Seeking Best Accessibility Practices
Oct28

Test case: Speaking Special Characters

A visitor, Ben Boyle, recently wrote that he was surprised when OSX Voiceover announced a series of three periods as “elipsis.” It is a surprisingly accurate interpretation of a simple character string.

That got Ben to wondering about how other characters, and special encodings, are announced.  Ben put together a selection of special characters and the variety of encodings that are commonly used for those characters. He provided the core of this case.

We agreed to try two different character set encodings, the older but ever present ISO-8859 and the broader UTF-8. I can already see significant visual rendering differences between the two character sets, with UTF-8 being the more accurate. It will be very interesting to know how the screen readers handle the test.

We are interested in knowing how theses things are announced by as many screen readers as you folks can use.  Please listen to either or both of the following test cases. The tests are rather lengthy, but I think well worth while. Take notes on what you hear, and respond to this posting with your results.


Aug29

Target lawsuit settled - exactly as it should be

Preface: Visitors who have been here before might remember that I once worked as an Accessibility Consultant for IBM. I retired early this year after an extraordinary 40 year career with IBM. What follows are my own opinions and should not in any way be attributed to IBM.

There was no “settled law” when the suit was brought against Target, no legal precedent to stand upon. That was likely one of the strong motivations for the National Federation of the Blind to bring the suit; to force settled law, and to clarify (actually greatly extend) the Americans with Disabilities Act. There’s still no settled law and I think that’s a very good outcome!

Those who think the settlement did not go far enough raise three concerns:
1) No legal precedent is established. This concern is also stated as the ADA’s applicability to the web wasn’t confirmed.
2) The settlement for class action litigants should have been larger.
3) The accommodations are mostly for the blind and not other disabilities. Jared Smith says, “Additionally, there is no indication that the Target accessibility guidelines include anything that would benefit anyone except blind users.”

My views are very much different. I’ll address the concerns in reverse order, doing the easiest one first.

3) The accommodations are mostly for the blind and not other disabilities.

Well … the lawsuit was brought by advocates of the blind. What else should we expect? Lawsuits are very serious matters, intended to decide very specific, and often precisely detailed, disputes. The case was very specifically about access for the blind, not access for the deaf or those with motor skill or other disabilities. The settlement must legally answer the charge, and has no obligation to satisfy unspecified complaints.

Sure, we who know how to do accessibility right would suggest going further and satisfying other disabilities as well. If we were designing from scratch and had good reason to believe the full range of people with disabilities would visit the site, we should very strongly recommend accommodations that satisfy all. That’s not the case in a lawsuit. Specific complaint: specific settlement.

Having dealt with solving these problems, I’m know that satisfying the blind is one of the toughest disabilities to accommodate. I also know that many things done to help the blind also help other disabilities as well. While Jared Smith sees solutions for only the blind, I see help for many others as well. For example, making everything keyboard operable helps the blind, those with motor skill problems, and all the rest of us who choose to be keyboard centric. Applying orderly document structure and paying attention to good tab order helps not only the blind, but also people with certain types of dyslexia, as well as all the rest of us who appreciate plain simple order. Ensuring that forms completion has a logical tab order also benefits the dyslexic and all the rest of us. If any specific disability has been left out, it might be the deaf. Yet, I don’t know how much multimedia (needing captions) actually exists on the Target site, or is planned.

2) The settlement for class action litigants should have been larger.

Let’s look at the details.

First, there are numerous costs for reworking the site, and a payment schedule for having the site monitored for compliance. Yes, I’m sure Jim Thatcher will provide very good value for the money, but compliance verification should have been left to Target to decide on their own, not a part of the settlement. After your last reckless driving and speeding judgment, you might have been sentenced to safe driving school, but has anyone heard of having a policeman assigned to monitor your driving behavior for the next three years. Wouldn’t it have been enough to say, “We don’t want to see you back in court again” and leave it to Target to decide how to monitor their compliance?

Then, there’s $20,000 to the California Center for the Blind on behalf of the original litigant. I don’t know what the suit actually cost the Center or the litigant, so I won’t quibble with that.

The remainder of the $6M is for class action claimants, awarding them $3500 if the site failed for them once and $7000 if they had more than one failure.  $3500 is a lot of money for not being able to buy something. I have no idea how legal “damages” are calculated under the California Unruh law. Trebling is a fairly common practice. Yet, I have a hard time believing anyone would have a $1200 cash register receipt from Target. I have no idea what the average receipt is at Target, but it seems beyond belief that the typical customer averages much more than $350 per visit. Using $350 would make the compensation ten times the amount that someone might have purchased. It also looks as though the compensation was designed to satisfy about 1200 possible claimants (about the mid point between 850 claimants at $7000 and 1700 claimants at $3500).

