2009: The year websites become accessible to all

For many years, the goal of making websites accessible to everyone has been pursued generally with little enthusiasm. But now a number of developments are conspiring to move accessibility up the agenda, according to web expert Bruce Lawson.

In my previous column for ZDNet UK, I suggested 2008 might prove to be the year the web grew up, because of the emergence of HTML 5. January has witnessed a flurry of developers starting to use HTML 5, so it seems I have the gift of clairvoyance and will therefore make another prediction: 2009 will be the year web accessibility becomes mainstream.

'Accessibility' is the term for making websites that can be used by people with disabilities, such as the blind, people who can't use a mouse for whatever reason — in fact, anyone with physical impairments, whether temporary, such as a broken arm, or permanent.

But accessibility doesn't mean special 'disabled' websites. It's an approach to coding that makes HTML accessible by disabled people's assistive technologies — such as screen-readers, which read web pages in a synthetic voice — without compromising visual design and usability for the majority.

Some will argue that accessibility is already mainstream. After all, the original World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) accessibility guidelines were published in 1999. But the world of web development is divided into two camps: those who treat the W3C as the gospel and those for whom it is irrelevant, incomprehensible or simply invisible.

This year, however, four factors are combining to push accessibility up the agenda, both in the UK and the US.

Outcomes not techniques
The first is the publication just before Christmas of the updated W3C specification, the snappily named Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The previous, 10-year-old version was difficult for developers to understand. Many checkpoints were hopelessly out of date and seemed to forbid JavaScript — the language powering the Ajax revolution. The old spec also ignored PDF, Flash and other non-W3C technologies.

But the new guidelines are written using language that doesn't assume any particular technology. They focus on outcomes rather than techniques — although, somewhat ironically, the most accessible document for web developers is the Techniques for WCAG 2.0 document that talks in concrete, HTML terms. It is now possible to get up-to-date guidelines about how to make today's websites accessible.

Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-Aria) is the second factor, complementary W3C specification that is expected to become a standard in 2009. It is the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite that allows developers to make Web 2.0 applications accessible by extending HTML 4 for all the bolt-ons web applications require, such as sliders, date-pickers and Ajax-updated dynamic regions.

Until HTML 5 is widespread, such Ajax widgets can be made only through scripting and are pretty much invisible to assistive technologies unless extra information is added to the HTML and manipulated by the scripts. That is what Aria does, and it is being supported...