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

This Monday was the third annual Blue Beanie Day, which promotes and celebrates the use of web standards to create accessible, semantic web content. Therefore, it provides a fitting backdrop to the Curious Tale of Max Weir. I’m not here to bash Max, as he’s received enough of that already. Rather, I’m spinning out a sort of parallel narrative that will cast a poorly timed comment into the light of folk lore for future web designers to consider.

On Monday one Andy Clarke, British rock star of the web design world, posted an open letter to Taylor Swift on his blog. This letter expressed his admiration for her as a musician and a gentle critique of a serious problem with her website: it is almost completely inaccessible to those with visual impairment or the inability to use a mouse. He details it quite thoroughly and politely, aware that as a musician (and not a web designer) she likely had no awareness of the issue or even touched the code of the site. This post provided a great example of the purpose of Blue Beanie Day, pushing web standards awareness to those who need it.

All was well until around comment #9 on Mr. Clarke’s post, by one Max Weir. You should read the linked comment for the full text, but the gist of his missive is summed up by the following line: This site is an interactive flash experience and thats all there is to it, there are designers who think accessibility, web standards etc and those who focus on creating a immersive experiences only.

This comment by a man who’s Twitter bio is “Design is form and function on equal level”, posted on an accessibility blog post on Blue Beanie Day, formed a nexus of baleful energy that summoned from the deep places one of the dreaded behemoths of nautical lore, the Beanicornupus. Identifiable by its massive blue beanie and gossamer spiral horn, this ravenous monster consumes the flesh of designers who think that “cool media experiences” are more important than ensuring a site can be used by impaired visitors and would consider that making a site this way is a valid business choice.

Poor Max didn’t stand a chance, suffering many grievous wounds at the hands of the commentators even after Andy tried to call them off. Like Captain Ahab, Max underestimated the beast. Today’s comic portrays his final moments, swallowed up by the Beanicornupus, calling out his defiance at the very end.

Max’s gruesome fate can provide a cautionary tale for us all. Web standards aren’t some sort of optional flavoring for some websites. They’re needed by every one of them. Those who choose to ignore that will face mockery from their website creator peers, and their clients will lose customers who aren’t able to access their sites. Although we’d like to think that only musicians, big uncaring media conglomerates, and our grandmothers don’t know the gospel truth of web standards, the fact is, as Andy said (when asking his commentators to stand down): It’s sobering that on Blue Beanie Day where we, who pride ourselves on our support for standards and accessibility, pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, must not forget that the job that Jeffrey started with Designing With Web Standards is far from done.

Today’s comic is a week or so late to be timely, but I think it’s still topical. It showcases the squirrel about to be launched on a rocket that Hixie insists has reached an appropriate state, even if it seems everyone else degrees.

As you’re likely familiar with my opinion on this topic, I think you can predict the results.

On October 27, 2009, Ian “Hixie” Hickson, editor-for-life of HTML5 (yes, my bias is showing) decided that there were
“no outstanding emails or bugs on the spec”, and flipped the switch on the spec declaring it in Last Call. Just in time to meet the October deadline. Hooray!

As it stands, his status flip may be premature. Or, perhaps, his viewpoint of reality. If you look at the W3C’s HTML issue tracker, you can see it’s got a lot left on it. In response to comments about this difference between the W3C and WHATWG on whether HTML5 had actually reached Last Call, Ian commented “…we have different issues lists and different criteria for going to Last Call.”

Looking at what’s left to resolve, it’d seem the difference in criteria is that the W3C would prefer the job was done properly, as opposed to being done quickly.

I’m inclined to agree with Shelley’s thoughts. Maybe Ian is trying to reassert some control. Maybe he just isn’t concerned with issues like providing unsighted web users with the information they need to understand tables on a website. Either way, it creates the appearance of a move meant to serve himself, not others.

That’s not a reassuring quality to see in our leviathan.

As I discussed on Monday, I’m working towards making this site more accessible. I’m starting with creating access to the comic for visually-impaired visitors, although I know that’s likely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making something truly accessible.