My view is that $3500 is very generous compensation for the inconvenience of having to go somewhere else to shop. Consider the case where your local Target store was late opening one morning, or had a broken water pipe that kept it closed all day. You drove over and couldn’t buy that patio furniture you had been wanting. Should you get $3500 compensation for not being able to access the store? Sure, it’s an artificial scenario, but it’s simply not normal for people to be compensated for being unable to purchase something, especially when there’s a K-Mart down the street that carries essentially the same merchandise (and just might have an accessible web site).

Then, Jared Smith says, “I also believe the 6 million dollar settlement to be rather insignificant for a corporation that had $63 billion in revenue and $3 billion in net income in 2007.” Oh please! Are there still people who believe in punishing the big guys just because they’re big? Robin Hood politics doesn’t belong in this settlement. Just as the complaint was for a specific class of people, the blind, the compensation should be specific, relevant to the complaint, not to what a corporation earns.

1) No legal precedent is established. This concern is also stated as the ADA’s applicability to the web wasn’t confirmed.

Jim Tatcher says, “The importance is now evident. In my non-legal opinion, the Judge said that the ADA applied to Target.com (to the extent that the web site related to Target’s bricks and mortar stores) and, most importantly, that the California anti-discrimination law (referred to as the Unruh Act) applied to Target.”

Peter Abrahams says,  “The laws on accessibility apply to your site.” and, “The law is now clear and public…”

Not at all!

Yes, those statements would be true had the case gone to trial and Target had actually been found guilty. Target was allowed to settle without admitting any wrong doing. The case never went to conclusion. Judge Patel’s ruling that the ADA and Unruh apply was not legally determined. It is still unsettled case law, still as murky as it has always been. Just like previous attempts, none of the cases came to a conclusion sufficient to claim the ADA is applicable. Three notable attempts have all failed to uphold the ADA as applicable to the web. (Gumson vs. Southwest Airlines, Spitzer vs. Ramada and Priceline, and NFB vs. Target)

The ADA became law in 1990, well before the advent of the web. The accommodation parts of the ADA are about physical accommodations, and there is very specific language and guidance about what types of physical accommodations must be made; parking spaces, aisle widths, braille markings, wheel chair ramps, rest room components, and on and on. The ADA material is so specific about these physical accommodations that one has to have a very fertile imagination to think that any of it could possibly apply to the web, or any other electronic systems. Applying the ADA to the web is nothing more than wishful thinking, thinking that requires numerous tenuous extensions to get from physical buildings to electronic enterprise. This looks like yet another case of a court inviting a penumbra into its judgment.

I understand why people would like to see the ADA applicable. It is the closest existing U.S. legislation that has the power to punish non-governmental businesses for how the disabled are treated. Yet, it is obsolete when the Web is considered. The right thing to do is to modernize the ADA through legislative action, not through judicial action. Create new law that is appropriate for non-governmental electronic enterprise. Make it as specific for the Internet as the ADA has been for physical accommodations. Pass it and enforce it. Stop trying to turn old law into new with judicial activism.

My conclusion

I still believe as strongly in making accessibility improvements as I always have. Businesses will be very well advised to avoid the legal hassles and lost opportunities that Target, Ramada, Priceline, Southwest Airlines, AOL, and others have experienced in the past.  Yet, I’m not sure many will see these as strong enough lessons to call to action.

The real messages to businesses is that full accessibility is simply good for business. While I worked for IBM, one of my primary responsibilities was looking after the accessibility features of ibm.com. The corporation was dedicated to providing full accessibility, and simultaneously was also very understanding of the competitive advantage that comes from being more accessible than the competition.

Free enterprise thrives when burdensome regulation and governmental interference is at a minimum. Let the businesses decide how they want to operate. Assuming equally attractive lines of products and services, those businesses who ignore some customers will suffer, and those who invite all will flourish. The last thing any of them need is a bludgeon based on a legal whim instead of clear and accurate law.


Apr19

“Off left” banned by Google?

Hidden text can be a spammer’s haven.

Years ago, when screen readers were at release 4.0, they started to change and actually pay attention to display:none. I ran a series of tests back then and knew exactly how every screen reader behaved. I was one of the earliest advocates of hiding helpful text off to the left of the visible viewport. I’ve used it cautiously for things like skip links, for the real text associated with image replacement headers, and for occassional other situations where the blind could benefit from having text available that wasn’t part of the visual design.

Along the way, people speculated whether search engine owners would eventually scoff at the technique. It is too similar to the nefarious methods of “link stuffing” that many spammers practice. I ignored the issue … until yesterday when I received the following from Google:

Dear site owner or webmaster of access-matters.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from access-matters.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

* The following hidden text on access-matters.com:

e.g.

cation approval card credit instant Low apr interest credit cards Juniper credit card application. Lowest phentermine prices Credit score Apply for a fleet low interest credit card application Zithromax no prescription Zoloft interactions Credit credit card applications? Hoodia information Propecia effectiveness, Reporting and interpreting liabilities Credit scores explained! Zocor lipitor Side effects from fosamax medicati

[…]

Ah gee, has it gotten so bad that they have to crack down on my very simple use of “off left?” Didn’t they look to see that the class is “access,” making it clear that it’s done for accessibility? So, it was off to their guidelines documents, and to their forums. The guidelines were not specific enough to answer my questions. The forums had lots of discussion, but most was speculation by curious people like me … and no answers from anyone with Google credentials. The best information I found was an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts at the StoneTemple Consulting site. In that interview, Matt said:

So, our philosophy has tried to be not to find any false positives, but to try to detect stuff that would qualify as keyword stuffing, or gibberish, or stitching pages, or scraping, especially put together with hidden text.

