are not familiar with disability is very difficult, when you’re not yourself familiar with it yourself.

>> Jonathan: So that’s your home life. Now obviously you’re in employment at the moment, and we’ll come on to that in a moment. But can you tell us about those initial steps into employment for you at that time? How easy was it for you to get a job?

>> Yves: Well, as we said already, I was 21 when this motorcycle accident occurred, so I was still a student at that time. But then, in terms of accessibility, back in 1987 the level of accessibility in schools and high-schools and universities was even lower than today. So I had to, yeah, I didn’t really have a large number of choices. I had to think about whether… To consider two options actually. Whether I would try to – because I wanted to be included in society. They way to do this is… Well… There are only two ways of doing that. One is sport. Practising sport at a reasonable high level which allows you to get some visibility around your activity and around yourself. Or through a job. And it turns out that I chose the second option because I’m very bad at sport.

>> Jonathan: Me too.

>> Yves: So the choice was very limited for me. And so I started to investigate what kind of work… You know, when you start realising that the world is difficult for you, then the inclusion in the society in general will be challenging. However, you start to be conscious of your possibilities and your limits. Then you have to consider what… what are your abilities. What are… which… What kind of things you would like to do to be included in this society. And then I realised that, er, well, using a computer… Thinking of IT in general, back in 1987 we were still at the very large box, large screen, very heavy PC etc. So for me it was, you know, computer IT technology was maybe the most attractive way for me to feel included in society. And so I started work in a school as a computer administrator to, you know, to create some, to computerise all the administrations in this school. Which was really a good experience for me, both in terms of professional experience and personal experience. Because I had to interact with kids on a daily basis. And they are very open at asking very key questions about disability, about what it means to use a wheelchair. How lucky I was to be able, not to have to walk. That I could use wheels instead of legs to move around. So how lucky I was. So then they ask key questions, very valid questions, and it was a very interesting experience.

>> Jonathan: Sure. That’s good. So now you’re Diversity leader for IBM Canada and Europe. Obviously there’s a lot of growth of career between being in the school and now. I’m just interested in what your job involves now, and how your experiences actually help you be effective in what you do.

>> Yves: Thank you. Well, actually, I joined here at 1982, 1992, and after different functions, since 2005 I am Workforce Diversity Leader for IBM Canada and Europe as you said. And my role is really to try and implement programmes to facilitate inclusion of any and all full employees in the IBM organisation regardless of their difference, whether it’s disability or cultural difference etc. Actually we’re all humans. We all want to be valued for our opportunities, for our skills, regardless of our culture, of our physical differences etc. So my role is really to think of the best ways to make sure that all people in IBM feel comfortable working in the organisation. So it’s really interesting to me to have this global experience, because although I’m labelled as a mobility impaired person, I have a job that requires me to travel frequently. And so, in terms of, you know, breaking the stereotypes, I’m a very good example of this, because I spend quite a lot of time in planes, in trains etc. And it’s really… I was very lucky to have a manager who was straightforward enough to ask me the key questions: will you be comfortable in this job, although, despite the fact that you use a wheelchair? Which is a key question that other people daren’t ask. And so it’s really a very good experience for me as well, in terms of culture. But of course I have to educate people, especially in lower economy… in countries were the economy is less developed, because the accessibility level is currently linked to the stage of the economic development of this country.

>> Jonathan: Sure. And one of the things I loved about your book that comes over is how your mindset and humour kind of comes through all the way. You seem to be saying, and I think this is your view of inclusion, that disabled people don’t need to be given any favours, they just need to be freed from unnecessary barriers that get put in their way to living the same life, competing for the same jobs, as everyone else… Would it be right for me to sum up what you are trying to say by saying that the challenge for disabled people should be like everyone else: how to be the best that they can be, rather than how to get around a world that was not set up for them right… Did I get that right?

