Somebody mentioned that it’s not possible to conform to WCAG on level AA and I had to disagree. I strongly believe that WCAG is just a common base that makes accessibility easier to achieve but it is not the goal to conform to WCAG. WCAG is the baseline – the minimum, and we should often reach over it to really make things accessible.
But this suggestion got me thinking about what are the hardest parts of accessibility that make people think like that in the first place. This post will probably be too short to cover all the aspects but I will try to summarize a bit.
Alternative texts can sometimes be hard
The nature of assistive technology today is most probably that it is simple to support information if it is in text form. All other formats are difficult or even impossible to be fully supported. Even simple images and icons, not to go to audio and video. Text can be zoomed in, read by computer, parsed to braille, parsed and analyzed by a program and so on. The most basic format of information. So we should probably again start with it. Sometimes it is not difficult to provide alternative texts but sometimes it really is.
Accessible infographics
I was discussing how to provide good alternative text to some infographics that described the process in a company. Image had a lot of text, not only titles but whole paragraphs. My suggestion was to type the text in it’s raw form under the image and just set a simple alt text on the image itself. Then assistive technology users could get the best alternative kind of experience and even Google would understand the page much better. Content creator was not quite happy about my suggestion – it meant almost double the time to produce the content. It had to be presented in an linear form and that can also be difficult when process itself is not linear and simply connected.
Multimedia accessibility
Making podcasts and videos is so simple in 2021 and it seems that everybody is doing it. To be accessible we need to provide alternative in text form. I will not go into details in this post as they are actually quite complex but let’s just think about easiest text alternatives for videos for a moment.
If you provide video in English then it may seem easy – you have built in possibilities to automatically generate captions and then it is only to upload them beside the video, right? Well that is not true at all. I’ve done some testing and it still required some manual adjustments. If the video was first scripted, like it had a written scenario, it was a bit easier but if it was a spontaneous talk, dialog or even interaction between multiple people, then it became really hard to follow up on people who were talking, what was shown and maybe not said and so on. To really provide accessible alternatives it is not enough to just write the captions – you have to let the user know who is talking and also what was visually presented but maybe not presented in the audio. So it can really become complicated. And I think that video captions and video descriptions may be the most difficult part of making things accessible.
Video game accessibility
I was impressed when I read about the modern games that are extremely realistic but also have it’s gameplay and interfaces accessible to all kinds of people. That was done from the start of the making of the game, it was definitely not being implemented on the end. Game producers started development with accessibility baked into the whole experience and I suppose also making some parts of game adaptive to user preferences. If all software was planned like that it would be much easier to have end products accessible and it would be possible for even more people to be able to enjoy it.
From the other perspective – I am almost certain that any modern game that must be made accessible after it was actually already produced – it will not be possible to adjust it without making huge efforts or even re-writing it totally.
Advanced interactions
Some interactions within user interfaces may be extremely hard or maybe even impossible to make accessible. One basic example is a software for making illustrations. It would be possible to “draw” a voice picture of a curve but imagine that you have to draw a vector illustration with hundreds of curves. It would soon become non-scalable and just too confusing. And the audio alternative would only add to one group of people, still not be accessible for other groups. So some interactions and even some software will possibly never be totally accessible to all. I do hope I will be able to live long enough to experience that barriers be broken and maybe there will be possibilities to project visualizations to users in a different way.
Some other types of interactions may seem impossible to be accessible but when user experience and user interactions are planned from the start they can provide totally accessible alternatives and really make it work for any user. One example that I can think of is so called drag and drop. When such patterns are investigated in the beginning it may be possible to provide alternative means and make alternative user interactions that may support only keyboard for example. So again – good planning up-front makes things more accessible on the long run.
Fixing legacy software
I will add fixing legacy software as the last item of difficult things to fix as it can be very time consuming. It goes mostly on the designers and developers workload and I think both groups like to remake or rewrite things from start to end, not just fix them here and there. I totally get the re-write ambitions, especially when thinking of design patterns and code but it may be quite difficult to get the means and time to do it, so that is why I think this can also be very difficult. Making old, broken things fixed can be really difficult and sometimes it can be like so because of us. Should we drop something that seems over complicated to fix and just replace it with a new product. Well, sometimes we can and sometimes we can not. And when we can not remake it, it can really be difficult.
Knowledge and planning makes it easier
The most difficult part of making things accessible is when we do not have control over all the aspects. As mentioned in the start – WCAG is only a start. And it covers quite a lot, so it takes time to learn about it’s details. And sometimes we can make a solution work for one group of people and break it for another group. So to posses the right knowledge makes it easier to implement accessibility.
Planning is the second part that comes after knowledge. We can just jump into the list of errors and fix them one by one but it is probably smart to invest a part of our time to prioritize the issues and their impacts and only act then. Sometimes we may even find out that if we first fix an issue we may maybe also fix the other issue by it and so on. So getting better at planning is surely also a part of the most effective solution.
