Best Practices Towards Functional Accessibility
In the realm of computer programming and user interface design, guidelines are documents that provide rules to make a thing conform to a standard. A standard is something that has gained acceptance (for a variety of possible reasons) and has been codified for others in a field to follow. Standards are critically important.
Without standards, the Web simply would not work. When I type a website address, I begin it with "http." HTTP is a protocol that conforms to a rigorously standardized means for passing messages from my web browser to a web server, where the content I am interested in sits, and then back again to my browser for display. If HTTP did not rigorously follow a standard, the likelihood of my receiving a response would be greatly diminished. Thus computer professionals have come up with a set of hard guidelines that must be followed when implementing devices that "speak" the HTTP standard.
There are two guidelines and standards that always come up in discussions of web accessibility: WCAG and 508.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), version 2.0 was published in December, 2008 and became an official recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the leading international group providing web standards. This is a complex document that provides a set of around 60 rules divided into four broad categories and supported by an extensive glossary of definitions. The document is further staged into levels of "conformance." If the designer follows in lock step all the guidelines through all levels of conformance (which is not always possible), he/she will produce content that is accessible across devices.
When web accessibility proponents mention "508 standards" they are typically referring to subsection 1194.22 of Section 508 of the U.S. Federal Rehabilitation Act, which was amended in 1998. The Section 508 law requires Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. And the 16 standards comprising subsection 1194.22 refer specifically to content and applications delivered via the web. Section 508's 1194.22 is primarily oriented as a set of standards that dictates procurement and contracting of development for web resources and applications used and promoted by Federal agencies for internal and public consumption.
Whereas meeting the very high bar of complete WCAG conformance will guarantee accessible content, it is wholly possible to satisfy the basic rules of Section 508 and still have content with accessibility problems. To take a key example, Section 508 subsection 1194.22 paragraph "a" states that all non-text elements need to have text equivalents—this is the so-called "alt text" standard. The problem is that this standard says absolutely nothing about the quality of the alternative text, only that it be "equivalent" to the non-text element. But let's take a common example of web content and apply this rule. Say we have a pull quote on our web page that is set off from the rest of the text by using an image of enlarged quotation marks. What is the "text equivalent" of this image? If we give the image alternative text of "image of quotation marks," then a screen reader user will hear that text read aloud before he/she hears the pull quote. In reality, the large quotations image is simply decorative and is something that the screen reader should not voice at all. The point we are driving at is that it is entirely possible to follow the Section 508 standard and still have web content that has minimal or very poor accessibility.
Neither the overwhelming set of guidelines of WCAG nor the thin set of standards in Section 508 provides a clear road to the creation of accessible content. What is needed, instead, is a set of practical, ideally intuitive, techniques—practices for achieving the goal of delivering accessible web pages, practices that can be followed by instructors and course designers who may have a limited understanding of accessibility but who do have the desire to "do the right thing" in creating content accessible to people of all abilities.
In organizing and composing our Best Practices, our goal is to provide a relatively simple set of techniques and approaches to composition and organization of educational content on the web that result in increased functional accessibility. Though we do not want to minimize the importance of standards and guidelines, we feel it is crucial to foreground the end goal: functionality for users regardless of ability, the primary purpose of the UD principles.
We also want to provide an overall structure to the Best Practices that is applicable specifically to providing educational content and that might readily be implemented by instructors and course designers who are cognizant of UD principles. In other words, our Best Practices try to translate UD principles into practical advice and code examples geared for educational content and do so in a manner that gives the course designer or instructor a logically organized repository of techniques that can be deployed easily.
A couple of caveats: While it is not necessary to have a full understanding of HTML markup in order to implement these Best Practices, familiarity with HTML will ease comprehension and ensure proper implementation. We strongly recommend that instructional designers for the web learn HTML. As we mentioned earlier, HTML is the core language of web pages. Your ability to understand and use these Best Practices will be greatly enhanced by an understanding of HTML, principles of Universal Design, and access issues, generally.