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Functional, accessible and good-looking

That we should design and build web services accessible to the population at large is a given. It's the law and it's good for business. But have you considered that it might lead to the development of innovative services too?

The issue of building accessible websites arouses comments such as: ‘It costs too much time and money’, ‘It's not necessary for my market’, and ‘It stifles creativity and promotes boring design’. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the legal and business arguments for an accessible and usable website and how, whilst implementing these standards, you can be challenged to create engaging experiences for your audiences.

Why Build Easy-to-use Websites?

Everyone needs an accessible product, be it a website, a potato-peeler or a chair. We like to find and accomplish on a website, to effortlessly peel a potato, and to sit comfortably.

Accessible web services are not just about providing easy-to-find information. Accessible web services are very much about social responsibility and evolving channels of communication - the global village.

The Office of the e-Envoy has set 2005 as the date by which "to ensure that everyone who wants it has access to the Internet". As the largest purchaser of software and digital services in the UK, when the Government builds to the national and international standards, its effect reverberates throughout the supply chain.

“It costs too much time and money”

If you have it in mind to build a service that caters to the largest possible market share in the business plan from day one, then your costs and development time will not be adversely affected.

The case of the Sydney Olympics website provides a convincing example. In June 1999, Bruce Maguire, who has been blind since birth, brought an action against the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games and the site builder IBM alleging that the site was inaccessible and therefore infringing on the Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act of 1992. As such things take time, it was not until the end of March 2000 that a date was set for inquiry into the allegedly inaccessible website.

In testimony on behalf of Mr Maguire, experts demonstrated that if IBM had addressed the difficulties in accessibility in June 1999 when the issues were first raised, the time taken to make the site compliant would be negligible. It was also pointed out that to make the site accessible from June 2002 it would take a month of work. This is in stark contrast to the defendant's claim that it would cause undue hardship, cost 2.2 million Australian dollars and 368 working days. IBM didn't win this one.

The lesson: For those procuring and providing web services, compliance with government and internationally recognised standards should be expected much in the same way it is expected that a car manufacturer comply with industry and international standards. And it doesn't increase production time or costs.

“It's not necessary for my market”

In striving to create services for all, to bridge the digital divide and truly capitalise on the sharing of knowledge, we must be fully cognisant of our users.

How well do you know your users? Have you developed scenarios describing the various personalities that use your services? Have you considered someone with a vision impairment? Have you considered that someone might be accessing your website at a public library on an old kiosk with a slow connection?

The more precise your user scenarios in the planning stages, the more you articulate the characters engaging with the service on a daily basis, the more you understand the lifestyle patterns of your audience, the more refined and targeted the presentation of content becomes.

In separating the content from the structure of a service, you build in the flexibility to create multiple presentation layers for the same content. When thoughtfully researched, analysed and built, the service will display content according to the technological context - web browser, WAP, iTV - and the audience.

The more flexible the content, the easier it is to re-present the content and create, as users demand, a new context or presentation layer.

“It stifles creativity and promotes boring design”

Let's look at product design. OXO's Good Grip line of kitchen tools was developed by entrepreneur and cooking aficionado Sam Farber. Farber was fed up with poorly designed, user-unfriendly kitchen products. And his wife's arthritic hands had difficulty with the traditional potato-peeler. He recognised that there were many people in this situation. There was an audience waiting to be served.

Farber went along to Smart Design with a brief to develop a potato-peeler handle that would appeal to multiple audiences - it had to attract people with its design, to be affordable and, above all, to be easy and comfortable for people with and without arthritis to use. It resulted in an innovative product that captivated the market and brought the phrase 'Universal Design' to the fore.

The OXO product line has grown to include a wide variety of kitchen gadgets, all following the principle of Universal Design. And the potato-peeler has become a design classic.

Another example of a product crossing over from a less-able community to the mass market is the Bayliss Freeplay radio. After seeing a documentary on AIDS in Africa on TV, the inventor Trevor Bayliss was inspired to create a tool to provide access to information - a wind-up radio. Disabled factory workers first produced the radio in South Africa. The wind-up radio idea has since been taken up by Sony and Phillips. The radio too has become a design classic. And there are plans to create a wind-up mechanism that can power a laptop computer.

In the world of the Internet, accessible Universal Design classics are still a bit hard to come by. Talk about accessible, usable and aesthetically pleasing websites abounds in the press, and throughout the Design, Information Architecture, Usability and Marketing communities. Finding websites that meet the challenges remains difficult.

The Standard Life site is a contender, as are the UKOnline and the Los Angeles Independent Living sites. The website Dive into Accessibility provides an excellent walk-through about how to build an accessible Weblog and its principles apply to all web services.

Conclusion

Spend a little extra time planning at the beginning of a project and you can enjoy the following benefits:

1. Increased access
Your site can be used by a wider audience. More visitors mean more potential customers. Making a website accessible to the disabled does not make it inaccessible to the able.
2. Device independence
The data can display on a web browser, PDA, WAP phone, Kiosk, iTV, screen readers, low bandwidth, high-bandwidth - whatever your user happens to have.
3. Separation of content from structure
Eases in comprehension and clear user pathways.
Leads to maintaining a consistent User Interface.
Search Engine friendly - all your content is legible and your Meta tags are in place.
4. Improves efficiency
Reduce site maintenance time because your content can be structured and presented by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and templates. One change to the CSS or template and the changes are applied globally.
No need to rebuild from scratch when a new delivery mechanism emerges and no need at present to re-write for devices
Employees and users can achieve their goals with minimal fuss. Less time talking to tech support and customer service.
5. Improves morale
The public and employees enjoy the tools rather than merely tolerate them.
6. Demonstrates social responsibility
Creates goodwill for the public and for employees.
Avoids discrimination.

While we remain in the teething stages for building web services with accessibility, usability, and good-looking-ness concerns integral to the product development cycle from day one, we can only see this as a fantastic opportunity for businesses and government offices to make a mark and take the lead. There are very clear business and legal arguments for moving to universal/accessible design.

As the Office of the e-Envoy puts it: “We cannot count on our users having standard technology, therefore, to ensure access to our information on the web the onus is on our web managers to deliver the message in a way that allows everyone to benefit.”

Links to further information (Clicking links will launch a new browser window)

Contributed by Nancy Perlman, Synchordia. Article originally published August 2002.

The Association of Accessibility Professionals is no more