Wearing badges is not enough

— Published September 29th, 2005  |  by Paul Fitzsimons   |  4 Comments

Something strange is happening. After years of lip service and resistance, clients and industry peers are talking more enthusiastically about accessibility compliance.

'We're aiming for AAA on our site.' 'Our new site is AAA compliant.' 'Our new clients are seeking compliance with AAA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0'.

And with this enthusiasm has come a proliferation of compliance badges and icons.

But rather than being overjoyed at this late conversion, I'm a little depressed and worried. Of course it's good that awareness of standards is increasing, but it strikes me that the motivation is all wrong. There’s too much focus on compliance, rather than on the people who benefit from compliance. Too much focus on techniques at the expense of the user experience.

Moreover, if you scratch the surface of many sites that are 'valid XHTML, CSS and AAA' you'll find that the claims are often dubious.

Standards compliance is about creating web content that conforms to best standards and practises and applying the techniques to ensure content reaches the most people possible. It is about coming up with design solutions that will enhance the user experience now and in the future.

It is not about badges. The badge is secondary to the work that is performed, and to the people who benefit from your design efforts.

Web accessibility is about people

Accessibility is about giving people access to the content on websites.

Creating accessible websites is about taking the time to understand the goals of users with disabilities and thinking through the design implications.

But how many design projects involve users with disabilities? How many web designers have practical knowledge about what is or isn't difficult for users of assistive technologies? How many websites displaying a WCAG AAA badge have actually been tested by users with disabilities?

The answer, unfortunately, is very few.

Valid does not mean accessible

At the risk of alienating my colleagues, I want to skewer one of the more popular myths about accessibility: valid is not the same as accessible.

It is possible to create accessible pages using invalid markup and tables for layout. It is equally possible to create inaccessible swamps with valid HTML and CSS.

That is not to say that valid HTML and CSS are not important, they are. And the wider advantages of these techniques mean that they should be an integral part of your web design.

But they are secondary to the delivery of a useful and enjoyable experience to all your users.

The guidelines are not subjective

It is sometimes said that guidelines are open to subjective interpretation, but this is only partly true. The guidelines are concerned with the experience of users with disabilities and therefore an objective, incontrovertible measure of compliance can only be gained through involving users in the design process and testing with real users.

The problem with badges

It is almost a rule of thumb that the sites most loudly trumpeting AAA compliance have the most dubious basis for their claims. This has always been the case, particularly when there is a commercial advantage to claiming accessibility.

Swedish accessibility expert Tommy Olsson describes them as 'badge hunters', and he makes the point that 'If accessibility claims don't hold up to scrutiny, badges lose their effect. Therefore it is better to honestly claim level A or AA, than to boast AAA when you're not even close.'

Claiming any level of accessibility without substance is wrong. But blithely displaying AAA badges risks undermining the wider effort to create better websites for users with disabilities, and the effort to devise solutions that can make this happen.

AAA is not easy

For a long time designers and clients believed that accessibility was too difficult, and chose to ignore it altogether. This is manifestly not the case. Reasonable accessibility, A or AA, is relatively easy to achieve. (Which is why AA has been set as the minimum recommended standard for public sector websites in Ireland, and for many accessibility initiatives across the world.)

But meeting the requirements for AAA-compliance is a far more substantial challenge involving other disciplines apart from web design and programming: writing easy-to-read copy, supplementing text with graphic or auditory illustrations, allowing users to customise the presentation of content.

In fact, for many accessibility experts AAA-compliance is the holy grail of web design – perfection that is impossible to achieve but which designers should aspire.

I don't hold with such romantic notions, but I firmly believe that achieving AAA compliance requires a lot of effort and skill — and simply saying so or displaying a badge does not magically make it happen.