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Implementing Accessibility Standards


It’s the right thing to do, say experts, right from the start

By Alex Handy
September 15, 2005 — 
Mark Melonson makes a living using computers that he’ll never see. Since he was born, his vision has slowly degraded to the point that he is now legally and functionally blind. But that hasn’t stopped Melonson from continuing his career as a security research specialist with Grey Hat Research in Houston.

Melonson’s ability to function unsighted in the wildly biased computer world is a testament to human adaptability, but that’s not to say that he’s had an easy time of it. Melonson builds and works on his home computers, and depending on his situation, sometimes works on up to five machines at once. Turning each computer into a functional tool for himself is half the battle.

Melonson said that he doubts most developers even know that the blind can use computers, and as a result, they don’t make their software and Web sites accessible to him. “There are so many people who just have Flash-based Web sites, and they are, like, totally inaccessible. They cannot simply rely on assistive technology vendors to create work-arounds,” said Melonson.

But the world of assistive technology has come a long way since Melonson’s eyesight began to dwindle. And for developers who wish to make their products usable by the blind, or by folks with other disabilities, such as paraplegics or users with debilitating palsies, the tools are now available to make accessible software easier to write, right from the start.

Access By Contract
Peter Korn, Sun Microsystems’ accessibility architect, said that the industry is entering a major new phase of accessibility standards: access by contract. “Everything on the screen is an object, in the true object-oriented sense of the word; they each have methods on them.” In particular, he said, this collection of methods becomes the accessibility interface. “These methods provide the information that users of accessibility technology need. We may have a button on the screen. I can ask the button, ‘Are you accessible?’ I can ask the button, ‘Where are you, do you have a name, do you have a description?’ It says, ‘Yes, my description is this or that.’”

This new generation of accessibility tools relies on the operating system and developer APIs. Thanks to more pervasive tools and standards, writing software for the handicapped is much easier these days, but that ease can only be had if an application is designed right from the beginning to integrate universal access standards.

Rob Haverty, technology evangelist for Microsoft’s accessible technology group, said that early implementation is key when it comes to integrating support for handicapped users.

“Our program managers are expected to include in their specifications everything that is needed for accessibility,” said Haverty. Microsoft’s developers are encouraged to create a “multimodal interface where you are not conveying info in one way only, for example using color only to convey info.”

Haverty went on to say that accessibility means conforming to the operating system. “One of the things we encourage in-house developers to do is, whenever possible, stick with standard controls instead of custom controls. As we see the development environment becoming richer, if you look at our new platform coming out, that was code-named Avalon, it makes it easier for a developer to customize the look of a control or the UI without having to create a custom control, because when you use standard controls, a lot of access info is given for free,” said Haverty.

Paul Snayd, program director of IBM’s accessibility technical team, concurred. He said that APIs can make life much easier for both user and developer alike, and that the key to proper accessibility implementation is good planning right from the start.

“Some of the steps may put [developers] in a position of a total rewrite,” said Snayd of the steps involved in making a program accessible. “One of the things you really have to do is start with a policy, which has all of the developers using the same rules and the same checkpoints. People may say, ‘That’s IBM; that’s how they do everything,’ but we’ve found this is the way to do it.”

As in conventional development, Snayd continued, developers have to make decisions about who their application is for and what it has to do. “Is it for users with mobility impairment? In which case you may want to limit the things that require simultaneous finger movements,” he said, adding that some platforms offer more to help make accessibility programming easier, such as Windows, Java Swing and Eclipse.

“There are [also] lots of helpful checklists and things on Web sites, setting out what the objectives are,” Snayd said. “You have the business objective; now you have to decide if you will address all people, or just some people. A product for the blind, or for the deaf? You have to pick an API that works. If you haven’t picked an API that these access vendors can map to, you put a lot of work and energy in for naught.”

Good Business
While Snayd, Korn and Haverty each have different ways of dealing with accessibility implementation, the one thing they can all agree on is the fact that making software usable by the handicapped is simply the right thing to do. While the monetary incentive from possible government contracts, which require accessibility for all workers, is great, making programs usable for all kinds of people is just good business in general, said Korn.

Despite his disability, Melonson considers himself fortunate; thanks to his experience, using computers is not nearly as difficult for him as it would be to a novice blind user.

“When I was about 5, my dad brought home a Tandy Color Computer 2, back when I could sorta see, and I was obsessed with video games. That branched out into programming because I wanted to write games,” said Melonson.

But despite the availability of more friendly software, many tasks still require blind users to have specialized knowledge and experience. Melonson is a programmer and a technician at a local college, and due to a lack of usable tools, he relies on his short-term memory to make his tasks easier.

“Usually I turn off the screen reader when programming,” he said. “I’ll use a Braille display if I can get my hands on one. They are very expensive. I wouldn’t say it was considerably more difficult, as long as you know what you’re doing.”


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