Hello everybody, and thank you for, among all other interesting talks today, choosing to dwell into the topic of accessibility, and how to make the world better for everyone.
I’m far form being an expert in accessibility, and I have to thank the passion for it to my A11y professor from University of Barcelona, Mireia Ribera. This however, plays in favor of my aim today, as my goal will be to demonstrate that you don’t need to be experts in accessibility to care for all your users, and you don’t need to be experts to implement basic tenants of universal design.
For whom do we do it? Benefits & Misconceptions Why do we bother? When should we do it? How do we make it possible? Strategy & Best Practices
WHO?
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World Health Organization fact sheet from 2014: “Over a billion people, about 15% of the world's population, have some form of disability.”
WhoWorld Health Organization fact sheet from 2014
People living in Europe(742 millions)
Disabled people in the world(1000 millions)
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That’s 250 millions more than all the people living in Europe! “Between 110 million and 190 million adults have significant difficulties in functioning.”
WhoEU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) from 2014
Millions!
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European Adults over 16: 8.5% have severe limitation and 17.5% have moderate limitations in everyday activities. That’s 1 in 4, or in RAW NUMBERS more than 100 million people in EU27 – more than the whole population of Germany. NOT MUCH OF AN EDGE CASE! “Limitation in activities people usually do because of health problems for at least the last 6 months”
Quick personal example: My sensitivity to sunlight makes reading on the beach mission impossible! (you’ll rightfully ask why on Earth did I choose to live in Spain – I must be a masochist… )�
Who- Temporary disability
- Situational disability
- Permanent
”Technology is the limb I never had.” Joanne O’Riordan
For those with permanent disability Technology is Lifeline! Born without limbs, at this 19 years old disability rights campaigner has just been awarded one of the Outstanding Young Person of the World Awards. Her brother Steven is making a film of her life, titled No Limbs No Limits.
EVERYONE
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So, we ALL CAN become disabled at some point, moment or period in our lives.
Difficulty seeing – TOOLS (Screen readers, Braille displays) Blind, Low Vision, Reduced field, Sensitivity to flashes, Glare, Cataracts 3%-4% of people in the US, UK and Canada can't see well enough to read Incidence increases with age, with more than 10% of over-70s affected. Color blindness 8% of Caucasian males in the US suffer from some form of color blindness, compared to 0.5% of females. (source: nih.gov). Incidence of color blindness differs between ethnic groups - from 1% in Eskimos to 8% in Caucasian males.
Who
Auditory > Visual
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Difficulty hearing – TOOLS (Hearing aides, captions & subtitles) 4%-5% of people in the US, UK and Canada suffer from difficulty hearing (sources: census.gov, Statistics Canada, UK ONS) Incidence increases sharply in over-60s, with more than 20% of over-75s affected.
Who
Mobility > Auditory >
Visual
http://www.sc.edu/scatp/cdrom/scatphelp.htm
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Dexterity difficulties – TOOLS (unlikely to use a mouse, and rely on the keyboard, mouth stick (sip & puff), head wand tracker or eye tracker/gazer instead) 7% of working age adults have a severe dexterity difficulty Stroke, Traumatic Brain and Spinal Cord Injuries, Cerebral Palsy, Muscular Dystrophy, Multiple Sclerosis, Arthritis, Dexterity limitations of hand(s)
Reading difficulties Up to 20% of people in the US have reading difficulties, including dyslexia (source: nih.gov). Another 25 %– 28% very limited literacy skills - National Adult Literacy Survey 'This typography is not designed to recreate what it would be like to read to read if you were dyslexic it is designed to simulate the feeling of reading with dyslexia by slowing the reading time of the viewer down to a speed of which someone who has dyslexia would read'
Who
WHO?
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Question begets: who, in reality, benefits from improved accessibility?
DISABLED?
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Anybody here without a mobile? Bell's mother and wife were deaf and his research on hearing devices eventually culminated in patenting the telephone in 1876, which in consequence brought the design of the transistor in 1947, and the transistor-radio in 1953 by Bell Labs. Curb cuts (transition between sidewalk and street) for people in wheelchairs benefit parents with baby carriages or ANYBODY with a trolley! Paid parental leave for women eventually led to right of fathers to take the same.
DISABLED?
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Designing for extremes leads to better design for EVERYONE!
EVERYONE
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Every time we design for an edge case it ends up benefiting everybody! But, another very important reason why accessibility EVENTUALLY ends up benefiting everybody…
Everyone
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On another hand, as we age, alongside various age-related disabilities, we (hopefully) gain more SPENDING POWER. Older people often have large amounts of disposable income and leisure time. “In US people with disabilities control aggregate annual income of > $1 trillion” (almost 900 billion Euros) - Disability Funders Network UK: impaired + elderly have combined spending power of 297 billion € - Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB)
Everyone
World report on disability 2011, WHO
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World Health Organization, World report on disability from 2011 Incidence of disability by age - Strong correlation between disability and ageing => numbers increase with demographic change.
Everyone
World report on disability 2011, WHO
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World Health Organization, World report on disability from 2011 Note: Government statistical agencies produce these numbers from questionnaires, but questions aren't standardized between countries, so figures are not directly comparable from country to country. For example, the questions "do you have difficulty seeing" and "do you have difficulty seeing newsprint" produce different response rates. Numbers also depend on overall % of older population, so consider ALL your audiences!
EveryoneEU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) from 2014
65+ Millions!
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50 millions of European older citizens have some for of disability. By 2020 half of European adults will be aged 50 or over!
EVERYONE
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Once again: Designing for “extremes” eventually leads to better design for EVERYONE (today or tomorrow, or in 20 years)!
WHY?
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Anybody is still asking why?
