Speakers

• Richard Schwerdtfeger (IBM)
• Marian Oosting (anderslezen.nl)
• Chris Heilmann (Yahoo!)
• Miguel González-Sancho (European Commission)
• Michael Cooper (W3C WAI)
• Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C Mobile Web Initiative)
• Dave Wilton (Legal & General)

Richard Schwerdtfeger works for IBM and is a member of the W3C WAI and the HTML working group, among others. I assume he had been invited because the organizers only knew him for having developed IBM Home Page Reader back in the 1990ies. But his current work involves the W3C working drafts for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) and other core technologies that his team developed in cooperation with vendors of Assistive Technologies (AT, e.g. screen readers) and the Mozilla Foundation.

There’s a paradigm shift in the usability and accessibility of Web 2.0 applications. ARIA adds meaning, importance, relationships, fills the gaps in (X)HTML, and increases usability for all users through familiar navigation models from desktop applications.

From Marian Oosting (anderslezen.nl) I learned about DAISY. It’s a library standard mostly used for talking books for the blind. Based on MP3 and the W3C XML standard SMIL, it combines strong compression with superior navigational features. Quite intriguing to use that format for audio books, and since 2006 it’s becoming available and more attractive for non-disabled users. For example, talking books are quite popular with elderly people who constitute about 60-80% of public library users.

In his presentation Chris Heilmann (Yahoo!) emphasized the need to ask people with impairments because they use assistive technologies in other ways than a non-disabled developer might foresee. Don’t assume, integrate their advice!

Miguel González-Sancho (European Commission, Information Society Directorate General) presented the European programs for e-Accessibility, e-Aging, and e-Inclusion. ICT is becoming essential for socio-economic participation, yet 40% of the European population is left behind. Functional limitations and disabilities increase due to aging. About 20% or 100 million of the European population is concerned. Thus accessibility is gaining relevance and becomes a social imperative.

In “Web Accessibility in the Future” Michael Cooper (W3C WAI) was rather giving the big picture and avoided to announce a release date for WCAG 2.0. Although the updated version will definitely play an important role in the future of accessibility, so does the development of a common Accessibility API or authoring interfaces that generate accessible content (ATAG). Think of user contributed content where the authors are usually unaware of accessibility requirements. Moreover, professionalization of accessible design, programming, and manual and semi-automated evaluation will gain importance. We must keep an open eye on developing technologies (MathML?, Second Life?), advocate accessibility in early stages, and keep accessibility awareness in legislation and society.

Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C Mobile Web Initiative) talked about the mobile web, of course. There are more mobile phones than computers, they are cheap, and about 80% of the world population has mobile network coverage. Mobile access is everywhere, will become ubiquitous. There are some limitations like the tiny screen, the lack of a proper keyboard, diversity is large and access slow. In fact mobile and impaired users have so many challenges in common that Dominique estimates an accessible website already meets half the requirements of the Mobile Web Best Practices. Bad news for militant accessibility advocates who keep emphasizing the differences between accessibility, universal access and device independence.

Dave Wilton from the large British financial services supplier Legal & General gave some real world examples why it literally pays to become accessible:

There are nine million people with disabilities in the UK. If 1% just bought a £300 policy, his company will make £27 million: “The cost of making the site accessible pales into insignificance.” If people can’t buy from Legal & General, they will go to their competitors. In surveys, helpdesk and logfile analyses they found 10% of their visitors don’t make it past the home page. That’s equivalent to slamming the door into the faces of 20,000 visitors each month. 30% never open a PDF file. Besides, every third Briton is older than 50, and as we have heard before, the incidence of disabilities increase with age. There are not only people with cognitive impairments, but also 3 million people who speak English as a second language, 1.5 million people lacking basic language skills, and 5.2 million adults who have sub-GCSE level English.

Next time somebody tells you “disabled people are not our target group” show ‘em these results:

• Online traffic surged with a 50% increase in natural search engine listings.
• The number of visitors receiving quotes increased by 100% within three months.
• The new content management system cut site maintenance costs by 66% with an annual saving of £200k.
• Without changing products or prices, conversion rates improved substantially, ranging between 26% and 300% increase with an average of 200% (something Jakob Nielsen seconds).
• The entire project delivered 100% return-on-investment (ROI) within just 12 months.
• Customer satisfaction was improved (not one accessibility complaint!)
• It was great PR!

To my disappointment it seems the target group were in fact IT professionals working for local municipalities. Most lectures focused on rather basic principles of accessibility although their topics would have had the potential for more advanced details.

