Benefit from IT'
Author: Philip Phil Chalmers Rainham Gillingham Medway Kent England Great Britain UK United Kingdom
Web accessibility - the wrong way |
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Web accessibility regulations are crazy
What would you think if your government required:
- all motor vehicles to be drivable by people with all kinds of physical disability?
- all telephone systems to be usable by the deaf?
- all television programmes, books and newspapers to be easily usable by the blind?
Wouldn't you think they were crazy? But governments are imposing all of these requirements on web sites.
Accessibility is the political football of vested interests
This crazy situation has arisen because:
- it's politically convenient for politicians, bureaucrats and the accessibility lobby.
- the web is too young to have an industry lobby powerful enough to oppose these interest groups - unlike the motor, telephone and "old media" industries.
If accessibility was funded out of taxation like any normal social programme, the politicians and bureaucrats would have to account for how efficiently and wisely the money was used and the lobbyists would have to justify their proposals. Accessibility regulations push the costs on to web sites' accounts. This enables politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists to claim credit for doing good while avoiding democratic accountability for the costs.
Why this is bad for the general public
Money spent on making web pages more accessible can't be spent on creating new products or new jobs. So accessibility costs "normal" people money - but the costs are not measured and no-one has to account for them or justify them.
Some sites have withdrawn some pages either because the cost of making them accessible would be high or because there are too many to convert in a short time. So these pages are now inaccessible to 100% of the population.
Accessibility regulations raise the cost of entry for new sites and small organisations. This makes it harder for the general public to find alternatives to the offerings of large firms and governments, and harder to find material specific to their interests or locations.
Why this is bad for the disabled
All the money and effort are spent on making web sites adapt to the limitations of current aids for the disabled instead of on creating better aids for the disabled. So the makers of current aids for the disabled have no incentive to develop better ones. For example if a particular HTML-to-speech translator can't cope with features commonly used in web pages, the web pages are blamed rather than the translator.
If web pages are withdrawn because of the cost of making them accessible, "normal" people can often get similar information from books, magazines, phone calls or television adverts - all of which generally present greater obstacles for the disabled than the Web.
And the accessibility regulations are not very effective because the disabled generally have low incomes - to access the Web at all they need a PC, a connection (which costs money to run) and software which is appropriate for their individual needs - plus help in setting everything up and tuition in using it.
Further details
Reason magazine's article Is your site accessible? (July 1999) describes the situation in the USA:
- What a newspaper would be like if the same accessibility regulations were applied to it.
- How the interpretation of accessibility regulations may be extended in the USA (look for the words "The new federal Web site committee established by the U.S. Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board").
- The biassed and self-nominated composition of the drafting committee (look for "The people drafting the rules believe they should apply to everyone. Who are they?")
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© Copyright 2001-2008 Philip Chalmers, all rights reserved