Good for Business - Benefits SEO
- Improves mobile access and overall usability
- Increases market share
- PR impact derived from corporate social responsibility
- Reduces legal risk
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SEO: Googe search for “alt tag” will yield more SEO related results than design or a11y ones For all effects & purposes, Google is BLIND! CNET - 30% Increase in traffic after they provided transcripts! Tesco supermarkets in UK implemented a fully accessible version of their online grocery store - It cost £35,000 to develop and generates estimated annual revenue of £1.61m.
Standards & Laws- European Standard on accessibility requirements for public procurement of
ICT products and services (EN 301 549 - 2014)
- Spanish norm UNE 139803:2012
- US - Section 508 (1998) & ADA- 21st Century & Video Accessibility Act (2010)
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 as ISO/IEC 40500 International Standard (2012)
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Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 - scheduled for refresh in 2015 CVAA updates federal law to increase the access of persons with disabilities to modern communications. Spanish Royal Decree from 2013 defines the disability not as an isolated property of a person, but as what surges when person interacts with situations that represent barriers that limit her life.
Accessibility mishaps make headlines (and courtrooms)
- National Federation of the Blind v. TARGET (2008)
- National Association of the Deaf (NAD) v. Netflix (2012)
US Retail chain TARGET – Ruling defined Internet sites as places of “public accommodation” protected by ADA 2012 – Netflix start offering closed captions (netflix-makes-a-blind-superhero-accessible-to-blind-viewers) October 2012 - Ten Million Books Accessible to Blind Readers - The Authors’ Guild v. HathiTrust (the repository of the Google books university scans) case permits university libraries to digitize their entire collections of books and printed media and it allows the university libraries to make ten million accessible books available to blind readers around the country. February 2015 - federal lawsuits against Harvard and M.I.T., saying both universities violated antidiscrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials. edX Accessibility Best Practices Guidance for Content Providers - documentation for content providers on how to develop courses that can serve the widest possible audience.
When?
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It’s cheaper to build accessibility features into a new site than to retrofit an old one.
Don’t put up fires
Plan accessibility as early as possible, don’t wait for QA
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Building a11y from beginning cost is between 1% and 3% of the budget, retrofit goes to 10%.
Plan the right intervention, by the right person, at the right time within the development lifecycle. Determine goals, roles and policies as BROADLY as possible (aiming at the organization as a whole).
I suggest John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change as inspiration Prepare business case for inclusive content to maximize acceptance and support in the organization A Cautionary Tale of Inaccessibility: Target Corporation Disguise A11y as SEO or MOBILE for stakeholders!
Strategy & Best Practices
You can’t fix everything at once
Make process part of the culture
Involve the users into planning and testing!
John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change
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Start with small wins (A-AA) – Fix the low hanging fruits (come to theworkshop afterwards ;) Consider the output(s) of your content (web, mobile, PDF…), and choose the resources, assets and authoring tools accordingly. Use Web Accessibility Initiative resources. Fully integrate A11y into your project lifecycle, and ensure its maintainability though QA process and testing Style Guides! Sighted testers overthink some things and make bad assumptions about others. People who use screen readers or other assistive technologies daily, for access to information and services, not to "test for accessibility" have a much different experience.
Once you dive into a11y you’ll find “guidelines”, “recommendations”, “requirements”, “success criteria”, and acronyms like “WCAG”, “Section 508”! Specs can be frustratingly complex: Forced to learn some new language from someone who was deliberately trying to confuse 228 page "Understanding WCAG 2.0" document 385 pages for "How to Meet WCAG 2.0" to explain a standard which has a core principle of "Understandable“ It's like reading the Constitution!!! These are reference docs, you did not learn HTML from reference!
POUR principles
Information must be:
PerceivableOperableUnderstandableRobust
OFFER ALTERNATIVES
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Most useful takeaway today! What does that mean? �Don’t limit your audience to only one sensory mean of consuming content.
OFFER ALTERNATIVES - Color & Contrast
http://www.floeproject.org/
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By all means, get the contrast right at first shot, but if you can:� Making available a high contrast version of your content will benefit the users with low vision AND all those who need to read it in highly illuminated settings Offer alternative CSS color and contrast schemes Floe is a project of the Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University.
OFFER ALTERNATIVES - Accessible Multimedia
Able Video Player - http://www.washington.edu/doit/videos/
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Offering timed captions and transcripts for your video and audio content will benefit auditory challenged audience AND improve its comprehension, make it searchable and referenceable for everybody. SEO!!!
OFFER ALTERNATIVES - Don’t Autoplay!
http://devtoolschallenger.com/
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There are ways & ways to let your users actually choose weather (and when) they want some amazing piece of content you produced. BIG a11y fail, so don’t’ autoplay, but…
OFFER ALTERNATIVES – Let it play!
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Providing an audio version of your content (either natively or by ensuring it is accessible to screen readers) will benefit your blind users AND all those who choose/prefer to listen instead of reading.
OFFER ALTERNATIVES – KISS(C) Principle
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Maintaining consistent terminology, structure and navigation, and making the content easily readable through the use of plain language will reduce cognitive load for all the audiences AND lower your localization costs. And I’ve saved the good news for last…
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PLETHORA of resources! Improving accessibility does involve investing more effort, the one of inclusion and thinking of and producing content for those who do not consume it the same way we able do. So yes, there is that additional layer of effort, but to cite one of my favorite SciFi characters: “The cause is just, and fair, and necessary!”, from both human, business and legal points of view. Therefore, go and make your content like you care for everybody! Thank you.
Questions?
Thank you!
Special thanks to Digital Content Management -Graduate Dept. and Prof. Mireia Ribera at iSchool of University of Barcelona, Spain.
Your opinion is important! http://UA07.honestly.de
