Friends, advocates, people of reason, help me enlighten this confused developer: bit.ly/FPlFEy #a11y #WAI #ARIA #Canada @dboudreau

— Elle Waters (@Nethermind) March 18, 2012

After seeing a handful of people comment on the tweet, I finally had to weigh in. I did so by saying:

@nethermind I heard that argument dozens of times

— Ryan Benson (@rguy84) March 18, 2012

and

@sarahebourne @Nethermind @dboudreau @karlgroves I’m not sure why you’re giving so much thought. Basic argument, easy to flip.

— Ryan Benson (@rguy84) March 19, 2012

To be honest, I am not sure why people are going into this so much. In the first line of the post, Nathan says I thought today I would just play devil’s advocate and argue against web accessibility for the visually impaired. Him stating that he’s playing devil’s advocate means he may know he should do web accessibility, but wants to take a shortcut. I haven’t spoken to Nathan, so I don’t know his actual motivation for the post. As an accessibility professional/specialist, or whatever your title is, you cannot let this type of argument catch you off guard.

I actually welcome posts like this, because I know what arguments the other side is going to throw at me – basically showing me their poker hand. Thanks!

The Argument

Nathan’s argument is boiled down to: only ~4% of my customers will be blind, that is not enough market share to do accessibility. While I am no businessman, I could see why you may be able to throw away 4% of your user base.

The Counter/Rebuttal

As an [whatever title you choose from above], you are supposed to use WCAG, Section 508, or whatever standards you follow to your organization. I will take an easy example to show people how it works. This is what §1194.22(n) says:

When electronic forms are designed to be completed on-line, the form shall allow people using assistive technology to access the information, field elements, and functionality required for completion and submission of the form, including all directions and cues.

The basic way to read this is: “All form elements need to have a label tag.” People get the fact that adding a <label> tag allows the text associated with the form element to get announced. However, not all people know that the <label> helps people with mobility impairments too. How? People with mobility impairments sometimes have difficulty clicking on small targets – like a radio button or check box. By giving the radio button or check box a <label>, the user can click on the associated word(s) or phrase. This is usually somewhat larger than the 10 pixel by 10 pixel (or so) radio button or check box. The CDC approximates 4% of 8-year-olds have cerebral palsy, which is just one type of disability that effects a person’s mobility. If we take that stat, and add it to the blind population, we are now at 8%. (I am not a statistician, so I don’t know the actual figuring of the two groups.) If you add in similar disabilities, I bet we hit the 10-15% range.

Suddenly that little 4% grew to 10% which is like turning away one customer out of ten. Business owners really have to stand back and weigh their results. I picked the easy one here, but other criteria points can be tied to other disability groups like I did with §1194.22(n).

Nathan also mentioned that designing with accessibility in mind, you cannot use: Flash, Java Applets, SVG, and JavaScript. Depending on what you’re doing in Flash, it can be accessible. You can call the Java Access Bridge into Java Applets to allow accessibility, so as long as you don’t break it, you can use it. For JavaScript, it depends on what library you are using. I don’t have experience with SVG, so I cannot comment about it right now.

This one was between myself and my father and/or my grandmother. See my father and I don’t have the greatest of relationships, for the past 8-10 years, we or rather I have been trying to reestablish a relationship with him. It is almost like dating somebody that you have dated in the past, you both know each others moves, so nothing is really new. Things would be progressing, then it is like something would click, and we’d revert to step 0 or negative 1. Just before I moved to North Carolina, he did something that set us back to about negative 100. My effort for proactively trying is basically zero.

Anyway, back to my story…

This internal conversation was basically how I was not planning to see him over the holidays, and him guilt tripping me about this. Of course I stood up for myself, stating reasons such as not having any communication in 8 or 9 months, and so on. After a while, I was a bit worked up, and knew the stress wouldn’t do any good, especially dealing with the ever so lovely people if the airport. Twenty ymberor so minutes later, my father is calling — talk about freaky. The conversation started out awkward, but ended normally, which made me glad. My prepared reply regarding the holidays didn’t have to be used.

I get off the phone with him and finish up getting ready, since it is now nearly 12:30, so I better get going. Thinking how my taxi driver made a point about him being there at 1, I headed outside a few minutes early. He didn’t show until nearly 1:30, and as you may guess, there was some excuse that he had. Yeah, yeah, whatever, let’s go. I pull up to the ticketing counter and hand over my ID to get my ticket, and the agent asks for a debit card. Huh? What? I am going for work, and was told it was paid on Friday. Well, the travel person bought a ticket, but never paid for it. With an okay from my team lead, I ponied up the $230 for the ticket, and figured all my problems were over. Wrong!

Next up: Security

I travel for work every two or three months, so I am used to the whole pat down I get due to being in a wheelchair. Usually I keep my badge out just in case, but since I was stressed from the other events, I had put it back in my bag. Of course either my newer shoes or something on my foot plates set off the scanner thing they do on me. Which entails me to play 50 questions with a TSA officer takes out a good deal of my stuff from my bag for examination. I tried to get the guys to look at my badge, but that went no where.

Needless to say, the security check took nearly 40 minutes to complete, and was a bit frazzled. I was planning to grab something to eat after I got done with security, however my just under two hour wait, turned out to be about 5 minutes. Joy!

So far I have been reading just various novels, so I didn’t really get the push for using a Kindle for education. I read my first text that I needed to make notes in. It was extremely handy to highlight passages, and make side notes on the side. For somebody who has difficulty highlighting or writing in the margin, this opens some doors. Unless you cannot operate the small 5-way navigational button.

