Are People Really Interested in Accessibility?
I was just browsing around looking at other computer labs that are comparable to mine across the nation. One lab that I found, who’s name I won’t say, has a contact form. We’ve all seen them, your name, e-mail, and an area that you type your question or comment, and hit send. Nothing fancy.
The lab has the following sentence above the text area field:
Please describe your needs as specifically as you can in the space below. There is no limit on length for this section of our form, but please remember to press the return key before your text starts to scroll beyond the right boundary of the field. Otherwise, we will not receive your request properly.
Just a heads up, this site is for accessible technology. On top of that, this lab covers accessible web design. So saying hit the return key if the form begins to scroll is merely impossible if you are blind. However that request (to hit return) makes no sense because textareas automatically wrap unless you don’t use spaces. Also if you use long(er) words near the edge of the textarea they may not break. Again if you are blind, you cannot know this, unless you know how many characters wide the textarea is, and you track the character count in your head.
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Obviously if you’re marketing your company as experts on accessibility, it’s important to make sure your own site is accessible.
However, with something like this I think it’s possibly more a question of ignorance than not caring.
I’d be surprised if they company KNEW their form wasn’t accessible. They probably hadn’t thought things through .. perhaps they’d just run the page through an automated tool like WebXact.
I think this highlights the importance of getting disabled people to test the site. As a non-disabled person it can be hard to empathize with the problems of a disabled person. However, if you do user testing you’ll highlight problems really easily.
At one level you shouldn’t claim to be an accessibility expert if you’re not .. however I still think it’s better than having the “screw accessibility, I don’t care about disabled people” attitude that many people have.
Richard, This is no company. This is my private blog. The place I got the information from is a lab similar to mine, that have people more knowledge in the subject field than I would I would guess. So making the statement they don’t know is not logical, since website accessibility is within their top 3 or 5 things they specialize in. Yes, I know I am the only one here that knows who my source is, so making such statements is a trust factor.
Yes user testing is crucial, but if you know how common things react, you know what happens without even needing software. For example, I did a quick check on a site at school, and from moving the mouse I could tell it wasn’t accessible.
I don’t recall I said I was an expert, yeah I will say I am pretty good at this stuff, but I couldn’t name every check-point for accessibility from the top of my head. I have been working with it for 3 or 4 years.
Hi Ryan
Sorry – you misunderstood me.
I didn’t mean you personally.
I meant anybody. So, for clarity, I should have said:
“Obviously if someone is marketing their company as experts on accessibility, it’s important to make sure their own site is accessible.”
Specifically, I meant the company you’re talking about, not this website.
Sorry for any confusion on that.
You said: “making the statement they don’t know is not logical, since website accessibility is within their top 3 or 5 things they specialize in.”
Just because somebody knows (or says they know) a lot about something doesn’t mean they know everything. Also, a lot of people claim to be experts on things when really they don’t know that much.
For example, I know quite a bit about accessibility, but I also know there’s a lot I don’t know. If I’m talking to a typical web designer then I probably come across as an “expert” but if I’m at a web design conference there’s no way I’d consider myself an expert on accessibility, though it is something I care passionately about.
I’d be surprised if the company in question had thought to themselves. “Yes, we know this form won’t be accessible – but we don’t care.” After all, they’re a company that SPECIALIZES in accessibility. Why would they?
I think it’s MUCH more likely that they didn’t realize the form is inaccessible.
I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of people have a very poor attitude to accessibility. However in this case it sounds like it’s probably due to:
a) ignorance – it just never occurred to them this would be a problem
b) an oversight – they’d normally cringe at the idea of doing something like this but were just having an off day when they did it
I think you need to give people the benefit of the doubt, at least.
In my experience, there are more stupid people than evil people, so your first assumption should be that it was stupidity.
Why not email them and politely point out the problem?
oh ok.
The lab’s form is actually accessible. They just added the off-the-wall comment that I quoted in the post. The reason why they posted that is probably the way their script is formating the textarea, has a bug.
I just found it funny that they said hit enter at the end of a line so it get sent correctly on an element that auto-wraps.
I almost used the form to tell them, but I found it too cliche.