>> Yves: Absolutely. There is a key parallel between the world of sport and the world of work. We all want to be the best in what we do, regardless of the activity that we decide to undertake. Which means that for the athletes, whether they are disabled or not… I’m not sure we have to call athletes with disabilities ‘superhuman’. They are human. Right? I am human. I want to do the job the best I can. They want to do their sport the best they can. Regardless of whether they use a wheelchair or they use sneakers. It’s exactly the same way of approaching things. I believe that, you know, to be honest with you, I still don’t understand why Paralympics are separate from the Olympics.

>> Jonathan: I thought you would have a view on that.

>> Yves: Right! You know, all those people are athletes. And the sweat, whether they are disabled people or they are athletes, able-bodied athletes, their sweat is the same. So why don’t we have…? You know, that would be a tremendous example of inclusion… Having all those athletes with a wheelchair on their legs, with two arms, with one arm, whatever… You know, being together during the games. Being together in the stadiums etc. during the opening ceremony. You would have all athletes regardless of their physical experience all together. That would be the ultimate example of inclusion.

>> Jonathan: I would agree. Did you see… I think, whether or not it’s on it’s way I don’t know… But did you see Oscar Pistorius running in the Olympics. I mean, for me, and I think possibility for his competitors, the other athletes that were running in the race against him and with him, that was a quite an emotional moment. For those two worlds to be in one place. Competing at the same level. Did you have thoughts on that?

>> Yves: Yes, it’s exactly the same in the world of work. Because I work with people, maybe I’m the only one using a wheelchair in my team… In terms of relationship, it’s exactly the same model as with the athletes. When they have to run with Oscar Pistorius… My colleagues have to work with me as well. And so they were also questioning my abilities, my capabilities. Then they realised that the fact that I no longer walk is not an issue when it comes to discussion together, to work together, to try to do positive things for the company, for the work. And it’s also true in the world of sport. Mr Pistorius is running like any other people, regardless of the kind of sneakers he has or has not. It’s exactly the same in my job. When I interact with my valid colleagues, they no longer consider me someone using a wheelchair. I am not my disability. I have a disability. I am not my wheelchair. I am using a wheelchair. That’s totally different. And once the people you work with, or you interact with, have got the message, you know, it’s like business as usual.

>> Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. That’s really powerful. Thank you for that. That’s great. You end the book by including quite a rousing open letter to people who create products and services, and actually people who legislate, who create laws as well, advocating them to take accessibility… to create them inclusively… You travel around the world for your job. So, presumably you experience a lot of inclusion and exclusion in the sorts of products and services and environments that you’re in. Do you see signs that the world is improving in inclusion?

>> Yves: I think so. Yes, yes. But I would say that… maybe it’s not politically correct, but I’m going to say it… However, it believe that when you speak to the business world, you must speak their language. So if they come to realise that people with disabilities represent not a niche market, but a real powerful market… Because a lot of people live with a disability – with a visual impairment, with a mobility impairment, with a hearing impairment, mental disability etc. – that require an accessible environment: an accessible website, an accessible marketplace with ramps, with elevators etc. Then they realise, slowly but surely, that making their business more accessible, both virtually and physically, allows them to enlarge… to grow their profit, their revenue. And so if you… I’m not against taking disability from this business perspective. You should not be ashamed. You know, we are humans, right? So we have the power, we also have the right to be consumers. And so if you offer products and services that are accessible, from a pure business perspective, you enlarge your pool of clients. So thinking about inclusion, at the end of the day, what we all want is a world as accessible as possible. I wouldn’t say fully accessible – I’m not dreaming. As accessible as possible. And if we take this accessibility issue from the business angle that would be one of the most effective ways to achieve this.

>> Jonathan: Absolutely. I was saying exactly the same thing to people at google yesterday. That’s my message to everyone that I speak to. There are a number of models, business models, for why inclusion is important. You can think of legal models, you can think of ethical models. But, for me, the bottom line – whether or not you can actually make more money is you make inclusive products – is where it’s at. That’s the one business model that never goes away – in a recession, or when laws change, anything like that. It’s key. So one last thing: I like to end blogs by encouraging my readers and viewers to do something, to make some sort of response… There are lot of creators of digital products in my audience, do you have a particular challenge for them?

