September saw a lot of web conferences being held, some of which were attended by members of the Web Access Team.
Firstly we had dConstruct 2008, held in Brighton. The title of this year’s event was “Designing The Social Web”.
The day consisted of the following talks:
- Steven Johnson – The Urban Web
- Aleks Krotoski – Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place
- Joshua Porter – Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design
- Daniel Burka – Designing for Interaction
- Tantek Çelik - Social Network Portability
- Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones – Designing for the Coral Reef
- Jeremy Keith – The System of the World
All in all it was a good day with all the talks being informative, interesting and inspiring me to think about the implications the social web has for accessibility in a wider sense.
I won’t be doing a full run down of the day here – that’s already been done elsewhere on other blogs. If you couldn’t make the day, Alastair Campbell from Nomensa has dConstruct 2008 notes which cover the day well on his personal blog. The podcasts of the talks are also starting to appear on the dConstruct website so make sure to check those out as they get released.
Talking of podcasts, a big thank you should go to Opera Software who sponsored the production of transcripts for the podcasts. These should also be available soon from the dConstruct website. It’s good to see a company sponsoring events such as this through providing something genuinely useful for a lot of people that couldn’t make the day rather than freebies for the attendees.
The Web Today
The web is an integral part of life for a lot of people. I, like many other people I know, feel out of the loop if I haven’t got access to the web for a few days. This situation can be exacerbated if you have a disability and have difficulty getting out of the house for example. For most of us, things such as online shopping and banking etc can be a more convenient way of doing something. If you haven’t got a car, online shopping can avoid you having to carry lots of bags on a bus for example. Similarly, online banking can be great if you don’t have time to physically get to the bank during the day. I can safely say through working with many people with disabilities over the last few years, that the web is usually more than a convenience to them. The web is often their lifeline to the outside world and more independent living and is invaluable.
The Social Web
The social web is no different. It holds a lot of potential to connect people with disabilities with each other in ways that were previously not available as easily or readily. Connecting online with people with similar types of disability to share thoughts, experiences and information presents a fantastic opportunity for self discovery. As with traditional online services, the benefits of the social web for people with disabilities are arguably greater than for those without disabilities.
Looking at this from the other side, social networks are totally reliant on people visiting and using their sites to be successful and profitable. Social networks that are almost always free to use, are often valued as businesses by the size of their user base that regularly use the site. Without the users, there is no social network and the site dies. This is of course true for any site or business, but is arguably more important for social networking sites.
Problems and Solutions
With this in mind, in my opinion social networking sites should really be taking accessibility and usability seriously. At present, some of the most popular social networking sites have some fundamental problems as highlighted in a recent eNation Report by AbilityNet. Social networking sites also highlight one of the other major challenges facing web accessibility at present, that of User Generated Content (UGC). The web is no longer being developed by professionals, it’s being developed by anyone who has access to a computer and enough knowledge to be able to create an online presence using tools no more difficult than a word processor.
As most users are not versed in accessibility, there are hopefully things that tool developers can do to help ensure that the authoring tools help users produce content that is accessible. The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) are being developed to help ensure that authoring tools are usable by people with disabilities and that the content they produce is accessible and meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). As many social networking sites fall under the category of authoring tools, these guidelines could help to ensure these sites are available to as large a user group as possible, which at the end of the day is what they are all after.
Despite many of their accessibility problems, there is one shining light that many social networking sites currently offer, their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). These APIs allow you to access the data and services of social networking sites from your own sites and applications. Essentially, you can build your own interfaces to the standard versions of sites. This concept inspired Christian Heilmann from Yahoo! to organize his own conference, called Scripting Enabled, where the concept of “accessibility mashups” was brought to the fore. I’ll be doing a post on Scripting Enabled and everything that has happened since the conference and hack day very soon so keep an eye out for that one.
While the ultimate goal is to have accessible and usable social networking sites for all, until sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr etc start making accessibility and usability part of their design and development processes, accessibility mashups are a way to get around the current problems in an inventive way with great results.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar