[Irl-dean] United Nations Global Audit of Web Accessibility

[Mark Magennis]

Josh asks:

> how many more of these reports do we need? I am sure we will all  
> agree that the
> situation is bad and getting it together is a Sisyphean task, but will
> we also end up with accessibility report blindness?

Yes, it does get a bit tedious hearing the same thing over and over  
again, but often 'business as usual' is important news. Also, I  
wonder who are the audiences for these reports. Whilst you and I may  
have seen quite a number over the past few years, I'm sure there are  
enough people new to the game for whom this will be their first  
report, not just the latest.

I wonder about the validity and usefulness of one-off snapshots  
without a standardised methodology though. I think accessibility  
studies can have more importance if they are part of an ongoing  
benchmarking process that allows direct comparison of results over  
time. I was talking to a guy yesterday who is involved in the EC  
eInclusion unit's latest ICT accessibility study. His belief was that  
the reason the EC funds these studies is that their decision making  
process thrives on hard data that is up to date and which can show  
trends and progress (or lack of it).

Having said that, the rapidly changing technological landscape and  
rapidly changing uses to which ICT is put in society make it  
difficult to do long term comparative studies. For example, a website  
study based on WCAG 1.0 which would have been an appropriate  
indicator 5 years ago is becoming steadily less appropriate as  
websites take on more technologies, functions and features that are  
not well measured by WCAG1.0 conformance. So the comparison gets less  
and less valid over time.

I was thinking about what might be a good approach to a long term  
eAccessibility benchmarking process (only thinking over coffee mind,  
so please don't shoot me down for being half baked or less), and it  
occurred to me that it might be good to use a rolling set of  
functional exercises based on "what people most want to do in the  
online world right now". So five years ago the tasks would have  
involved searching for information and buying small consumer items  
because that's what everyone wanted to do then. Today, we would  
instead (or also) be measuring the use of social networking,  
publishing, gaming and eGovernment services. Maybe in the near future  
we'd be measuring virtual reality and teleconferencing. At some point  
we'd maybe stop being prudish and start measuring the accessibility  
of online porn, particularly when it gets married to virtual reality  
and multi-player gaming. Any volunteers for that study? :-) Who knows  
what will happen, but that's the point. When not only the technology  
is rapidly changing but, more importantly, the uses to which people  
need to put that technology in order to feel included and evolving,  
then surely the benchmarks should change accordingly, but in a way  
that retains comparability. So the measurements could be taken on a  
'basket' of what are currently considered to be the top 10 things  
'people' want to do on the interweb and the 'score' could reflect the  
extent to which those activities are accessible. Just an idea. Any  
thoughts?

Mark

Dr. Mark Magennis
Director of the Centre for Inclusive Technology (CFIT)
National Council for the Blind of Ireland
Whitworth Road, Dublin 9, Republic of Ireland
www.cfit.ie

mark.magennis at ncbi.ie   tel: +353 (0)71 914 7464



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