Four Books on Web Accessibility
Review by Charles McCathieNevile
From: SIGCHI Bulletin - May/June 2003 - page 14

Understanding Accessibility - A Guide to Achieving Compliance on Websites and
Intranets by Robert B. Yonaitis. ISBN: 1-930616-03-1, free, HiSoftware, 2002. 

Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark. ISBN: 073571150X, $39.99, New
Riders, 2002. 

Constructing Accessible Websites by Jim Thatcher, Cynthia Waddell, Shawn
Henry, Sarah Swierenga, Mark Urban, Michael Burks, Bob Regan, and Paul
Bohman. ISBN: 1904151000, $49.99, Glasshaus, 2002. 

Maximum Accessibility by John M. Slatin and Sharron Rush. ISBN: 0201774224,
$44.99, Addison Wesley Professional, 2002. 

The year 2002 saw the release of the four English-language books on the topic
of Web accessibility listed above. To reduce the confusion caused by such
similar names, in what follows these books are respectively refrrred to as
Yonaitis, Thatcher et al, Clark, and Slatin and Rush. 

This review first introduces "Section 508" and "WCAG", the two accessibility
standards to which all the books refer extensively. I then comment on each
book, and finish with some more general thoughts and some comparison. 

WCAG and Section 508 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a Recommendation of the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C is a web standards organization that
in 1997 launched the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to ensure that the
work of W3C supports access to the web by all people regardless of
disability. WAI does this through five activities: 

  Producing guidelines for ensuring accessibility 

  Reviewing W3C Specifications to ensure that they support accessibility 

  Supporting, by review and co-ordination, developers of tools to test or
  enhance accessibility 

  Monitoring research and development in web accessibility 

  Outreach to promote accessibility and the W3C's work in this area. 

The WCAG are one of four guideline specifications from WAI, and they provide
technical requirements to ensure that web content is accessible to people
regardless of disability. Beginning with guidelines collected in the early
90s by the TRACE center at the University of Wisconsin, they were produced by
an international process of consensus building in a volunteer working group.
This group worked over a period of two years, responding both to public and
W3C reviews. The final Recommendation was published in May 1999, while its
companion "Techniques Documents" are updated from time to time. 

The W3C is now working on an updated version, WCAG 2. Because of vagaries in
the development process it is not possible to know when it will be published
in its final form, but it is currently expected around the end of 2003.
Authors of all the books reviewed here have participated in this work. 

"Section 508" is the United States Federal standards for accessibility of
information technology, required by the Workplace Rehabilitation Act
amendments of 1998, Section 508. The moniker "Section 508" often only refers
to subpart B, # 1194.22, which outlines requirements for Web content. This is
a purchasing regulation of the US Federal government which requires (with
caveats) that information technology purchased by the government meet certain
standards. Broadly speaking, it applies as law to US Federal Government
agencies and agencies receiving funding from the US Federal Government. It
was drafted by a group commissioned by the US Gov- ernment who took, but were
not bound by, advice from the public. Again, the Rule itself was published,
but there are supporting materials provided which are updated from time to
time. At present the reviewer knows of no plans to update the Rule. 

Yonaitis - Understanding Accessibility 

Yonaitis' UnderstandingAccessibility is free in electronic form from the
HiSoftware website. It is written by the CEO of HiSoftware, Rob Yonaitis, and
is designed to complement HiSoftware's product line. The printed version is
the smallest of the four books - 190 small pages of large print with 6 small
black and white images. 

The book is pitched very clearly at people trying to comply with the United
States Federal Government's "Section 508", as is stated in the introduction.
It also relates those guidelines to the WCAG, following the lead of the then
supporting material for Section 508. This analysis has since been shown to be
inaccurate, but for the purposes of the book that has little impact. 

The book provides a very brief introduction to accessibility, and outlines
Section 508 and its applicability (at the same time referring the reader to
the original). It then goes through each 508 checkpoint (listing the matching
W3C checkpoint), what it means and how to test it. The testing information
was disap- pointing from a vendor of testing software - instead of providing
real instruction for how to use a tool it simply states that "...automated
testing tools such as HiSoftware's AccVerify can quickly test a page or an
entire Web site." Alternatively, the tool may state that an issue needs to be
verified manually. The book then gives a brief but clear discussion of
accessibility testing and how to integrate testing and repair into an
over-all production and quality assurance process. 

There is a chapter on using metadata and text alternatives, which includes a
discussion of why not to use a "text-only" version of a site, followed by a
point-by-point tutorial on implementing the section 508 requirements. Again
this was disappointing, since instead of demonstrating how to use software
designed to ease users' lives it simply provides HTML code examples. 

The final chapter discusses (very briefly) the relationship between software
accessibility and Web accessibility, although it does little more than
explain the section 508 and WCAG requirement that Web content which behaves
like software (for example, a dynamic HTML or flash application that has its
own interface) needs to respect software accessibility standards. 

Clark - Building Accessible Websites 

Joe Clark's book was preceded by his blog Ä a running online commentary from
Clark on the progress of his book. It is written in an informal style, in
which the author "[assumes] my esteemed readers have basic knowledge of
HTML," and "espouses standards compliance through and through."  

The book was written in HTML, and all its examples use XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- the official W3C standard at the time of writing. It advocates dismissing
non-standards compliant browsers (Netscape 4 is singled out in this context).
Throughout, the author rails against websites being boring in the name of
accessibility, and turns his sometimes vitriolic rhetoric towards both
accessibility advocates who don't mea- sure up to his vision of a "cool web"
and designers who don't accept that accessibility is a vital part of their
jobs. Clark advocates his work as the only necessary and useful source for
examples and explanation of accessibility: 

  "All the existing resources for Web Accessibility are either too terse or
  too verbose, offer too few examples or examples you'd neverfind in actual
  Websites, and don't pay enough attention to real-world use ... In short, I
  intend to make accessibility less of a pain in the arse."  

It comes with a companion full-text CD-ROM that also includes all examples
and a number of accessibility-oriented utilities. It explains that images are
not included in the electronic text, because this was not cost-effective, and
they would not have had more thorough enough text alternatives. 

The book starts with "How to Read this Book', which, as well as making the
claims discussed above, outlines some limitations. Chapter 2, titled "Why
Bother?", debunks some myths and gives reasons why accessibility is
important. The next chapter explains how people with disabilities use
computers, concluding along the way that there is not much that can be
explained about making the Web accessible to people with what are broadly
termed "cognitive disabilities" - everything from dyslexia to mental
retardation. The next chapter, on "What is Media Access", argues that
accessibility is substantially about text alternatives to rich media so that
screen readers can cope with the Web. 

The next couple of chapters introduce well-structured and correct HTML. One
chapter includes a thorough explanation of text alternatives illustrated with
a good range of real world examples drawn from around the world. This is one
of the features of this book - it is the only one that shows the
international nature of the Web. Following are solid chapters on text and
links, and navigation. Another chapter of this book features the only
in-depth treatment among the four books of colour and typeface. If it doesn't
answer every question anyone has, it certainly provides a good foundation and
useful practical advice. The chapter on tables and frames is heavy on tables,
but skips past frames in about a page mostly taken up with a rhetorical blast
at HTML in place of a proper explanation of how to properly use the advised
<noframes> tag. 

The chapter on style sheets is similarly short on useful explanation of what
to do, although it does make some important points clearly. The chapters on
forms and multimedia are again in the vein of the best of this book,
providing good explanations of the issues and ways to deal with them. With
the author known as "the king of captions", expectations are high in this
area, and the relevant chapter lives up to them. A certification and testing
chapter provides sound advice about an accessibility policy, and on testing
with users, but the final future dreams chapter seems to demonstrate a lack
of familiarity with current work outside the narrow area of HTML - an
impression reinforced at various places throughout the book. 

