In expositional writing one does well to address the 6 W's (sometimes called H's): Who; What; When; Where; Why; How.
I can dispense with: the Where since we all know this is about the World Wide Web; the When since it is for now and all time to come; and the What since it is any/every -thing that you ever wanted to either know about for yourself or wanted others to find out and agree with you as to how important it was that you let it be known.
The great imponderable of the Why is beyond my scope because if it could be answered we'd probably all be out hang-gliding, playing music, making love, or somehow reveling in the then-well-understood reason for our existence.
I'm sure I won't have much novel to add about the How of developing materials for the Web but I'll give it a shot later. My biggest concern as I get too far into my eighth decade is the Who of it all. Who develops Web content - and for whom? How can one, as a Webmaster who cares about the issue, guarantee accessibility?
We are all too familiar with grandiose dreams of the "promise of the Web" - and its parent, the internet - how we now inhabit a "global village" and in the flutter of a Spring-struck heart we can entrance a whole planet with our wit and wisdom. Also adding "dot-com" to the name of one's company can make each of us worth more than the gross national product of most nations.
A little history: in the U.S. women couldn't vote until 1920; people with black skin couldn't play major league baseball until 1947; folks who preferred their sexual relations to be with their own gender were in danger of annihilation if they revealed that fact - sadly still true today; and we are finally presented with the notion that people with disabilities (which of course from a rational viewpoint is everybody) are somehow OK to euthanize.
So I come to the development game as one who is on the Heavy Track. I submit that posting inaccessible content to the World Wide Web is as sociopathic as ethnic cleansing, apartheid, gay-bashing, and various flavors of "something-or-other" Supremacy.
So in summary the Who of things is the "everyone" in the WWW6 slogan "Everything, everyone connected". Of course the "everything" in there is the What mentioned earlier.
The theme of my presentation is that if you are going to produce material for the World Wide Web, particularly if you are trying to insure its Universal Accessibility and Usability, you should put yourself under the direction of blind folks. I am also concerned that people with hearing problems or reduced motor skills be able to access whatever developers publish on the Web, but since my background is in the "field" of visual impairment I put most of my emphasis on that area.
Further you should do at least some of your work without a monitor or a mouse. When I first got this suggestion from my directors I thought "oh, I can imagine what that would be like so I don't really need to do it since it'll just hang me up." WRONG. The actual performing under those conditions is beyond humbling - it goes all the way to reformation. If you use a mask that permits viewing only one line at a time or try to read through a straw you can get some feeling of part of the problem. If your only access to a page of text is through the synthesized speech of a screen reader you can guess what it's like to search for a particular word: you must listen serially to the whole damn thing! You will gain great respect for "find" mechanisms and further you will begin to appreciate how important it is to use structural elements for their intended purpose instead of as a substitute for proper formatting procedures. I used H1 to make stuff bigger until I snapped that some people actually use structure elements to jump around in a document - DUH!
The cliche is that a picture is worth 1000 words but of course it is also known that the information in pictures can often be adequately communicated with words but there are a lot of words that, short as they may be, can barely be approached even with several seconds of images. Most of the content we get from novels must be left out else the films based on them would last a lifetime. So for a little How I give you the number 1 priority in Web Development Practice: the ALT="text" attribute - now, thankfully a requirement for many HTML elements.
This is such a significant matter that we've actually presented the author with two other attributes that can be used to be sure that little is lost either on blind people or those getting Web stuff over their car radios: TITLE and LONGDESC. I leave the delineations amongst them to others but just note that they have a place and if you're working for blind guys you'll find out more about it - also if you're not using a monitor and hear "Welcome to IMAGE" or "Click here to see live nude action".
When I was a jazz musician in the bebop era of the 1950s the word "cool" had a meaning that has been usurped by some lost souls who use it to refer to Web sites that are very "uncool" to one of my generation. The symbol of all this is the old "blinking text" built into early text-based devices: it seems like a great idea until you actually encounter it and then it gets to be like fireworks to a child or pornography to an adolescent boy - fascinating for a short time and then really boring.
We don't need to make the Web into slow TV since we already have fast TV and when you have experienced the old "157 channels and nothing to watch" effect you realize that the aspect of the Web that is a really huge, fast library with instant links to more than you ever wanted to know about everything is what we must safeguard. Somewhere under all those pictures of smiling flight attendants and Tahitiian beaches there is a means of finding an airline schedule and even ordering a ticket: "click here to..." Whenever I see the word "just" used in connection with "click" or "drag and drop" I am reminded of the frequent embarrassment I feel immediately after telling a blind guy "it's the green one - right over there." Blind people come to learn that most wannabe helpful sighted folks don't know their right from their left and "just click here" is frequently not an option.
As in the old fable, your blind bosses always knew the Emperor was naked even when he had on all his robes. Let's assume that you've decided to heed my advice and get yourself an accessibility advisor whom you will accept as your mentor/overseer/boss: which blind guy do you choose? After all there are all sorts of blind people: those who use WIFE 2.0 as their screen access system; those who don't want to discourage your stupid ideas because you're "just trying to help"; those who can't be of much help because the Web is so hard to use that it's just another hollow promise like rehab agencies and visual substitution systems.
Oddly enough, the latter are the best choice because they will: be the essential devil's advocate when you think you've got it at last; discourage you from creating a cyberghetto called a "text-only" page that you've failed to provide automatic updates for; remind you that a lot of blind guys are interested in the color of the rose you've properly tagged in the ALT attribute as "spring" even though they don't have any experience of color.
