There's no doubt that the web can be an enormous benefit for people who have difficulty with books / newspapers, speech / hearing, mobility, etc.

But the accessibilty advocates spoil their case by quoting statistics without stating their meaning, e.g. "18% of Australians are disabled". What level of severity counts as disabled? For example I need varifocal spectacles and have a very slight red-green colour vision deficiency (no problems with traffic lights but the Ishihara colour test shows it up). Am I disabled?

I also intensely dislike the accessibility lobby's attempts to achieve their objectives by regulation rather than by tax-funded social programmes - regulation avoids accountability for the costs and benefits, and therefore is bad management and undemocratic (see http://www.benefit-from-it.com/editorials/accessibility_wrong_way.htm).

The regulatory approach also avoids the difficult policy problems of prioritisation. There are probably a dozen types of visual disability (4 common types of colour vision deficiency alone). And in some cases people with different disabilites may have conflicting needs - for example people with dyslexia or "cognitive difficulties" (low IQ) need all the visual cues they can get, but visual cues often get in the way of page readers used by the blind.

Posted by: Philip Chalmers on March 12, 2003 06:00 AM

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PS I forgot the other thing that advocates of the regulatory approach often gloss over - the disabled are often poor (see http://forums.com.com/group/zd.News.Talkback/zdnn/tb.tpt/@thread@128291@forward@1@D-,D@ALL/@article@128291?EXP=ALL&VWM=hr&ROS=1&PAGETP=2100&NODEID=1104&SHOST=zdnet.com.com).

Posted by: Philip Chalmers on March 12, 2003 06:02 AM

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Philip Chalmers' points are accurate but misleading. The alleged conflicts between disability groups are rarely noticeable in practice. I just finished giving a presentation on this very point. He also doesn't bother to suggest a resolution, perhaps because if he actually did more research his complaints would vanish.

Posted by: Joe Clark on March 12, 2003 01:04 PM

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Joe Clark's article is interesting, and I particularly like the design examples quoted at the end and the link to a page about form design techniques.

But it does not not say anything about the presence / absence of conflicts between disability groups. And it exemplifies the misuse of statistics which undermines accessibility advocacy - it does not say what percentage of people have disabilities which are actually a severe obstacle to their use of IT / the Web and its categories are far too broad - for example "learning disability" generally includes both dyslexia and low IQ, which are very different.

Likewise the statistics on percentages of the disabled who have Internet access do not distinguish between cases where the obstacle is non-accessible web sites and cases where it is lack of money.

The article's section on form design reveals conflicts between the requirements of "normal" people and of people with certain types of disability. Normal people want to see as much of the form at a glance as possible so they can easily decide whether to complete the form, and this leads designers to aim for compact forms with each label-INPUT pair on the same line.

Admittedly the whole accessibility situation will become easier as standards-compliant browsers become the norm.

But up-to-date browsers are not enough on their own. For example Joe Clark's article mentions a problem in the interface between MS's Accessibility infrastructure and Window Eyes. It is unreasonable to expect web designers to include work-rounds for defects in client software. I notice that Joe Clark dropped support for Netscape 4 in early 2000, when NS 4 still had about 16% of the browser market - about the same as the percentage of the population who are "disabled".

Accessibility by regulation, besides being bad managment and an evasion of democratic accountability, does nothing to improve the quality of software for the disabled. The best and quickest way to promote improvements is to provide an effective demand for them, i.e. backed by money. A tax-funded accessibility programme could create an effective demand if it was based on research into the major obstacles to accessibility (Joe Clark's article gives a useful summary) and backed up by a specification of requirements to met by publicly-funded purchases of software for the disabled. Software suppliers will then compete to meet the spec at a reasonable cost.

The next question is who pays the additional cost of making web pages accessible to users of approved software aids for the disabled - particularly if the results are less suitable / attractive for normal people (see my comment on forms above). The short answer is, "Governments should pay and should account for the cost". If that means bureaucrats have to negotiate rather than dictate, I would regard that as an advantage.

Finally I would like to thank Joe for giving me an opportunity for further research.

Posted by: Philip Chalmers on March 13, 2003 12:42 PM

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