Is Accessible Design A Myth?

Eric A. Meyer

Complex Spiral Consulting

An Accessible Web

• How accessible can visual designs really be?
• The goal, of course, is to have the same document/data available to all users of all devices
• CSS was a huge step forward in realizing this goal
• The old adage: two steps forward, one step back

Presentation vs. Portability

• Humans are, by and large, visual creatures
• Strong visual design usually requires images, which at present means rasterized images
• A close runner-up in design is strong (and varied) typography, which at present means raster images or Flash
• Providing an alternative in either case is necessary

Image Replacement

• A number of techniques emerged in the early 00's
• All sought to allow document text to be 'transparently' replaced with images
  • The ideal: no non-semantic markup, no accessibility penalties, no limit on visual effects
• All emerged from the growing desire to be accessible without sacrificing design
• The biggest stumbling block? Screen readers!

Skip Links

• For those who experience a document linearlly, skip links can be helpful
• Sighted users don't need the skip links ("Return to top" excepted)
• Accessibility-conscious designers try to include them while hiding them from sighted users
• The biggest stumbling block? Screen readers!

Tear Down These Walls!

• The approach of trying to audibly render a visual presentation is deeply flawed
  • It made sense in the table era, but that time is done and so is scrape-reading
• Documents are becoming semantic, structural — accessible!
• It's long past time for screen readers to become audio browsers
  • The general concept behind DOCTYPE switching has utility here
• Less guessing, less confusion, less repetition

Should Audible CSS Return?

• Whether it's aural or speech, support for audio CSS would be a giant step forward
• Authors are getting more used to styling documents for different media — they're ready
• Those lagging behind would catch up once they understand how structural markup could help them, not hurt them
• Remove scrape-reading from the equation, push markup into more semanticity
  • With a common foundation, explaining good audio styling techniques becomes much easier

Promise On The Horizon

• Enrichment of the CSS content property solves image-replacement problems at a stroke
  • Markup stays pristine; text remains for non-visual media
  • Anything can be substituted
• The wait, however, will almost certainly not be short
• Too bad this is the current best hope for accessible design!

To Sum Up

• Accessibility and visual design are still in tension
• Screen readers need to become audio browsers
• Audio styling is a needed technology
• Things will get better in the next few years...
• ...but how much better depends on audio browsers