European Accessibility laws – a misguided move?
Today I received the text from a speech made on 1st October 2009 by Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media. The speech was to launch “The Digital Single Market: a key to unlock the potential of the knowledge based economy EDiMA’s White Paper on Policy Strategy for the Development of New Media Services 2009-2014″
In principle the speech contains several very useful proposals, including investigating market fragmentation, e-books, network neutrality and so on. However, two sections are of great concern to those of us who believe in a holistic approach to accessibility. In one, Ms Reding discusses the subject of website trustmarks, and while she refers to the ‘.eu’ domain as being an appropriate symbol of trust, her remarks regarding accessibility cannot help but raise in our minds the prospect of an EU accessibility kitemark for websites. There are many papers discussing why such a system has huge limitations, three of the best of which I will direct you to by Phipps and Kelly, Kelly et al. 2005 and Kelly et al. 2007, but imagine for one minute a web-based teaching resource designed for a class of completely blind students. The page may well have white text on a white background and no images, it may have a ‘talking head’ video with no captions – which for that discrete audience doesn’t matter at all. But the site will be unable to win a kitemark, and the college providing it may suffer when it’s neighbour announces it has kitemarked all its pages (despite them being vastly inferior learning resources). Senior Managers, who do not have time to fully grapple with the nuances of accessibility, then issue a diktat that all web resources have to meet the kitemark standard and immediately teachers have to waste their valuable time modifying a resource that realistically does not need to be modified – they don’t have the time top do this, and the resource is shelved. We go back to the lowest common denominator.
The second concern about the proposals is that, worse than kitemarks, it would appear that the spectre of a European Web Accessibility Law has raised it’s head again. The key passage from Viviane Reding’s speech below is the following:
We cannot achieve the Single Market by leaving aside certain parts of our population. I am talking about e-accessibility: 15% of our population is disabled and our rules on accessibility are still fragmented. Each Member State is going its own way. We have to consider that this is costly for industry because they have to respond to a wide range of fragmented national standards. It also leaves disabled people without a consistent level of service that they can expect.
What should we do? We should in my view encourage the European-wide adoption of the global web accessibility standard, the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. We should do it together and in step so that the online services industry can reap economies of scale and the users get a decent and reliable framework. I believe the way we should do this is to develop together with stakeholders a European Disability Act.
So, we are back to where we were a while ago, facing the impending implementation of a blunt tool that will in all probability not have the finesse to allow true accessibility to flourish. And the question of what is a web site, compared with what is a learning resource, for example, remains unanswered, and therefore will we see another knee-jerk reaction as we did after SENDA where all learning resources that are not 100% accessible to all-comers are discarded for fear of litigation?
The study by Helen Petrie a few years ago showed an unsatisfactory degree of correlation between the usability of web sites by disabled people and their ‘accessibility’ as badged by compliance with WCAG etc.While I have no objection to measures that promote and encourage the accessibility of web resources, an area in which far too little action is being taken, particularly by some commercial sectors, what concerns me is the implementation of a ‘standard’ or ‘legislation’ that does not allow for the flexibility the web increasingly facilitates, and has the net result of reducing flexibility and therefore accessibility. It is seen as a success, because the proportion of ‘accessible’ web sites increases, but what is not measured is whether, overall, disabled people are getting any more use out of the web than they were before, and if all of the flexible and adaptable resources we have are taken away because of minor accessibility flaws (including, for example, being a vastly useful resource for one group that is by definition inaccessible to another), I would argue that disabled people are in reality no further forward.
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October 4th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
It was the last sentence in this blog that caught my attention. Since working with VI I’ve been in despair at the inaccessibility of digital data. What should be a democratic environment for debate and access to information is denied to those with sensory impairment. We are all guilty in that it is easy to assume other people access virtual environments in the same way that we do. This is the ME-Model where creators of online content use a mouse and their eyes and expect their audience to do so as well. As a result, without a mouse and effective vision the ‘flexibility the web increasingly facilitates’ which Simon talks about, simply does not exist. If anything the web in 2009 is increasingly inaccessible.
Setting aside the issues around the cost of assistive hardware and software for the VI, the Internet offers access to communication and information. These are fundamental rights yet users with VI are excluded by barriers created by poor design. They are denied participation not just to learning resources but to something more fundamental than education – the right to contact family and friends; to seek out information about their impairment, be creative, artistic, mathematical, do their shopping online, have a virtual life and participate in the online activities we take so much for granted. A European single digital market, if this paper is anything to go by, will do nothing to help because it’s rehashing what has gone before; the idea that there is an identified group of people who are different and who have different needs.
A holistic vision of accessibility was a step in the right direction. It provided a theoretical framework on which to build policy and practice within educational institutions but I wonder if it’s time for more radical rethinking. We need to move away from the language of Reding with her talk about e-accessibility, from comments such as ‘15% of our population is disabled’ and ideas about developing a European Disability Act. We need to promote inclusive practice and move away from the language of disability altogether. Making the web accessible for the ‘disabled’ aggravates existing social and cultural prejudice. The social model of disability remains a theoretical approach, the built environment is still hostile and individual attitudes towards impairment still negative. As soon as the label disability is used then we are marginalising a section of the population on the grounds of difference and while we can legislate against discrimination we have a long way to go before we change attitudes and misconceptions. All the WAI’s in the world will not change human nature. We need to think outside of the box and come at this from a different direction.