Bliss of ignorance? Or lack of awareness issue?
I have been one of those people that did not care about accessibility for a long time on my web developer journey. This was not intentional though – I just didn’t know that I don’t care about it, because I didn’t know what accessibility is and how to implement it…
It was the year of 1999, here in Europe at least, and I started playing with HTML in my spare time (besides being a system administrator at work). I helped a local volunteer cancer awareness and support association and they asked if I can make them a website – after I fixed their computer and installed new printer. Quite a common experience in those days.
I didn’t have any knowledge about the code behind web, but I learned bit by bit, by checking source code of familiar websites, trying and failing. Then I read a book or two (those were really outdated quickly, but provided some basic concepts). Those were still the days of table powered websites, and the easiest way to make a nice looking site was to have an image and cut it into parts, then use a table to position them. Mark the clickable areas, add some text, stuff as much keywords in the keywords meta tag and publish the site on local and global search engines.
Simple and quite nice looking page, when I happened to find free images that I needed.
And mostly if not totally inaccessible, but I didn’t know that.
Not so strange – when we mimic and copy bad quality we can only expect bad quality, but with websites it is kind of different – I used the mouse and 14 inch screen and everything worked. Stakeholders were delighted, nobody complained and I had to add that it works best in Internet Explorer, so that I didn’t have to cope with differences of other browsers (and defend that to stakeholders).
I think a lot of webmasters (yes, that was what we were called back in the day) did it like that. And then add things with DHTML (Dynamic HTML, basically small JavaScript based interactions) and also added some image counters. It was enough for most cases. Printing was a big requirement, so people struggled a bit with fixing that as well, when they were reminded of it.
We read to fill out alt texts for images with keywords, to get a better search engine position (it was one of the common myths at least), and we used a lot of headings for the same reason – not to make sure the structure was right, but because it would for sure make our site at the top of the search results.
First contact with accessibility
In about the same time as I did my first website Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 1 were established (18th of May 1999). But nobody told me, nobody discussed it in my internet and offline world, code examples I stumbled upon didn’t mention it, books I’ve read didn’t include a word about it and even official and unofficial courses I took didn’t know about it.
I haven’t heard about accessibility until I moved to Norway and got my first job as a web developer, in 2014. It was quite a fresh legal requirement (referring to WCAG 2.0, legislation applied in 2013) and even my employer didn’t actually know about the requirements. Until our customer – a large public sector organization – mentioned it to us and we needed to come with some results we weren’t really aware of it.
Fast forward to today and the world has changed a lot in this, for the better, I can add, but still far from good. Awareness is way better, I suspect legislation and main stream media coverage did a lot for it. It is still strange that even after all these years I stumble upon people surprised about the WCAG as a part of their profession of making digital products.
I usually point to the lack of accessibility in official education, but there are more and more universities that try to at least mention the requirements, so it’s not just that.
Sometimes I can almost feel the subtle negativity or intentional passivity towards making the efforts for accessibility. In some meetings, and I can just speculate, it seems that some people treat accessibility not only as additional work, but also as unneeded work. Legislation helps here, at least a bit, but perhaps just to keep them silent, not to motivate them. In such cases I try to talk in terms of business cases, brand management improvements, lower legal risks and potentials, but it is often not very effective.
I am happy that accessibility gets more attention and that legislation is slowly, but evidently, moving from public to private sector as well. European accessibility act is a major step in the right direction, although I would wish that it would cover more, but it is a start and it makes sense with it’s scope.
Even if I am an optimist – I am also a realist – and when we think about the inaccessibility of public sector (at least most of it, some parts are doing amazing work), I know it will take a lot of time, convincing and advocating, but it really helps to have the law as a last resort, just to make sure people accept accessibility has a role in our more and more digital world.
Therefore I can just conclude – resisting accessibility is totally futile – it will be a part of education, sooner or later, it will spread from public to private sector, one step at a time, it will be integrated into processes, just like security and privacy try to be.
The sooner we learn about it and the sooner we implement it – the better. People need accessibility and we need to provide it, it’s that simple – resisting accessibility is futile!