Text-only web sites: accessibility saviour or a waste of time?

For many website designers and commissioners of websites, the answer to the question "How do you make an accessible website?" is "Provide a text-only version". This article discusses the pros and cons of a text-only web site, and suggests how "text-only" may be used as part of a broader approach to optimal accessibility of on-line information.

 

The emergence of text-only web sites as an apparent solution to web accessibility

Promotion of web accessibility has largely concentrated on raising awareness of the importance of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which provide advice on how to create a single web site that is designed to be accessible to as many people as possible, regardless of disability.

So why has the provision of a text-only version of a web site been seen as a 'silver bullet'? The emergence of text-only web sites as an apparent solution to web accessibility can be attributed to a number of factors:

• Prominence of guidelines that specifically support access for blind web users - that is, people who can not see images distinguish colour or columnar or tabular layout, or who use screen reading technology to access web content.
• The level of impact of web accessibility and its apparent (or related) barriers on blind people is matched by the levels of activity of organisations such as the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) in raising awareness of the need to design web sites that can be accessed by blind people. The campaigning of organisations supporting blind and visually impaired people has been successful to the extent that many web site developers appear to equate web accessibility with "accessibility for blind people", seemingly ignoring the many other groups who may also face barriers.

Indeed, the most authoritative set of guidelines relating to web content accessibility, the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, includes a 'catch-all' guideline:

' Checkpoint 11.4: "If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as often as the inaccessible (original) page." '

It is easy to see how this checkpoint might be interpreted as "create a separate accessible page", and thus "create a separate page without graphics, colour, multimedia or dynamic content" - in other words a text-only page.

As the rush to create text-only web sites intensified, tools began to emerge that automated this conversion process to some extent, easing the painstaking task of creating duplicate versions of web pages minus graphics, tables and colour information. BETSIE, once installed on a web server, allowed the automatic, on-the-fly creation of text-only versions of any web page residing on the server. When the text-only page is created on-the-fly in this way, the issue of maintenance of two separate versions of a page is also addressed.

 

Problems with text-only

So why should we question the use of text-only web sites? Why do we urge caution before purchasing and installing technology that creates separate versions of our web pages, if it results in an enhanced experience for many disabled people?

 

Text-only promotes segregation of disabled people

Many people are uncomfortable with the basic philosophy of text-only web sites as a solution to exclusion resulting from inaccessible web sites. Much of the functionality of automated conversion software is aimed at identifying and automatically repairing significant access barriers in the source web page. Any solution that encourages a persistence of access barriers within web sites is of debatable long-term benefit to the health of the Web.

 

Text-only does not remove all access barriers

A large amount of academic research has focused on evaluation and repair of existing web pages - for example IBM's WebAdapt project [6] provides a browser extension to allow redisplay of web pages or audio output of selected text.

The best chances of a successful conversion to an accessible, usable page exist when the source page is itself accessible.

Conversely, a page with significant access barriers is least likely to be converted to a highly accessible format.

In other words, a well designed, accessible site with graphics and colour is just as accessible when converted to text-only. Automatically converting a page with access barriers (for example poor or missing alternative text, the use of colour to present information and poor link text) into text-only format will not remove these barriers.

Thus, those web pages that most urgently need repair - that is, they have significant access barriers present - are least likely to be successfully converted into an accessible, usable version by the addition of a text only site.

 

Two versions of a page increases complexity and reduces navigability

The provision of two versions of every page of a site also increases site complexity, posing navigational challenges. There will be a need to identify links to external pages and links to non-HTML documents - pages beyond the reach of the text-only conversion process.

Will text-only alternatives be indexed with equal prominence, or will only graphical versions of pages be displayed in search results?

 

Text is inaccessible for some disabled people

Perhaps the most damaging perception is that a text-only page is all that any disabled person requires in order for them to access web content. On-screen reading of textual content is physiologically challenging for many people. For people with reduced reading skill or people with dyslexia, large quantities of text displayed on a web page may be virtually impossible to access.

 

Creating a graphical page that becomes 'text-only'

Rather than invest money and resources in complex automated text-only creation software, the most effective way of creating accessible web sites is to create pages in standard HTML or XHTML, styled with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is, of course, vital in order to ensure that a web page can utilise colour, columnar positioning, graphics and multimedia and still be accessible and usable by people using screen readers or text-only browsers.

• Provide appropriate alternative text for all images. This text should be succinct yet informative, and should avoid repetition of adjacent content.
• Provide meaningful link text for hyperlinks. Link text should make sense when read - or heard - in isolation, indicating the nature of the destination page, and its format, if not HTML.
• Using colour to distinguish information means this information will be inaccessible to screen reader users as well as potentially inaccessible to people unable to distinguish colour effectively.

 

Where text-only can help

There are some situations where a text-only version of web content may be a justifiable accessibility solution, as part of a holistic approach to accessible web design.

Some access solutions are, by their nature, a text-only alternative - for example the provision of text transcripts for audio or video content. The most equitable, inclusive, and therefore most desirable access solution is to provide captions and audio descriptions to ensure people with vision impairments or hard of hearing can access the media content. Together with the other techniques outlined in this paper, this makes redundant for the vast majority of websites the process of creating alternative text-only versions.