Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom

Posted by: Joanne Finch | 02 May 2008

Last Friday, 25th April, Adam and I attended the Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom conference in City University, London. The event was organised by AbilityNets Senior Accessibility and Usability Consultant Kath Moonan, and hosted by Robin Christopherson one of their founding members. The event advertised an impressive range of speakers including Jonathon Hassell, Head of Audience Experience and Usability for BBC, Julie Howell who is Director of Accessibility at digital design agency Fortune Cookie, and Antonia Hyde from United Response a company who works with people who have learning disabilities and mental health needs.

I went to the event because the digital industry is moving forward so fast and in my role it's of the upmost important to keep my accessibility knowledge up-to-date, especially with the onset of sites that rely on user generated content such as, FaceBook, YouTube, Flickr etc. So I thought what better way to keep me in the know that to attend a “the first ever conference focusing on web accessibility in a Web 2.0 world”, the day promised to be a very practical day, offering realistic solutions and cutting edge techniques.

Jeremy Keith from Clearleft was first up and spoke about how the key to accessibility was to keep data open, by allowing other users to take your data and do with it what they will, we will have a far more accessible web. The transcript of his keynote is here
After tea and biscuits Steve Faulkner from Paciello Group was up, he took Twitter as his case study examining the problems encountered by using AJAX. Steve’s talk, along with Antonia’s, was more practical than most of the other speakers, and was probably more of what I expected from the event.

Christian Heilmann was next with an entertaining talk on “Fencing in the habitat”, how with the likes of text resize, text only & high contrast options we are placing users with disabilities in their own habitats, rather than encouraging them to learn how to use their browsers in order to tailor content to suit their needs. I was kind of agreeing with everything Chris was saying about text re-size options etc as it was what I was preaching to clients myself as far back as four, five years ago, but then Antonia Hyde from United Response gave her speech on designing for users with learning disabilities.

I found Antonias talk one of the most engaging and was quite disappointed in that she was rushed for time and cut short by the organizers. Designing for users with learning disabilities is not something I’ve really looked into before and I know it’s not something that is taken into account in the W3C WCAG guidelines. Antonia showed videos of users trying to use various sites encountering issues with changing content and content overload, lack of easy options to tailor content such as changing contrast or text size (in contrast to what Christian Heilmann has been saying previously) and lack of good iconage for easy recognition.

Jonathan Hassel talked about user generated content and the issues with making it accessible. He showed a couple of projects that the BBC have developed, BBC Jam have designed an e-learning tool that translates English into British Sign Language (BSL) with the help of some nicely illustrated characters. Then there was also an e-learning tool for blind kids which made clever use of stereo sound to give instant feedback to on screen actions. One fact that did take me by surprise is that “No blind child under the age of 11 years is using any type of e-learning software”.

Next up was Stephen Eisden of Leonard Cheshire Disability talking about "Building a social network for disabled users". Disability Information portal DIP uses WordPress as it’s underlying technology and tries to take into account a range of requirements from a wide variety of disabilities. DIP online is currently in a pilot scheme you can join in here dip-online.org.

Finally Ian Forrester of BBC backstage was on, unfortunately another speaker who was pushed for time and got cut short. Ian talked briefly about the “Tools and Technologies to watch and avoid” mentioning Flash and Adobe Air among other culprits to be aware of. He discussed how we are in the middle of a “User Control Revolution” and that users with disabilities need to be part of the revolution too that means allowing them to contribute rather than just to observe.

The day ended with a discussion panel, which consisted of: Mike Davies of Yahoo! UK, Kath Moonan from AbilityNet, Bim Egan from the RNIB, Jonathan Hassell from the BBC, Antonia Hyde from United Response and Panayiotis Zaphiris from the City University, all moderated by Julie Howell.

The over riding message I took from the day was that we’re in a world that has gone beyond the WCAG guidelines and ticking all the right boxes, we should be making content, and the ability to create content, truly accessible to users. That we are all unique, and have our own requirements it’s not just for those we class has disabled. We need to design for everyone and get everyone involved.

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