Web Accessibility: A turning Point for Legislative Options

Submission to EU Consultation on Web Accessibility

Date: 04/06/2008

This Paper should be read in conjunction with humanITy Paper ‘Key Factors in Generic Disability ICT Access Rights' dated 28^th May 2008 by Kevin Carey, Director, humanITy.

1. Background

1.1 Since the mid 1990s there has been an iterative initiative by the World Wide Web Consortium' Web Accessibility Initiative (w3org/wai) to define web accessibility and the output from this process has widely been accepted as the standard cited in legislation and regulation (until now WCAG 1). To that extent the WAI initiative has been a striking political success; it has received global recognition and although there have been some attempts to 'improve' it by other parties, notably some nation states, most stakeholders have agreed that it is better to conform to a global standard than to fragment it, even if some of the fragmentation results in a better set of guidelines.

1.2 The problem for web accessibility, therefore, has not been the difficulty of defining a standard and giving it a widely recognised remit; that process, enshrined in WCAG 1.0, took place remarkably quickly. The major problem has been in gaining a reasonable level of compliance. Even in the public sector in jurisdictions with legislated compliance, results have been poor.

1.3 The central question, therefore, is whether it is of benefit to disabled people to continue with the current strategy of trying to legislate for the provisions of WAI in the area of accessibility guidelines (bearing in mind the imminence of WCAG 2.0) or whether another strategy is required.

2. The Options

2.1 There are, fundamentally, three options for improving web accessibility on a vertical legislative basis, any of which could be integrated into a horizontal approach:

Voluntary codes of practice with 'moral' force and 'moral' remedies;
Legislation/regulation of the publisher;
Uncontested rights by disabled people and their intermediaries to render material accessible which is in the public domain.

2.2 It is the central contention of this Paper that neither the voluntary nor even the legislative/regulatory approach is not likely to work with respect to the publisher in a competitive environment because the balance of the two opposing factors in competition - cost and market share - are unfavourable to disabled people: the increased market share produced by accessibility is perceived to be outweighed by the cost of accessibility.

2.3 There are three arguments generally advanced against the proposition in 2.2:

First, awareness raising will improve accessibility compliance (see 2.4 below);
Secondly, ‘design for all' will lower the cost of accessibility by integrating its principles into initial design (see 2.5);
Thirdly, that there is a 'business case' for accessibility (see 2.6 below).

2.4 There is no evidence that awareness raising improves accessibility compliance; the evidence against this assertion is strongest if the accessibility of public sector web sites concerned with health, welfare and social services - and even special education - are analysed. These are organisations whose awareness level could hardly be exceeded.

2.5 In order to comply with WAI WCAG 1.0 there are, fundamentally, three basic principles:

Enable customisation;
Enable choice of user interface;
Create multi media multi modally.

The first of these three principles may be implemented at very low cost at the initial design stage. It is neither difficult nor expensive to separate style from content and to design in a granular way so that customisation is the facilitated, particularly in respect of text and image size, colour and contrast. The second is more costly and still presents some difficulties, notably the use of common files on a television and computer user interface; and the size of screens means that macros need to be written for automated page simplification, as this Paper will show in Section 3, the third is prohibitively expensive at whatever stage of production it is implemented (in television, for example, special services to render product multi modal - signing, sub titling and audio description - take place at the post production phase for all except live broadcasts).

2.6 The 'business case' for accessibility (particularly in the context of 2.5 above) is only viable in the theoretical scenario of unrestricted capital availability; it has been seen not to work where capital is limited (see Appendix 1). If the balance of competitive advantage was in favour of accessibility as a rational use of capital with an advantage to shareholders it would already be a widespread practice.

3. The Challenge of Multi Modality

3.1 The only area of multi media which has been consistently rendered multi modally is that sector of broadcasting which is regulated. Because historically broadcasting rights have been granted in exchange for accessibility undertakings and/or because it is subject to state regulation and finance, compliance has been high (see Appendix 2). Digitisation has lowered the costs of some multi modal rendering but the costs are still considerable:

Subtitling by reproducing speech in symbolic language and providing descriptions of other audio features requires medium level skill;
Describing images in an audio file requires a high level of skill;
Signing requires a high and rare level of skill.

3.2 It is totally unrealistic to expect the web as a whole to comply with the standards attained in television. In the United Kingdom the obligations to comply with television accessibility standards are tapered to accord with the size of the companies such that some companies are so small that they are not obliged to comply.

3.3 Although there are increasingly reliable processes for rending speech into text and vice versa, the major stumbling block is the increasing hegemony of the image. The Web has reached a turning point. If it was difficult to secure compliance in a text-based ecology it is even more problematic to secure that compliance in an image-based environment. There are five reasons for this:

The improvement and falling cost of digital photography;
The increased capacity of the web and broadband telephony to handle pictures;
Multi lingual jurisdictions and global commercial requirements to communicate in language free mode;
The increasing cost of writing clear and concise prose;
The increase in image-based self publishing.

3.4 In the environment described in 3.3 it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine any legislative obligation on publishers to render material multi modally except which this results from a clear case of corporate mission and user benefit:

The public sector obligation on itself
The public sector requirement for accessibility as the condition of granting a licence (broadcasting, public utilities, public sector funded agencies and enterprises, universities)
Organisations which specify a universal remit (‘all citizens') or a specialist disability remit.

3.5 At the other end of the spectrum, there are clear cases where accessibility would cost the publisher more than the cost of the standard product (see Appendix 3) shows some working out of examples but two are obvious:

An art gallery selling new pictures on the web would find it more expensive to describe the pictures than simply to upload them;
A small music company would find it more expensive to provide print versions of all its lyrics than simply to upload the music.

4. Conclusion

4.1 The general conclusion is that the third option in Section 2, the right of rendering, should be the central pillar of any legislative approach, with a requirement on publishers that they should not place any obstacle in the way of that rendering by, for example, making it difficult to alter font and size of print. This should be supported by a specific proposal to place an accessibility obligation on those organisations whose remit requires it, as outlined in Para 3.4.

Appendix 1

See "A Framework for Considering Disability Accessibility and Reasonable Accommodation"

Appendix 2

Download Global Table, Accessible Broadcasting (PDF)

Appendix 3

See "Examples of weighting and scoring the accessibility requirement of a web site"

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