Matt May on Web Accessibility: Do It Right - Keep It Simple
Matt May, Accessibility Engineer at Adobe in Seattle, gave a great talk last night on Web Accessibility. The talk was sponsored by Refresh Seattle.
Matt is someone we all can — and should — turn to with questions about Web Accessibility. It’s clear why Adobe and W3C/WAI chose Matt to articulate and evangelize accessibility standards:
- Matt really knows his stuff (an understatement).
- He makes the material accessible.
- Matt is accessible.
A quick glance at the Federal Government’s Section 508 website shows why this is so important: it’s dense as hell, therefore most of us will never read it. Although it’s absolutely clear that Matt could tell you in great detail about many aspects of accessibility, like most Kung Fu masters, he restrains himself.* Here’s how he typically states the importance of accessibility in software and Web development:
A mealymouthed stance? No way.
To turn standards into reality, we (and by “we” I mean Matt) must reduce the “oh my god, how will we do it?!” factor as much as possible. Sure, companies that do work for government agencies will try to comply with Section 508 as much as the law requires, which might mean hiring an “expert”. But what about all the other software and web pages out there?
It makes a lot of sense to put the emphasis where it will do the most good: by making reasonably-sized sites reasonably accessible — because that’s a whole lot better than nuttin’, honey. And, by keeping it simple for these sites’ developers and other stakeholders, we stand a much better chance of helping them inspire others to follow suit.
Something else Matt said helped reinforce his position. When asked to recommend a book on accessibility standards, he said he could not — because those on the market devote too much attention to compliance (with Section 508, for example) versus simple ways to achieve more accessibility, more quickly. (He may have hinted that he was hoping to correct the situation himself, I’m not sure. But maybe a book, by its nature, would do less for the cause than newer media in smaller doses, like video or podcasts, along with the Web and PDF.)
Matt will be posting links related to his talk, and I will include those as soon as he does. Meantime, here are some other resources:
- Matt May’s blog (views are his own - check it out!)
- Web Accessibility Initiative - Quick Tips to Make Accessible Web Sites
- Accessibility at Adobe (some good stuff here)
- Matt’s profile at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C/WAI)
*To my knowledge, Matt is not really a Kung Fu master — just in case you were going to refrain from making any negative comments below. Fire away!
Mark McLaren
McBuzz Communications
Popularity: 60% [?]
August 21st, 2007 at 3:17 pm
I would have loved to go to this talk. All the accessibility people I know don’t really match Adobe with accessibility. Mainly because of their baby, PDF. It would have been interesting to hear what he had to say about both that and Flash. You can do all you want to make flash and pdf more accessible, but there will always be a quicker way to do the same thing.
August 21st, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Thanks for commenting, Ryan. I like your style. I wish you had been there, too. Can you suggest how we might have gotten the word out better?
I’m hoping Matt May will drop by this post any time now. I left some cookies and milk out. (Might not be enough given his schedule.)
Matt doesn’t mince words on his blog when it comes to PDF and Flash:
“PDF and Flash are even more liberal [than HTML — in terms of markup language] — in fact, you can start with nothing and invent your own structure, or work with no structure at all. That’s what’s making accessibility of these formats so damn hard to work out: almost any object — and all of its components — can mean almost anything at any time.” (Accessibility: Why Valid Isn’t Enough)
August 21st, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Thanks for the writeup, Mark. Hope my boss sees this.
Now, on the Adobe and accessibility thing. There was a point when the accessibility of PDF was zero. And most people who have cared about accessibility for a long time remember that.
However, for at least the last five years, Adobe’s added accessibility support progressively, in each release, to PDF and Acrobat Reader. You can edit a PDF to specify the reading order, call out headers, scan and analyze tables, add alt text to images and other objects, and so on. Acrobat Reader also supports MSAA (as does Flash), and on top of that, it can read PDF documents out loud by itself.
But still, there are people who have long memories, and reflexively say, if PDF, then inaccessible. In reality, it’s far ahead of where it was, and we’re going to keep on improving it. And when I meet people with memories like this, I can say I remember that time too, but…
Based on the people I’ve worked with since I started focusing on accessibility many years ago, the two companies I most wanted to work for were Adobe and Macromedia. They had some of the biggest challenges to tackle, they’ve been active in the community forever, and most importantly, they’ve always been open about what remains to be done. We’re an accessibility organization, not a marketing department. Adobe makes stuff that’s constantly pushing the limits of what people can do with computers. There’s always going to be something we could be doing more inclusively. And that, in a nutshell, is what they pay me to point out.