10 Milestones in the Mainstreaming of Accessibility

Transcript

4 August 2013

Roberta: Dr Scott Hollier, Media Access Australia’s Project Manager and member of the W3C Advisory Committee, has written an article, ‘10 Milestones in the Mainstreaming of Accessibility’. This looks at the key achievements and developments over the past 15 years in accessibility and the online media. Welcome, Scott.

Scott: Thanks, Roberta, thanks for having me back again.

Roberta: And you’re here to talk about those milestones. So what has led to significant developments in accessibility over the years, Scott?

Scott:    Well, it’s been a combination of things like legislation, innovation from some of the big companies, and also just the fact that the way we use technology is changing. So in the United States they introduced some legislation very early in the piece about how you buy technology for the US government, and that led to a lot of accessibility requirements, and then a lot of the companies, big companies, got on board and then produced accessibility in what they do. And yeah, gradually over time things have really improved.

Roberta:  What are some of the key accessibility milestones that have led to accessibility improvements?

Scott:    Well, probably the biggest ones in terms of developers would be things like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, as we call it, and we talked a bit about the WCAG in the past on this segment; yeah, basically a series of guidelines to help developers to make sure that the technologies that we use work well on the web.

So with the way WCAG’s been implemented has been a big step, but also even just the inclusion of accessibility in a lot of the products that we use, so things like having a screen reader in Windows and the Mac, accessible iPhones and things like that, so there’s been a lot, particularly in the last 15 years there’s been great progress.

Roberta: It seems that big multinational companies are taking accessibilities a bit more seriously these days. Is there any particular reason for that?

Scott:    Well, I think it is in part because of that US legislation. It’s called Section 508, and that got introduced in the late ‘90’s, and I think that was a good encouragement, maybe a little bit of a stick to help the companies get going. But since then a lot of companies have really embraced accessibility. So on the Apple side of things we saw the first screen reader come in in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger which was about eight years ago now. We saw the first iPhone that had accessibility with the 3GS. And more recently we’ve seen Windows 8 has updated its accessibility features to make them compatible with both touch and keyboard. So it’s really nice that there is a number of companies, especially those big ones which are taking accessibility more seriously.

Roberta: Smart phone and tablet accessibility has come a long way, and do you see a time when maybe the accessibility of desktop computers and mobile devices start to merge together?

Scott:    I think so, and I think that’s almost upon us now. Because Windows hasn’t always had a very good screen reader it’s taken a little while for that side of things to catch up. But now that Windows has become touch-based we’re seeing products like the Surface which do merge tablet and desktop computer together with accessibility, and also the great advancements, especially the Apple, when it brought out its accessible iPhone, really showed that up until that point touch was considered a really hard thing to make accessible but Apple led the way on that. So as we become more touch-based in our accessibility I think that yeah, we will see a lot more merging of these devices that we have come to rely on so much.

Roberta: Scott, what does the future hold for accessibility?

Scott: Ah, good question. In terms of the future I think one of the really exciting things is what’s called the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure, or GPII, and the way that works is basically, let’s say you’re at a train station and you want to buy a ticket. Well, at the moment if you can’t read the screen it’s very tricky, but the idea of GPII is that you could walk up to a ticket machine, it would identify you, and then it would change the interface of the ticket machine to what you needed. So if you’re vision impaired it might make things high contrast, large print and read it out to you, or if you’re in a wheelchair it might make the touch buttons lower so you can reach them. And I think it’s really exciting that there is this GPII initiative in the US. It’s starting to get more traction now, and really the future is that whatever interface we walk up to, be it an iPad, or a TV or a ticket machine, that potentially that could get set up for whatever our needs are, and I see that as the future. It’s a very ambitious project, and there’s other things along those lines happening at the moment, but yeah, in the future I think perhaps we won’t have to learn as much about what operating system does what, the… we’ll just be able to walk up to the device and it will be familiar to us, which is an exciting feature I think.

Roberta: Yes, but what we’ve got now, Scott, might have seemed like a dream years ago, and it’s happening.

Scott: Well, absolutely. And I think like we were saying before, when it came to touch devices no one ever thought really that a blind person would be able to use a touch screen, and often a touch screen just in its very essence was seen as inaccessible. Now that’s what we use; we use it on our phones and our tablets. So absolutely, Roberta, what we would have thought of as impossible to access even 10 years ago is commonplace today.

Roberta: Yeah, well you can read Scott’s article at .Net Magazine website. Or for more information on developments you can go to Media Access Australia. I’ve been speaking with Dr Scott Hollier about the milestones of accessibility. And Media Access Australia is a supporter of this program. 

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