Seeing that Amazon is releasing a few new models of Kindles, will the accessibility issues be handled? There has already been a lawsuit over the lack of accessibility.

Accessible Complex Table Example

It has been an incredibly long time since I have updated this thing. The last time I posted here was back in Nov 2009. My girlfriend at the time, Noelle, did a series of posts back in January.

I will just say Noelle, and I parted ways back in late March 2010. We tried to work things off and on until mid June, however that was not successful. So those three posts will be the only ones by her.

School

I finally became a graduate of the University of Washington! I now hold a BA in Political Science. I graduated June 12, 2010, at Husky Stadium. It was near chaos, just over 5,000 people walking across the stage. UW graduations are notorious for being bad weather, for mine it was the opposite. I think it topped out in the upper 70s or low 80′s.

Everybody in my party got burnt! It was pretty funny to see the little strips where we missed. I still remember sitting there in the football’s indoor field seeing all the people. This really made me think of things, like I said I majored in Political Science. If you talk to me, you will see my lack of interest and passion for the field. As I sat there waiting for things to begin, I sat there I saw all the groups of friends or colleauges, however I just didn’t click enough with anybody to feel right.

The only downfall of graduation, which was not that big of a surprise, was my dad not coming. Since it was so warm out, sadly he didn’t want to deal with the heat, the people, and the traffic afterward. In turn, my grandmother could not go due to dad not attending.

Work

Like every college graduate, I was worried about getting a job. I applied to a list of places, and got turned down to everything. If I didn’t get turned down, I simply didn’t hear back from them. That being said, something I have done every year while I was at the UW was signed up for a program that hooks students up with federal agencies. So, in late May I got an e-mail from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) asking me to work for them. After an interview over e-mail, I was offered another interview, this time over the phone, with the woman whom I was in contact with, the guy who would be my boss, and my team lead. Days after the interview, I was told they were interested in passing my name onto HR. Just over two months later, I was boarding a plane to head to North Carolina.

Anybody who knows about usability, this hopping back and forth between the mouse and keyboard slows a person down no matter how fast they think they are. Staying on one device will be faster. One of the things you can do to speed up your bookmarklet speed is to give them keywords. Depending on your browser, determines how you do it.

• Firefox – v 3.5.5 – After putting the button/bookmarklet in your toolbar, right click it, and choose properties. You should see a field labeled keyword, put whatever word/phrase you please and hit ok.
• Internet Explorer – 7 & 8 – There is a shortcut key field after getting into the bookmark properties like described for Firefox. I recommend that you do not use this tip in IE because setting a shortcut key only just launches a new window/tab in your default browser using that link.
• Opera – v 9.5+ – Once in the properties window, there willl be a nickname field. Input whatever nickname you desire.

Now since you have a keyword/nickname/whatever, you can just type that into the address bar and automatically be sent there. The most speed that will be gained is when people use URL shortners, over things like blog pings. I have tried a handful of shorteners, and the best so far is: is.gd. The way I have mine set up is I have the is.gd keyword set to is. So I browse to a long URL site, press <CTRL> + <L> and it jumps to is.gd’s shortened version. Since is.gd puts the new url into a text input box with the text selected, I can copy the url without pressing anymore than the copy hotkey. Then I am set to go.

A lot of people like the bit.ly service. I don’t exactly want to use that as my update platform. Since bit.ly is designed to be namely a status updater with links, their shortened url is in an HTML textarea element. So you have to highlight it if you are not planning to use it in a status update.

Why am I so harsh?

Well, I instinctively put in my site. One of the “potential problems” reported is the following”

Tabular information may be missing table markup.

Well I am sorry to say, nothing on the page in question has a table, nor data of any kind that makes it look like a table. So if you try this checker, I wouldn’t take the results to heart quite yet.

With that being said, it has some hopes. The information is quite complete, with samples of valid code. I would however make the code in question highlighted somehow (color, a border, background color) within the code block. Currently it gives a full source code sample, which is a bit tedious to skim through if you don’t know what exactly is wrong.

I also have been terribly busy with school. I am currently trying to write a policy review on something from the Social Security Administration. It is really hard to track down stuff beside the laymen level explanations. I am slowly getting there.

President Obama’s first press conference, courtesy of C-SPAN. Mainly about the economic stimulus package. I am not 100% on his ideas. I believe that while it is good that he is wanting to give money to the people. However, I think that it is important that citizens should begin saving again… It is a long video, but is worth the watch.

Technorati Tags: press conference, obama, president

One way I can tell is the default notification on where you are at if via keyboard navigation, is gone. I personally rely on this quite heavily. If I know I need to hit Tab 10 times to get somewhere, I am forced to count now, versus watching visually. Another thing is since I have the wp.com stat plugin activated, the cursor is by default is placed in the login box for that. While it is cool that I can login with just hitting enter, since that password is saved, but my focus is now halfway down the page. Where will I be located after a few tabs? Who really knows.

The sad thing about this is, I was asked my opinion if WordPress would be a good option for a blind user. At the time, I was still running 2.6.* and said it’s ok, not the best thing to use. I added that if the said user was considered a power user, they could make it work. I don’t think this will be the case anymore. Like I said, this is sad, so many people are using WordPress not only for bloggin but things like a CMS! It is shame that the dev team doesn’t adhere to standards. Going off that, it says they have no interest is accessibility. You can stretch that out to include usability even.