Looking Through the Facets
Two weeks ago this Sunday, I left for Penn State to speak at their Web 2008 conference. I arrived back in town late last night from the UPA Conference in Baltimore. In between I gave a handful of presentations (such as this one), served as a session chair, met a lot of really interesting people, hooked up with some dear friends, revisited my art school days, went to an Orioles game, replaced the windshield on my car, strolled around my old neighborhood, drank too much beer and ate some strange cheese.
The best part was finding myself squarely in the belly of the beast that is web accessibility. I now have more intimate knowledge of current developments regarding Section 508, Section 255, TEITAC, the EU Mandate 376 and the continuing evolution of the WCAG 2.0 draft. Since that fateful day in 2003 when I was literally laughed out of a meeting (I had suggested to my company that the web software we created should accommodate users with disabilities), the topic of accessibility has certainly gained positive traction.
Still, I’m a little worried. Not about the user base, not about adoption among practitioners, not about proving a business case, and certainly not about the standards themselves. WCAG 2.0 is written to be comprehensive, persuasive, testable and harmonized. Here, read for yourself.
No, what I’m concerned about is the Internet itself. Can we really predict what digital communication and community will look like five years from now? Who’s to say that the primary stream of delivery will remain websites developed in HTML/CSS/XML and presented within a W3C-approved construct? One could argue that the Web will become more immersive, more visual, more haptic, more identity-driven through avatar technology. Is it likely? I don’t know. Is it possible? You bet.
Consider the role of the avatar. Much study is being done on the trust users place in their virtual proxies. Will businesses in the private sector seek to capitalize on these new forms of identifying customers? If so, how does that impact our users who have impairments of vision, motor skills, hearing and cognitive abilities?
Having said that, let’s be clear about one thing: the most direct path to creating accessible web content today remains the writing of well-formed, standards-compliant HTML. The entire edifice of HTML is the crafting of content marked up within the context it was intended. Screen readers understand headers, links, lists, bullet points, etc, because good HTML offers an easy handshake with assistive devices. It’s automatic. The challenge of creating accessible non-HTML content using Flash, for example, is that it requires conscious effort to do so. You can make a Flash piece accessible, but the authoring software doesn’t provide this feature by default.
Here’s the thing, though. I’ve written before about the forms in which the Internet may splinter in the future, and one of those is the paradigm of the virtual world. I’m drawing a slight distinction between compliance and conformance. In the private sector the marketplace drives conformance; the threat of a lawsuit drives compliance. I know, from speaking to several folks closely involved with the process, that Second Life was a consideration throughout the discussion. What I’m afraid of is the possibility that businesses will begin to infiltrate SL, offering in-world services similar to the Web and leaving users with disabilities out of the equation.
Here’s a starting point: the term public accommodation is used to define the reasonable extent a business must provide accessible, equivalent services. Consider what will happen if virtual worlds become increasingly transactional. If a business wants to do business in-world, it may be time to investigate what public accommodation means within that specific context. Such a discussion may very well expand beyond the guidelines proposed by the W3C. Perhaps such an event is further in the distance than I suggest, but shouldn’t we at least begin to explore new forms of digital experience with accessibility in mind?