>> Yves: Erm, not really a challenge. But just one thing they should always keep in mind… When they create products, er, including or integrating accessible features in their product should not be something that they have to think about. This should be natural. This should be mainstream. This accessibility feature should be included from the beginning, from the very beginning, when they start thinking of creating products. Including accessibility features in their products should be as natural as thinking about a keyboard with keys.

>> Jonathan: Sure, absolutely, well, as I say, the Standards I’ve created here in the UK, BS 8878, is all about enabling organisations to do that. That’s great. Thank you so much for that Yves. As always on Hassell Inclusion video blogs the best comments happen after the episode in the comments over on hassellinclusion.com so if you’re watching this somewhere else come back to hassellinclusion.com and tell us what you think.

And don’t forget, this is Yves’s book ‘Turning Point: The Fall & Rise’. All of the information for how to get this will be below the video on hassellinclusion.com

Thanks so much Yves for inspiring us today. This will be going a few days into the Paralympics. So hopefully people will be starting to think, yeah, I’m being inspired by disabled people, I’m getting used to being inspired day after day. What more can I do? I think this has given us a number of key insights for what would be helpful to, er, set up the right sort of world where the barriers are not so high and people can achieve their full potential. So thank you everyone for watching. We’ll see you next time. Bye everybody.

>> Yves: Goodbye Jonathan. And thank you.

This comes after a Californian court refused to dismiss a lawsuit by GLAD against CNN for its refusal to add closed captioning to its news clips back in February.

Websites are covered by the ADA

The Netflix captions suit ruling is another clear support for the legal case behind web accessibility in the USA, as it gives a clear ruling on the application of the ADA to the web.

While Netflix had argued that the ADA only applies to physical places and shouldn’t apply to a web-only business, the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts judge stated in his decision that:

“the legislative history of the ADA makes clear that Congress intended the ADA to adapt to changes in technology.”

According to the judge:

“In a society in which business is increasingly conducted online,” the ADA would only be compromised by ”excluding businesses that sell services through the Internet.”

As Arlene Mayerson, attorney for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, says:

“By recognizing that websites are covered by the ADA, the court has ensured that the ADA stays relevant as much of our society moves from Main Street to the Internet.”

Has the lawsuit already had most of its intended effect?

What is particularly interesting in this case is that, possibly as a result of this lawsuit, Netflix is already doing more than almost any other video-on-demand supplier to enrich its content with captions / subtitles.

In the last year it has:

• added caption / subtitle support to its iPhone and iPad apps; and
• reached its target of 80% of the hours streamed in the US being of content with captions or subtitles available (in December 2011).

Could a similar lawsuit happen in the UK?

In comparison, Netflix’s main rival in the UK – LoveFilm – doesn’t yet include closed captions (or subtitles, as they are usually called in the UK) on its LoveFilm Instant service on any platform, despite this having been something highlighted by Hearing Impaired people through the RNID over a year ago and continually kept in the public eye by Pesky People’s #subtitlesnow campaign.

LoveFilm’s reasoning for its lack of captions, stated in May 2011 as a response to Craig Butchers initial complaint, was that it was:

“… prohibitively costly, and likely to be breach of license agreements, for us to unilaterally develop and implement open or closed captioning for our on demand titles but we will continue to raise this with our licensors.

It is worth noting that nearly our entire VOD catalogue is duplicated by our DVD catalogue and most DVDs have some form of English language subtitling and, in some cases, full captioning.”

With Netflix’s progress in providing captions, proving that it can be done in terms of license terms and costs, this excuse is beginning to look less and less reasonable.

LoveFilm’s argument – that people who need captions can get that facility through their DVD catalogue – has echoes of the argument that some mobile app owners have used to justify the lack of accessibility of their apps: that the service provided by their app is also available in an accessible form via their website.

However, as Martin Sloan blogged on that issue:

“service providers do have a duty, under the reasonable adjustments obligation, to continue to review the means through which they provide services and consider whether any adjustments can be made which will improve the accessibility to users with disablities (this obligation does not apply to potential age discrimination). This is an evolving duty, and so requires service providers to take advantage of new technologies and techniques – for example, new hardware or operating system features, and new W3C standards.”

