Accessible Accessibility
Nice title eh? Thats what a B in GCSE English gets you
But anyway, enough of the silly title, what am I on about? Well, actually, the title does kind of sum it up nicely.
Web accessibility is something I harp on about quite a lot, mention something along the lines of not seeing the point of it, and you’ll ensnare me in an instant heated debate on the subject.
I really want more people to take accessibility seriously and make web pages with it taken into consideration. But… and of course you knew a but was coming, what do non-web people do when they want to get something online?
I bring this up after a discussion on an email list which is about Special Needs IT. Mainly full of Teachers, education professionals and relevant software/hardware publishers , this is a group of people who’s whole job is based around younger people with various disabilities and impairements and how they use computers. This of course includes the web and there’s a fair niche market there.
Some of these people are quite handy with computers themselves, either technically minded, or just good at utilising the availible applications, and being the niche kind of market it is, they also tend to share information (the whole idea behind the email list) and therefore the web becomes a very useful medium. But very few of them are web people, and very few of them have the time or inclination to start learning HTML, web standards, code semantics, Accessibility practices etc…
And why should they. They aren’t web developers, they are just people trying to share information with others, they shouldn’t need to jump through hoops to do that kind of thing.
Yet they don’t have the proper tools readily availible to publish this information on the web, in an easy manner that takes account of the issues like presenting it in an Accessible form.
This was kicked off by a mention of a toold that is supposed to take MS Word’s output and tidy it up for better use on the web. Another person said they couldn’t see why just using the “Save as Webpage…” option in Word wasn’t good enough, which demonstrates that though they work with kids who needs the accessibility enhancements, they have no idea why a site is or isn’t accessible.
And its needs to be that simple. it needs to be something that people can type into, click a couple buttons, and have a webpage that publishes the content they want, in a proper manner.
As I’m typing here, I see a tool that already does most of that, this Blogging software. I got thinking, that really, for a lot of these people, some kind of blogging application would be about perfect. It is a kind of CMS for the masses, its the whole caboodle in one package. I don’t think I’d recommend MT to them, I had a hard enough time getting that up and running myself, but something like Wordpress that I’m on now owuld be a lot more suitable.
Grab someone with a bit of web knowledge. Someone who can help get some hsoting setup and say what the MySQL details are for the small amounts of manual configuration. Voila, in about 10 minutes of work, a teacher, with a little bit of help, could have a decent online CMS up and running, on which to post their tidbits of information, link off to resources, comment on various things in their area of interest.
Out of the box Wordpress seems pretty good. It generates nicely validating XHTML1.0 Transitional (yeah ok, served up as text/html, but I’m happy enough wiht that), but then, I’ve been banging on about accessibility haven’t I.
Wordpress probably isn’t that inaccessible out of the box, but I also think some fairly minor tweaks would probably make it better. Some clearer fonts, maybe some better contrast to areas. I imagine a few tweaks to the default stylesheet would do it.
Having a bit of a search, I can see some very nice looking Wordpress templates, but none that seem particularly more accessible. Maybe I need to tweak the default one myself. Its nice that all these people provide their own templates for things, that can be easily plugged in by people with less CSS knowledge, or knowledge of a particular blog system, or those with a sever lack of design skills (myself generally included there), but I do with some of them would pay more attention to standards and accessibility. That way, people who really can’t do it themselves, have an option to produce something that may not be the flashiest thing around, but works, and works well.
Now, perhaps I need to set-up a dummy version of Wordpress and fiddle with that style sheet. Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast……