Aside from ‘access to the internet’ – the single most important issue at this weeks first Internet Governance Forum – ‘accessibility’ follows suite in what is to be labelled “priority”.
In fact, access to the internet deals with submarine fibre optic cables, gigantic satellite dishes and other infrastructure considerations. That has to come first. But when you break down the story of internet access to the personal level, what is needed, is a strong commitment towards getting women, underprivileged and people with disabilities on board.
If accessibility has recently become the label behind which free and open software advocates like to find refuge to push for their applications to gain space on policy-makers’ radar, it has been around for much longer.
For and by disabled people
Since 1997, three research labs, MIT in the US, ERCIM in Europe and Keio in Japan have agreed to host staff that now form the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a 400-member strong standards body that develops key web technologies and languages such as HTML, CSS, XML, and many more. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is one of five domains of the W3C which develops strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the internet accessible to people with disabilities.
W3C does not develop software. However, the web technologies and standards that W3C develops are open standards with a royalty free patent policy. This has promoted the development of many different software and information systems including open source projects.
One example of what is NOT accessible is content that can not adapt to the user preferences. For example, images that do not have a textual description that can be displayed (or read aloud by a "screen reader") for a person that can not see them represent one common accessibility problem.
Now, I guess if you are reading these lines and just shrug your shoulders, consider that 14,5 % of the population of the first fifteen member countries of the European Union suffers from disabilities (2001 Eurostat report on Disability and Social Participation in Europe).
That same indicator rises to 25% and higher in the “new” EU countries and once singled out, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic are nearer to 30 to 35% of the population as established by a 2002 EU barometer.
This statistics are not meant to frighten, but rather to underline the fact that without appropriate policy on this issue, you have as much as 35% of Europe’s population being web-excluded entirely. That’s only for Europe.
Of course, the story doesn’t end here, since another growing social phenomenon called aging is also alarming. In 2000, there were 61 million people aged 65 years and older in the EU. “Today, these elderly people represent 16% of the total population,” said Nikoloas Floratos of e-ISOTIS during the international meeting on the future of the internet held in Greece in late October 2006. Aging-related symptoms and deficiencies end up being very much similar to disabilities that prevent you from having access to most websites out there.
“At W3C, we’re tackling these figures in tangible ways, coming up with accessibility features for [computing languages such as] html,” added W3C’s Shadi Abou-Zhara. “We develop methods for evaluating content, carry out education and outreach.” The other thing this group does is talk to industry in order to to develop consensus based solutions through common research and development that takes accessibility standards on board.
“When we talk disabilities, we mean a wide variety of disabilities: Visual, hearing, physical, cognitive, or neurological,” Abou-Zhara insisted, before saying that all needed to do their part in order to achieve this: developers, users, those working on guidelines and governments.
Governments are slow, but momentum might be around the corner
Germany, France, Spain and other countries have already taken steps to adopt ‘accessibility’ guidelines said Abou-Zhara. The “Equality for People with Disabilities Act” of Switzerland for example, came into force on January 1 2004. “It requires all government websites to be accessible to persons with disabilities,” highlights Norbert Bollow of a Swiss internet user group.
Bollow has been involved in ventures to come up with accessibility certifications that would be endorsed and implemented by governments. He and his colleagues have pushed this so far that the “Design for All Switzerland” is now a reference for many people working on accesibility.
But if these advances are made in developing countries, what does that tell us in developing contexts? And what about the many diverging, incompatible and fragmented standards out there?
“That’s exactly why we’re here!” says Daniel Dardailler, W3C associate chair, present in Athens for the IGF. “The W3C is mostly present in Western countries. As to our offices, we’ve had offices in Morocco and Hong Kong since several years. We’ve recently opened offices in India and China, and are looking into other offices in Brasil, Tunisia, and South Africa,” he concluded.
If the government lobby approach is certainly one that can successfully advance accessibility in developing countries, the regionalisation of W3C guidelines for example might also need to gain momentum with civil society getting in ring. Looking at accessibility advocates present in Athens, one might think these people needed a little awareness-push.
A grassroots momentum – such as the one that gave rise to the multiplication of the Creative Commons movement – along with an international “Internet Quality Label” could certainly become ways forward to make accessibility unavoidable.
Useful links:
e-ISOTIS: http://www.e-isotis.org/
JCAFE (APC-member working on accessibility): http://www.jcafe.net/english/
Internet Quality Labels: http://ATMIG.org
World Wide Web Consortium: http://www.w3.org/
Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/WAI/