Accessibility investment should go into R&D, not web development
June 10th, 2008
David Macken, managing director of System Associates, a provider of Internet solutions for the public sector, believes that Government 'Accessibility' budget would be better invested in developing more effective tools for disabled web users, rather than spending it on individual government websites.
According to Macken, typically 4-5% of the budget to develop a typical government website, is spent on making a website more accessible, yet on a larger scale, it is not necessarily broadening access to information on the web. He believes that the money would be better invested centrally to fund the research and development of online tools and equipment that make it easier for disabled users to access all web content.
Macken comments, "For every million commercial websites that have poor accessibility, there are only 100 government sites with really good accessibility." He continues, "Public sector organisations are being compliance-driven and as a result, their efforts to be accessible are merely a drop in the ocean in terms of what could be achieved with investment in the right places."
For Macken, investment in the right places includes the development of more sophisticated Braille readers, which can interpret Flash or Javascript. He comments: "Today's Braille readers have not been able to keep up with web technology and are effective only if certain accessibility criteria are met in the development of a website. This typically results in the 'dumbing down' of a website, so that it is mostly text. For a commercial organisation, this is undesirable and costly, as they want to create visually stimulating sites which encourage the majority of users to browse their site. By adopting a text-heavy approach, it also makes a site less accessible for other users such as dyslexics or those who are visually impaired, as they find it hard to follow the line of text.
Part of the problem is the pace at which accessibility standards are reviewed and published. By the time accessibility guidelines and support are developed, web technology has moved on.
Macken also believes that accessibility organisations have succumbed to compliance, rather than innovation. He comments: "Rather than encouraging web developers to be creative, accessibility organisations have become the policemen for government accessibility standards, providing web accessibility accreditations for companies who comply with W3C standards. Their efforts would probably produce more widespread results if they actively encouraged and supported the development of innovative applications with accessibility built-in as standard."
As a web developer to the public sector, System Associates aims to build-in accessibility to much of its software, yet this is not always easy. Macken comments: "Web developers typically integrate and adapt a variety of software packages to develop a bespoke application. Integrating some of the latest applications such as mapping systems makes it very difficult to remain W3C compliant in all areas. Mapping systems are very user-friendly to the majority of users, yet to comply with accessibility standards, two applications would need to be developed, one using the mapping system and the other using a text-based format. This is time consuming and a cost that most organisations are not prepared to bear. "
He concludes: "Government organisations are merely scratching the surface of genuine web accessibility and need to review whether their accessibility guidelines are genuinely making it easier for disabled users to access web information."