So, while precedents set under the American ADA do not apply in the UK, the similarities between the judge’s ruling that the ADA’s intention is to adapt to changes in technology, and the Equality Act’s clear evolving duty on service providers to take advantage of new technologies, should be enough to give LoveFilm some pause for thought.

It’s only UK disability lobbyists’ culture of ‘work with…’ rather than ‘litigate against…’ that is stopping a similar captioning lawsuit happening here in the UK.

And, as the RNIB BMI-baby lawsuit seems to indicate, a culture of litigation seems to be emerging in the UK, based on the successful results of disabled groups mobilising in the US.

Could provision of captions/subtitles be a USP for Netflix over LoveFilm?

For now, despite the ongoing lawsuit against it, Netflix is still the best bet for subtitled film and TV from paid-for video-on-demand services in the UK, as it is in the US.

For people who are hard of hearing, this gives Netflix a unique selling point over LoveFilm.

And, bearing in mind that the same technology used for closed-captions for the original language of a film or TV programme can be used to caption it into other languages, closed-captioning technology may be a strategically essential element to enable organisations like Netflix and LoveFilm to extend their services into countries outside the English-speaking world.

In the battle for distribution of online video globally, as understood by YouTube, closed-captioning is a real enabler.

How should LoveFilm and other online streaming services react to this case?

Like all organisations that own websites, video-on-demand services would do well to further consider how to balance the needs of their disabled users with the needs of their other users, and how to balance the priority of creating accessibility USPs against USPs in available content, available platforms etc.

Based on the legal and business case for closed-captions, my recommendation is that all video-on-demand services place a higher priority on investigating how to put in place the right workflows to ensure as much of their content that has captions / subtitles on DVDs has the same captions / subtitles online.

As Hassell Inclusion were instrumental in helping BBC iPlayer to achieve close to 100% subtitles for all its TV and film content online, we’d be happy to help any online video providers investigate how the inclusion of captions could be added to their business-as-usual video production and distribution processes to gain competitive advantage.

Please contact us if we can be of any help.

9th October 2012 update – case settled

The captions lawsuit between NAD and Netflix was settled on 9th October, with an agreement for Netflix to achieve 100% captioned programmes within 2 years and to pay costs of $755,000 in legal fees.

For more, see my analysis blog on what does this mean for Netflix, NAD, the hard-of-hearing people that organisations like NAD represent, and the web industry in general?

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Global Accessibility Awareness Day is a community-driven effort whose goal is to dedicate one day to raising the profile of and introducing the topic of digital (web, software, mobile app/device etc.) accessibility and people with different disabilities to the broadest audience possible.

I’ve already done quite a bit via this site and blog to raise the profile of accessibility globally, especially through my popular Accessibility Myths 2011 blogs.

Today, I’m going to do my bit for GAAD by blogging on one of the subjects people regularly ask me about – accessibility statements – and highlight how guidance in BS 8878 adds to their effectiveness.

History of accessibility statements and accessibility policy statements

Accessibility statements have been around for years.

While it’s likely that some accessibility statements existed on websites before 2006, the first official definition of what a statement should be appeared in PAS 78 Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites (the fore-runner to BS 8878) in March 2006.

PAS 78 recommended ‘a summary of [a website's] accessibility policy should be made available on the website’ and called this summary an accessibility policy statement.

The role of an accessibility policy statement was to let the disabled users of a website know the important aspects of the way the site had been created to be accessible, and give details on how they could optimise their website user experience, usually through following links to information on the BBC My Web My Way site.

When the drafting team of BS 8878 and I were considering how BS 8878 should update this advice, we did a lot more thinking about the sorts of statements we’d become used to seeing on websites, and how helpful they were to users.

Other than streamlining the language so that an accessibility policy statement became an accessibility statement, the most crucial aspect of this was…

Who is an accessibility statement for?

The lack of thinking about who accessibility statements are for is where most current statements fall down, big time.

