Is Accessibility Conformance an Elusive Property?

Well we undertook a study of validity and reliability of WCAG 2.0 and found that an 80% target for agreement is not attainable, when audits are conducted without communication between evaluators. Even with experienced evaluators the error rate is relatively high; and further, untrained accessibility auditors -be they developers or quality testers from other domains- do much worse than this. Read the full published text via ACM Author-izer Open Access on the publications page.

Accessibility for All

Last week I was talking about Deep Accessibility, and trying to define what it might be (who knows if I’m right). I said that in reality I thought it was pretty difficult to create a kind of Deep Accessibility, but that it was possible and necessary, and it was not just about disability but about all of us being able to access the information and functionality as we want or need. In a perfect example of how deep accessibility might be needed the UK Governments Research Councils UK (RCUK) swoop in with some requirements that makes my case.

Defining Deep Accessibility (or how to make Mustikka-rahkapizza)

To make Mustikka-rahkapizza, you need vettä. It’s a recipe I learnt while in Helsinki on holiday, but I could not have learnt this without my smart translator app which uses a combination of camera, OCR, and translation engine to give me a view onto that recipe I would not normally have. In this case the paper recipe was made accessible by my translator application; which added value by converting and adding information via a computational process. This idea then of different views onto information, or functionality, adding new meaning by performing some computational process is just the kind of deep accessibility I’ve been thinking about recently; and maybe isn’t our usual conception of accessibility.

Deep Accessibility

Last week I said that ‘If open data, and its access by citizens, is as important as governments seem to think, then the deep accessibility of that data is just as important.’ Now, we’ve seen the specific case in relation to Big Open Data; but what do I mean by deep accessibility in more general terms…?