Speakers

• Markus Erle
• Jan Eric Hellbusch
• Henrik Tonn-Eichstädt
• Kai Laborenz
• Chris Heilmann
• Prof. Christian Bühler
• Rainer Schlegel

Markus Erle from Wertewerk talked about Accessible Information Architecture. Well, mostly about information architecture and usability, which has a lot in common with accessibility issues, but otherwise the link to the accessibility topic was rather faint. Although later he presented an example of a community website for people with learning disabilities with a simplified email user interface — a training ground for real webmail sites like GMX or Gmail.

Jan Eric Hellbusch was next with Avoiding Errors While Creating Accessible Websites. He mentioned several principles for quality assurance, like frontloading, i.e. good concepts and flowcharts in the planning phase to avoid errors later, because subsequent testing and fixing accessibility into a project is more expensive. Speaking about costs, Jan mentioned an estimated cost increase for adding accessibility to be in a one digit percentage range. In a study Heerdt and Strauss estimated even less than 1.56% which I consider too low (Miesenberger et al. (eds.): ICCHP 2004, LNCS 3118, pp. 323-330, Springer, 2004).

Worth noting was the principle of normalization: no special rules, normal conditions for all, participation for the disabled — also in the creation of a website. Better ask screen reader users instead of buying an expensive screen reader yourself, because they use it in different ways than a sighted user.

Henrik Tonn-Eichstädt with the help of Anna Courtpozanis intended to demonstrate how complex scenarios work in a screen reader. They didn’t. A new computer with a trial version of Jaws posed enough technical problems to turn this part of the presentation into a catastrophe. Reminder to self: always record demonstrations in advance, never rely on live ones.

Otherwise Tonn-Eichstädt had a fluent presentation of his study on the internet usage of blind users, but was making assumptions as soon as questions became more technical. No, comments in the markup will not be read by screen readers. And even sighted users wouldn’t find a hidden title on normal text, since a title is used on links or acronyms.

In a side note more than 35% of the blind and 52% of the disabled in Germany are older than 65 — I always wondered how many will never use the internet anyway when I hear numbers like “10% of Germany’s population is disabled.” Now you know.

Kai Laborenz had a smooth and entertaining presentation on CSS featuring multi-column layout and sliding doors. He managed to draw my attention to people with a different color contrast setting where background images will be gone. I must admit I almost forgot these cases when screen reader issues and zoom readers are so omnipresent.

Chris Heilmann talked charmingly and competent about Hijax and the known problems and solutions, advantages and disadvantages. Although Yahoo! is experimenting with the integration of the new XHTML 1.1 Role Attribute and States and Properties modules, that was no topic yet in his lecture. I missed a relation to accessibility, techniques for making Ajax accessible, but in the end if you have a robust server model as a fallback you don’t need necessarily accessible Ajax. Still he mentioned Flash’s capability of screen reader recognition, so in combination with JavaScript some customized notes for those users become possible.

Perhaps the most controversial presentation was Prof. Christian Bühler’s on the DIN certification of websites. So far they proposed a pre-audit for accessibility to easily filter non-accessible websites, followed by an accessibility test checking three pages against the German legal equivalent of the WCAG. Since August the main audit procedures have been finalized, a task that took them several years.

Alas they partnered with DIN CERTCO, the German authority for standard certification, thus the process will cost about € 5k — every year. Small communities don’t have that money, companies with the money will not spend it because people with disabilities are beyond their perceived target groups, and they gain no financial advantage since they can’t be sued in Germany.

Also you have to provide evidence of your qualification and regular training. Nice, only our profession doesn’t have regular training, at least I can’t prove whose blogs I read frequently. Does reading Joe Clark’s blog automatically qualify? Molly, will you certify that somebody with my IP address accessed your website? Finally you have to notify the testers of any changes on your site’s content, and even if the contributors in your web team change. I wonder how this will work for highly dynamic news sites. No, this certification is stillborn.

Last was Rainer Schlegel about Accessible Websites with Open Source Systems. But he repeated more or less that there are virtually no accessible content management systems, except Papoo and perhaps Immediacy. Most templates can be adjusted for WCAG conform output, but accessible interfaces for editors supporting ATAG are nonexistent. I had been looking forward to that presentation to learn about stuff like Typo3 extensions for marking up acronyms or language changes, but it didn’t get into such detail.

Overall this conference gave some inspiration, meeting Jan, Chris, Markus and Kai was nice, but my advice would be: save the money for Erlangen.