While I was ranting on the internet about similar issues I got a supporting reply that said "True development cycle demands this. Us fading sighteds can help but only the end users can tell us what they need." Mr. Gantt's point was correct as far as it went but that's only part of what I'm talking about. We don't just need input from blind guys as "end users"; we need their direction in many matters that they have often spent most of their lives pondering. Inclusion isn't just for the folks with disabilities, we too are included and we have an awful lot to learn: more in fact than we have to give.
If as I fear you won't turn off your monitor and ignore your mouse you will need another way to find out how to correct some of the problems of preparing material for a Web that is at once accessible, usable, and attractive. Even if I think the latter is of marginal importance the fact that you find the concept of publishing on the Web energizing enough to go through all the frustrations of dealing with browsers that render the same material variously shows that you care about appearances; that function and form don't necessarily "follow" in a particular hierarchy of priority.
Certain urgings by the Guidelines are purposely abstract. The notion that a site will "transform gracefully" isn't concrete unless you examine the checkpoints and associated techniques from which you will get a sense of what works when an inaccessible site is attacked by constructs used to make it accessible. Perhaps the most important imperative is to make one's content "understandable and navigable" and this is where the How comes into play.
Marshall McCluhan's "The Medium Is the Message" should, in my opinion have been "The Medium Is A Message" because in fact the message is the message. Mr. Lincoln's "...conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal..." statement may look better to some people if it's in a special type face accompanied by fanfare but these are embellishments that the mind can better provide. In the beginning was the word - and it's still good.
Frequently I tend to overlook the importance of other-than-words components of language, particularly written language. Typically when one renders language in print there are several non-word elements that are "semantic"; i.e., they provide information beyond just the words. Punctuation is very handy for conveying both the sound of words that are to be spoken and the meaning of the content.
Another important addendum to the language of words is structure, such as the previously mentioned elements of headers and paragraphs to divide material into logical chunks. Although we may think of these as visual devices, they also serve to assist in scanning and/or describing a document.
Punctuation is part of braille and of written language and it is often used structurally to inform a reader of what a listener hears in spoken language. Text-to-speech renditions of punctuation come mostly in two flavors: punctuation is read (as in "open paren", etc.) or an attempt is made to present it with the speech engine trying to do what a human reader would - use voice inflections to show the pauses of commas, the pitch changes for question marks, etc. This all works fairly well for blind people using either braille or speechout systems.
Certain conventions have become very informative, most notably tabularization of information to permit easy retrieval. Unfortunately, when either headers or tables are used for formatting purposes, their value as structural devices is seriously undermined. One of the "lazy author" techniques is to create a table, then scan it into a document because the ordinary table presentations of HTML are less esthetically pleasing than the one created with some tool or other. Although it is conceivable that some day there will be a suitable means of "reverse-engineering" a photograph of a table, it is possible with style sheets and proper labelling of tabular elements to have the best of both worlds.
If you've ever watched a sports event in a bar where the sound of the TV is muted and the captioning is on so that you can follow the rather banal yammering of the "color commentator" and play-by-play announcer you have noticed how amusing are the errors made by automated renditions of voice recognition systems. The same problems insure the intervention of a human transcriber/translator whenever one form of language is transformed as by court stenographers or sign language folks. It always seems that such things as optical character recognition need to be graded some other way than "95%" accurate - which rates an "A" on a term paper but either a scornful laugh or perplexed frustration in cases of "machine translation."
Although discussion threads proliferate about problems with ascii art and smileys, these are fairly trivial aspects for most Web information. We tend to use slang and new constructs frequently and a few years ago "flame" and "diss" would be as meaningless to most readers as "rofl", "imho", and "rtfm". The former have become part of mainstream language and the latter are quite familiar to most people who might be hearing or reading this. Those elements that have almost universal acceptance like tables and submission forms deserve special attention: 1) use markup elements and attributes that make sensible rendering possible - what we call "graceful transformation"; 2) use what programmers call "documentation". I remember a button at a convention: "Good Programmers Don't Document - If It Was Hard To Write It Should Be Hard To Read!" Please don't tell somebody who is using a webphone while driving to "just click here". It will also be helpful for blind people.
Guidelines and their associated checkpoints can be very informative if you want to learn about accessibility issues. The accompanying techniques and sample code furnished with guideline documents will give you much instructive fodder. The thing most of us have learned in preparing these documents is that in almost every instance the exercise of providing accessible Web content will make that content better business.
>From the inception of the WAI I have been preaching to this choir about "it's the law" as a point to make for emphasizing the business case for accessible design; programmers are cheaper than lawyers and some day people littering the infobahn will be wasting their time giving depositions - time that could have better been used by utilizing universal design principles in the past that is now the present. The WAI guidelines, or something very like them will be the objective tests by which governments decide which software to refuse to buy and which Web sites to allow on their servers. It is very much in your enlightened self-interest to heed what is presented in these sessions.
If you have any doubts as to the imminence of some of these events just take a look at the timeline for U.S. federal agencies to demonstrate compliance with accessibility guidelines. They are currently mandated to assess their sites for ease of access by both employees and users. When the Access Board publishes final regulations, it will allow until sometime next year for full compliance. This rule (Section 508 for short) also covers purchases of software - so the tools not only must produce accessible products, they must themselves be accessible.
To summarize: remember that this effort is part of the undertaking to save the world, spearheaded by the Disability Rights Movement; hire blind people and others with disabilities to supervise you in your work; make the content of your Web presence understandable and navigable; follow the Guidelines and check the CheckPoints by utilizing the Techniques.