We use a combination of algorithmic and manual things to find hidden text.

There was little to lead me to believe they had cracked down hard. Yet, I was skeptical that they might no longer be doing the “manual things” and making due consideration. So, lets’ have a look…

I pulled up the site and disabled CSS using Chris Pederick’s excellent Web-Developer toolbar. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHH! Just below the header area was a huge block of spam links. What the ??? Where the H___ did they come from?

Long story short, the site had been hacked. The hacker left behind one line of code in the header.php file. That line started with <font style=’position: absolute;overflow: hidden;height: 0;width: 0′> and contained about 150 links for various pharmaceutical products, doubtful financial products, and enhancement products of all types for all genders. Yes, the hosting service confirmed the password thefts. Yes, I cleaned it up and changed my passwords.

Yes, Google was right. Spam was stuffed into hidden text on my site.

They were not complaining about my accessibility technique.


Apr18

Very quiet at Access Matters

The post just previous to this one is dated Jan 22. What you don’t see is “2007.” That’s right 15 months ago. What happened to cause blogging to subside?

In January 2007, I changed jobs. No, it was not to a different employer, but my sixth or seventh unique job at the same employer, IBM. While I hade been doing accessibility work for a number of years, it was a secondary part of my work. That changed in January 2007 when I moved to IBM’s Human Ability and Accessibility Center.

Hurray! Full time accessibility work.

Well, … yes and no. There are pros and cons to everything. On the plus side, my primary work was assisting our Human Resources division with improving the accessibility characteristics of the applications they sponsor. Many are custom built by outside firms with specific areas of expertise (investment counseling, health care services, career guidance, etc.), and all of these applications are used on our intranet by upwards of 380,000 IBM employees. That audience has the typcical distribution of disabilities, and making these applications fully accessible was both very important and highly appreciated. That part of the job was very satisfying.

On the other hand, I had been eligible for retirement for many years already, and the lure of other activites was growing stronger day by day. Travel, visiting grandchildren, woodworking, boat building, and various forms of artwork were all singing their siren songs.

I gave into the temptations and retired from IBM at the end of 2007, after 41 years of amazing technological progress. Accessibility is still a very strong interest, but not likely one that will be associated with “employment” any time soon. Four months into it, I find that retirement suits me well. — April 2008


Jan22

Improving accessibility for today’s AJAX - To hack or not?

This posting ends up being like previous quiz questions, but I’m dropping the old numbering sheme (related to WCAG principles) and the multiple choice answers as well. New year, new topics, time to move on.

I want to ask about a proposed technique, but first the set up.

A short while ago, Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner published a very good article about how screen readers behave and some ideas on Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s well worth the read. … Now, I’ll wait.

So, they’re back again with another. This time, they’re trying to lessen the burden on the visitors who use screen readers. Why put the onus on them to constantly shift modes if there’s something programatic that can be done? In Improving Ajax applications for JAWS users, Gez and Steve reveal a technique they have found which forces JAWS 7.1 to update its virtual buffer without user intervention.

I should trust that they are right in saying it’s new to JAWS and probably does little for other assistive technology products. Yet, as much trust and resect I have for these guys, you never know when a JAWS competitor might implement the same trigger. Plus, I’m curious to actually try it with a variety of assistive technology and browsers, more than I have at my own disposal.

That’s where you come in. I have two very simple test cases for you to try. The first is as simple an AJAX application as one can write. (Actually, I liberated it from Brothercake’s Sitepoint article AJAX and Screenreaders: When can it work?) The test case has one link which does one AJAX call and updates a paragraph. You can’t make one any simpler. The second test case simply extends the first with Gez and Steve’s updateBuffer technique. Go give each of them a quick try with whatever array of assistive technologies and browsers you have. Tell us how they behave.


Jan22

Simple AJAX Test 1a

This test builds upon Simple AJAX Test #1 by extending it with a “hacK” to better support screen readers. It uses Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner’s updateBuffer technique as published in their article “Improving AJAX applications for JAWS users.” Is it only for JAWS, or will it make a difference for others too?

This link is the trigger.

This paragraph will update with the response

What happens in your screen reader? Does it update and speak the response with no problems, or do you have to do something special to hear the response? Important: How does it compare with the behavior of Simple AJAX Test #1? When leaving a comment, please tell us which screen reader and browser you are using. Remember to include version numbers.



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