As I write this Full Code Press is taking place in Sydney. The Woman of Words is participating for the Australian team as copywriter/editor.

You can check out the progresss on Flickr and YouTube.

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.

Tim Berners-Lee on what what the web is, what the web isn’t and what the web should/could be.

“One of the fundamental properties of the Web is the fact that it is just one space, and its a consensual space. It should be independent of the hardware you use. It should be independent of the software you use or the operating system its running on. It should also be independent of what culture you’re in, or whether your’e writing a wonderful, carefully edited document, or whether youre scribbling something on the back of the proverbial envelope. And it should be independent of what language you’re using, what character set, whether your letters go up and down, left to right, or right to left. Also, people should be able to access that information even if they have disabilities. At W3C we call this concept one Web for anyone, everywhere, on anything.”

Tim Berners-Lee

I was told to use IE when trying to visit a govt website today. Firefox and Safari users are told to use IE instead.

A colleague questioned the site’s creators on this method and was told due to accessibility reasons it was best to use IE. Isn’t that sort of philosophy completely against the entire notion of accessibility? Since when did accessibility mean using only one browser and since when was IE considered an accessible browser?

It is good code and good design that ensures a site is accessible not what browser you use!