I read with interest the post below in the e-access bulletin, the comments from my distinguished friend, Julie Howells regarding accessibility, Julie knows her stuff and I tend to make an effort to read when she writes or gets up to in the big wide world. In this post her thoughts mirror much that I (we) have been saying to our customers (and work colleagues) for some time, Accessibility and compliance are NOT the same thing and I would even go as far as to say that accessibility has little to do with disability at all.

Accessibility is about being able to get to the information available and then doing something useful with it, its less about building in 'features' for disables users and much more about not building barriers to users. Its makes sense therefore, to make sure that the user experience is well designed and clear to all users, their expectations are met with consistent and clear navigation and structures and that they are left feeling confident in the service you, as a supplier, are offering.

Full posting from the E-access Bulletin below, copy right and details on how to subscribe are included as per the copyright agreement

E-Government Bulletin, 28 April 2008: Digital exclusion; Public bodies sell on eBay; Common web accessibility problems. 

The need to move beyond pure technical 'accessibility' of websites to the creation of 'fantastic user experiences' for disabled people online was the keynote theme at last week's E-Access '08 conference on access to technology by people with disabilities, hosted by the publishers of E-Government Bulletin.

Julie Howell, Director of Accessibility at digital agency Fortune Cookie and former digital policy manager at blindness charity RNIB, told delegates the simply ensuring the special access technologies such as the text to speech screen readers used by blind people could read information on a website was no longer enough.

"We should be creating rich, engaging, fabulous user experiences for disabled people," Howell said. "It's not about taking text and just having it read out loud."

If accessibility is defined as the ability of any person using any technology in any circumstance to access content, it will mean that for example a blind person's screen reader can find the content and read it out, Howell said. "That, however, is no guarantee that blind person will be able to do their shopping in a reasonable amount of time, or complete their task at the same cost as a sighted person would.

"My definition of equality is the ability of a disabled person to achieve a goal in the same time, at the same time, at the same cost, and at the same convenience as a person who doesn't have a disability. I've never understood why I, who can see, should have it easier on the web than my friend, who is blind."

Howell outlined plans for her work as chair of a new British Standards Institution technical committee to create the first British standard on web accessibility (see E-Government Bulletin issue 257, 18 February 2008).

She said a draft standard would be released for consultation in September and pledged the final version would be published in the first quarter of 2009. The standard will cover key recent developments in internet technology such as 'Web 2.0', rich internet applications and the need for modern websites to work across platforms including mobile phones, Howell said.

NOTE: To view the slides used in Julie Howell's presentation, see the programme page at:
http://www.headstar-events.com/eaccess08/
Further coverage of E-Access '08 including the keynote presentation will appear in our sister publication E-Access Bulletin. To register for this free newsletter see:
http://www.headstar.com/eab

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