Today I finally set up a system for linking a transcript of the comic via an aria-describedby attribute on the comic’s image tag. As I learned, making a transcript is a time-consuming process. So far, only the most recent comic has a transcript, and it took me well over a half hour to do with little outside distraction. I can understand, then, one major barrier to accessibility being more common on the Internet: laziness.

It’s easy enough for me to consider that my comic has a very small cross-section of people that it’s targeting: web designers and developers. Of that demographic, even less have accessibility issues significant enough to prohibit them from enjoying the comic (or in some cases like deafness, the comic doesn’t have any feature that they’d be missing out on without added support). But the fact is, if even one person is interested in my work, and they can’t experience it because of a barrier that I should be trying to help overcome, then I’m doing something wrong.

Over the next few days or weeks (depending on how much free time I have for the project) I’ll continue to make transcripts for the past comics. All future CSSquirrel comics going forward will have a transcript created when it is first made.

If you’re a person who makes use of screen readers, can you take a chance to examine comic #34 (Squirrel in the Dark) and tell me if the feature is working correctly, or if there’s any other work I should make to enhance it? I’d appreciate that very much.

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?

In one of his recent lengthy, marathonesque comments in other people’s blog posts, John Allsopp said the following quote in response to Bruce Lawson’s post HTML is a mess: “I guess one of the reasons folks are resorting to raising their legitimate concerns in public fora, rather than directly with the HTML WG (or should that be the WhatWG, or maybe both?) is possible they don’t have a tonne of faith in the process.”

This comment by John sent me down several interesting paths of consideration. Firstly, it made me think that Mr. Allsopp might spend more time writing in other people’s blogs than his own, much like Jeff Croft (who I had the fortune to see at Refresh Bellingham last week) appears to spend more time in every other city in America than the one in which he lives.

Secondly, I briefly thought that I’d start spelling “ton” (American spelling) like “tonne” (which appears to be the Australian, and I’ll bet also the UK spelling). I quickly discarded that plan, since it’d just limit my word count in Twitter. Which made me wonder, do Japanese users of Twitter get to use kanji in their tweets? If so, that seems highly unfair. They could fit a War & Peace sized comment in a single tweet that way. (Note to self: learn Japanese.)

Finally I really got to the meat of what he said in that sentence (one of many that expressed his thoughts on the mess topic Bruce had posted about). Why should you or I bother with figuring out how the hell to send an email to the proper mailing lists for the HTML5 WG? Or the WHAT WG? Heck, I’m not even sure which group is more relevant. The former has more technical authority, but the latter is actually making all the calls. RDFa, ARIA, and other fruits of the loins of other W3C chartered working groups are being disregarded by the HTML5 people consistently, or being carefully argued away with a pleading for use cases, a suggestion that their expertise is flawed, or that alternate solutions (read that: the WHAT WG’s solutions) are the better option.

People who’ve spent decades in service to their fields are being shot down by non-experts. Consider the issues with accessibility. Laura Carlson recently sent a proposal (signed by a lot of notables including accessibility guru John Foliot and HTML5 doctor in residence Bruce Lawson) that suggested the audacious idea that there be a formal procedure that describes how HTML5 will seek accessibility guidance from the W3C WAI groups.

HTML5 editor-for-life Ian Hickson evaded the issue by listing all the unanswered questions he has waiting on such topics instead of addressing the proposal. Sam Ruby one-upped Ian by expressing his disappointment that the proposal even existed.

In a situation like this, where motivated, caring experts in their fields are being ignored or deflected when using the official channels, why should your average John Everyweb even consider unraveling the process involved enough to attempt to address concerns, knowing the almost certain result of such efforts?

I can’t think of any motivating reasons.

Today’s comic features John Foliot (representing accessibility efforts) submitting such a suggestion to the HTML5 group(s), with my squirrel alter ego looking on in horror at the results. Consider it a softened metaphor that reflects my own growing dismay at the direction HTML5 seems to be heading when working with others.