Ben's Blog

Accessibility is now commonplace. Designers, developers, business owners and even advertisers are now seeing the business benefits of accessible websites.

Eyes used to glaze over when we mentioned accessibility. Now those same eyes are passionately telling us all about it. Accessibility is now as important as interaction, branding and aesthetics and fortunately today we can have them all.

Now I am going to contradict myself. Sort of.

Imagine you have a web standards compliant website. It has pleasing aesthetics, semantic markup and good usability and accessibility. Users will enjoy this website and so will search engines.

Now say you want to use Flash on part of your website. Many of us know that Flash and accessibility are like oil and water. However when Flash is used in the correct context it is a brilliant tool for enhancing a website’s usefulness and capacity to communicate but it royally ruins your accessibility rating.

At this point you have three options:

1. Proceed with your idea and don’t worry if it is not accessible.
2. Proceed with your idea and make your best effort to provide an accessible alternative.
3. Bin your idea because every byte of your website has to be accessible.

I like the sound of point two.

If due to accessibility obligations you choose not to use the technology that best suits your content, isn’t that an accessibility problem in itself? By denying users the most appropriate delivery of content aren’t we denying them of the best user experience possible?

Remember not for a moment am I saying we should exclude certain users. That would be lazy, foolish and inherently against Tim’s notion of the Web.

Rather than following wonky guidelines to the letter in an effort to include everyone equally, we need to push forward where we can but at the same time never leave anyone completely behind.

For example. A sophisticated graph is nothing more than a table of data, or an interactive map from Point A to Point B is nothing more than an ordered list of directions.

So what’s stopping us? We can have our cake and eat it too. Sort of.

I would like to clarify that I am not limiting my comments to Flash. PDFs or JavaScript that doesn’t degrade gracefully are just as problematic.

I want to emphasise that I am an accessibility advocate. I understand and support the WAI and believe that accessibility is truly at the heart of any well designed website but so are a lot of other things.