CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

Like probably every developer/designer who is getting confident with mad HTML skills, CSS styling, and JS wrangling, once I got to the point of consistently making semantic, validating pages, I figured I’d had a handle on what a proper web page needed to be so that anyone, with any browser, could properly experience. That would free me to move onto more important subjects like figuring out how to outshine everyone else on the newest, baddest CSS3 styling possible.

Then, at Web Directions North, I attended Derek Featherstone’s Accessibility Beyond Compliance presentation. By the end of it, I could spot at least a dozen things I was doing wrong, very wrong, with my coding. I figured there was even more that wasn’t correct. Accessibility, which I understand as making the web accessible to people with sensory or cognitive disabilities, was a topic that I’d taken horribly for granted. I assumed if it validated, it’d work out. That was naive, to say the least.

Since then, I’ve been trying to get more familiar with the topic while simultaneously keeping up to date with everything else that makes the web work. Trying best suits what happens. I’ll admit, I’ve been thinking of it as a low priority, which I knew was the wrong attitude. But I’ve made efforts to ensure my JS-powered interactivity makes use of the right tags (buttons instead of spans, for example), although I’m still unsure of how to announce the change of a page (like a AJAX-based popup) to a screen-reader. It was incremental, but I was improving.

With this site, with the comic, I’ve been slower. After all, a comic is at it’s heart a visual medium. Would a blind person want to sit through the annoyance of having the joke described to him, like the co-worker’s bungled re-telling of a standup joke he heard last night?

I started reading a lot about HTML 5, and the arguments that it’s birthing process has spawned. One of the banners that differing “sides” of the involved parties frequently have been waving is accessibility, or the perceived lack thereof, or the problems with different scenarios of implementing it. One of the voices I’d see the most was John Foliot, who’s graced this comic a couple times now. I’ve even been lucky enough to have him provide me with a technique for making an accessible summary of a comic for this site.

I have not yet implemented that technique. How much do I suck? After today’s comic, I will be doing so (exact implementation time this week varies).

What brought this topic back to my mind was a string of comments on last week’s comic, which discussed the “pick an icon” custom CAPTCHA that my comment-system makes use of. If you haven’t posted here before, it provides three images, and asks you to click on one to confirm that you’re not some horrid robot. I had thought about blind users when I made it, and ensured each image had descriptive text that didn’t named the image’s object, but provided enough prose about it to let them know what they were seeing.

In the comment discussion, some problems with how that system was interacted with came up, including challenges for screen-readers that I hadn’t anticipated, and the issue of the cognitively-disabled, which I hadn’t even thought about. One well-meaning commentator, in my defense, said something to the effect of “Well, you can’t always make it work for everyone.”…

I didn’t care for that, even though I know he didn’t mean ill by it. The thing is, I like the web, a lot. It’s a huge part of my job, my hobbies, and my ability to communicate and learn about all sorts of things in the world I can’t afford to go visit in person. How would I interact with it if I was suddenly stricken blind? Would I be satisfied with my experience surfing on a screen-reader, listening to pages as they were written?

Yesterday, I closed my eyes, and tried to just make use of Microsoft’s Narrator program, starting with the task of activating the program from scratch while blind. I was able to get it going, but after about two minutes of trying to do anything with my computer, I shut it off in frustration.

Today’s comic, which technically stars John Foliot, is an exploration of that frustration, and hopefully shaking people out of the passive assumption that it’s OK if their website isn’t working for a small subset of surfers.

It also reflects a challenge for myself. I need to implement a summary system for the comic for blind readers. I need to update the CAPTCHA to better serve blind/low-vision readers and make it easier for the cognitively-challenged to understand while still being confusing to a robot. I probably need to do more than that, but I don’t even know what other challenges the site represents yet.

Check out your site. If you had to listen to it, would it be usable? If not, what are you going to do about it?

Tags: accessibility, blind, Comic, derek featherstone, john foliot, screen reader

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 9:52 am and is filed under Comic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.