Most statements talk a lot about how committed the organisation that owns the website is about accessibility. They give grand words of intent, backed up by attempts to prove they live up to those words.

The grand words are fine, if a little generic.

The attempts to prove the site’s accessibility usually go along the lines of publishing:

• loads of jargon from the web development community (HTML 5, CSS 3, JavaScript etc.);
• loads of jargon from the accessibility community (WCAG 2.0, WAI-ARIA etc.);
• and loads of jargon about accessibility legislation (DDA, Equality Act, ADA etc.)

Statements often read like a combination of a sales piece on how socially responsible the organisation is, a technology manual, and some legal small print.

All of which would be fine if the intended audience for the statement was other web developer, accessibility consultants and lawyers.

But these statements are supposed ‘to give accessibility information to disabled people’…

When might disabled people want to read accessibility information?

So, let’s think about why disabled people might want that information, and when they might visit a website’s accessibility statement…

I’ll use an analogy.

Like most people, I have various hats that I wear: I’m a man, a dad, a husband, an accessibility consultant, someone who wears contact-lenses, a resident of London, a supporter of Fulham Football Club…

Say, for some obscure legal reason, websites felt they needed to publish links on every page to information on how people who are short-sighted could use them best.

The question is: why would I ever click on that link?

Would I go to the Fulham FC site to look for information on the latest team news, but see the link to ‘Short-sighted’ and think ‘forget that team news, let’s check to see what they’re saying about contact-lenses first’?

That’s faintly ridiculous.

A more sensible thing to do would be to get to the team news, and only go to the ‘Short-sighted’ page if I had a problem reading the team news that I though might be solved if I went to the ‘Short-sighted’ page.

And what would my reaction be if, when I arrived at that ‘Short-sighted’ page, I found platitudes about ‘how Fulham FC really cares for people with contact-lenses’ and all the things they say they’ve done to help me, in jargon I can’t understand, and finally found a link to something which could help me, but required me to go to another site and spend 20 minutes or £200 on a solution?

What should be the aim of an accessibility statement?

So, chances are the only reason people will visit a website’s accessibility statement is because something on the websites is not working for them.

They’ll be annoyed that the site isn’t working for them already. And they’ll want the accessibility page to get them to a solution to their problem as soon as possible.

If they don’t find that solution quickly, they’ll either:

• write the site off as useless and go elsewhere (losing the site custom);
• or want to complain, using whatever national law they can get their hands on to back up their case (giving the site’s legal and accessibility teams a challenge).

BS 8878′s tips on how to write an accessibility statement

With this insight in mind, BS 8878 recommends that accessibility statements:

• use clear, simple language, that the greatest majority of disabled users (including those with learning difficulties) can understand (even if they can’t understand the rest of the site)
• include information on how users can customise their experience of the website if they are having difficulties using it – either through installing assistive technologies, using browser or operating system accessibility features, or accessibility tools on the site itself
• include information on any accessibility limitations the site has (as BS 8878 accepts that the realities of site creation deadlines often mean sites regularly need to launch without perfect accessibility for all users), and plans to fix the limitations
• include contact mechanisms for disabled people to use to get help if they still can’t find a solution to their difficulties, and suggest that people read WAI’s ‘Contacting Organisations about Inaccessible Websites’ document to make sure their feedback adequately explains the problem they are having
• after this information the statement may include information on how the owners of the website catered for accessibility in its production, but this should avoid technical terms and jargon
• include the date the accessibility statement was last updated (and the statement’s accuracy should be reviewed and updated every time a new version of the site is launched)

Good accessibility statement examples

To help you write a best-practice statement, BS 8878 includes an example accessibility statement in its annexes. Other good examples include:

• Hassell Inclusion’s accessibility statement
• the accessibility help and accessibility policy published on gov.uk are also along the right lines

If you need help in writing your website’s accessibility statement, please contact us and we’ll be glad to help you.

What do you think?

I’d be really interested for any disabled or elderly people to let me know what they think about the advice in this blog, and examples of accessibility statements you’ve found useful or not – please leave a comment if you have time.

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