Access Enablement or Accessibility?

Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have been going back and forth and back again about accessibility and in particular the SVG images on Sam’s blog. In Mark’s latest post he explains the somewhat crazy world of access enablement:

Long answer: As far as I know, none of the commercially available screenreaders support svg in any way, much less reading the title of an svg image included inline in an xhtml page (as opposed to, say, linked from the src attribute of an <img> element, or embedded in an <object> element). Nonetheless, you have provided a text alternative for the image, and theoretically, that could be presented to a user in place of (or in addition to) the image. You have therefore fulfilled your moral duty, even though no one actually benefits from it. Welcome to the wacky world of access enablement. Mark’s right – in many companies and other organizations you have to tick the boxes for accessibility rules and they are quite often just plain stupid. Mark calls that access enablement, I call it beurocracy or perhaps more kindly, the only effective way to get a large organization to meet difficult to understand objectives.

However, in the case of Sam’s blog, there really isn’t any loss of information if you can’t see the image. They act as a kind of category logo, and when you can see them, provide a quick way to scan the page for a particular topic. It would not be quick to scan the page if the images were displayed as a text alternative.

In fact, it could well be argued that adding the text alternative makes the page less accessible, not more. Compare:

Accessible

accessible

Mark Pilgrim: Deep thought: every post on @samruby ’s blog since June 2006 contains an image without a text alternative.

With:

Accessible

Mark Pilgrim: Deep thought: every post on @samruby ’s blog since June 2006 contains an image without a text alternative.

If you were a blind user accessing the page with a screen reader (the mythical one that supports titles in SVG), your screen reader would say the word “accessible” twice – once as a header and once as the alternate text for the image. You might get “Heading: Accessible, Image: Accessible” read to you but it’s still not useful. The single most useful thing that could be done with that image when encountered by screen readers is to simply ignore it.

One of the biggest challenges about accessibility is convincing people that it’s not just about adding alt tags to images, it’s about allowing people with disabilities to access the page. Following the rules to the letter is neither the absolute right answer nor a silver bullet. What you need to do is actually test with real world tools. That’s why the actual rules, particularly in WCAG 2.0, are so incredibly vague. The techniques are more detailed and more descriptive but the rules themselves are very high level.

The same thing applies in the real world. You have to provide ramps or elevators so that people in wheelchairs can get everywhere they need to go, but you don’t have to provide ramps everywhere. There are plenty of shopping malls and other public places that provide a normal set of stairs in the most convenient place and an elevator off to one side. Sam’s blog is a perfect example of that concept applied to software. I read Sam’s blog without seeing those SVG images all the time because they don’t come through to my feed reader, yet I can still tell what the post is about because it has a descriptive title.

If you’re asking yourself “does my site meet WCAG 2.0?” you’re doing it all wrong. You should be asking “is my site accessible?” Just meeting WCAG won’t necessarily make your site accessible – do it if that’s what is required to get paid, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that it’s the real aim.