The appendix on "Accessibility and the Law" provides perhaps the best general
discussion of the issue among these books, although it also follows the
original incorrect comparison of Section 508 with WCAG that was released with
the Section 508 regulations. And a colophon covering motivation and design of
the book finishes the book with a few personal thoughts on the most overtly
personal of the books reviewed. 

Thatcher et al. - Constructing Accessible Websites 

This substantial work is available as a large-text book, or as a CD-ROM
(which does include graphics and alternative text for them); I read the
CD-ROM version to save weight. The CD-ROM is written in HTML, but the text is
small enough to be hard to read. It also included a trial version of
Macromedia's Dreamweaver (for Windows only). The book is written by several
authors, each contributing more or less free-standing chapters with little in
the way of editing to tie them together. 

The book opens with a chapter introducing accessibility. The chapter makes
the important connection between accessibility as defined in WCAG and Section
508 and general usability. The second chapter introduces legal aspects.
Although it provides a survey of international law, it is more a list of
facts, and it would have been nice to see some deeper discussion of the
different frameworks and approaches to law. 

The largest section of the book covers the way that assistive technologies
work, the details of how to make various kinds of Web Content accessible, and
how to test for Section 508 compliance using Bobby and LIFT. Again the
emphasis is on working with screen reading technology, almost to the
exclusion of other issues, and the content covered is fairly similar.  It
would have been nice to see additional coverage on assessment of the more
cross-disability oriented WCAG. 

A chapter on development tools gives a reasonably good coverage of the
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, and a quick impression of some major
authoring tools, (Dreamweaver, GoLive, FrontPage, HomeSite and BBEdit) when
used with some of the most common accessibility extensions available. With
some real instruction on how to use the tools and pitfalls to avoid this
chapter is a standout amongst the books reviewed. 

It is followed by one of the weaker chapters, on Cascading Style Sheets. The
chapter gives some style sheet examples, but fails to explain them clearly,
and poor editing has left some errors. The result is a chapter that only
helps people who already know what was going to be explained. 

A chapter on Macromedia Flash accessibility is written by the Director of
Accessibility for Macromedia, Bob Regan. After a couple of paragraphs that
sound like advertising copy, the substance of the chapter is informative and
not available in any of the other books. While being ahead of other print
material, this chapter demonstrates the main limitation of the book form for
this content Ä the book is difficult to update as technologies evolve. Next
comes an analysis of some US and Australian case law. In some important
respects, this chapter is now out of date Ä a problem that is exacerbated
because it fails to anticipate possible changes in policy direction. 

The penultimate chapter is about implementing an accessibility policy in an
organisation Ä a solid chapter that has the edge over the corresponding ones
by Clark (except perhaps for Clark's straightforward explanation of what to
say about accessibility, which I would paraphrase as "just the facts, ma'am")
or Yonaitis. The final chapter, on future directions, shows a good awareness
of work around W3C and beyond. 

Slatin and Rush 

Like Thatcher et al, this is a physically large book. The typesetting is
large and open, explained as enabling John Slatin, who is blind, to scan it
easily and accurately when he was working on it. The book does not have a CD
ROM version, but it does have a foreword by Jakob Nielsen explaining the
nexus between accessibility and usability. It also has a linearised version
of all tables in an appendix, to help people who use scanners and Optical
Character Recognition to produce an electronic text from a paper book - a
commonplace technique. 

The book is divided into two sections - the first introduces the concepts of
accessibility. It includes a discussion of the role of legislation and
regulation, focussing on the US situation. It also discusses moral and
business arguments for accessibility that goes beyond mere compliance to a
set of rules, and discusses the value of what it calls `grass-roots efforts'
in supporting accessibility. This section also uses several in-depth analyses
of particular tasks Ä a full length chapter each, describing the particular
problems that arise when using a real website for a real world task. 

As in Thatcher et al., the legal chapter presents a somewhat "triumphalist"
view of history as a steady progress towards a more complete coverage of
accessibility as a legal right based on a moral argument. Whatever one thinks
of the ethics involved, this seems a slightly naive view, which is not
unambiguously supported by all the facts. While the book does focus on issues
related to accessibility for people with visual disabilities, of the four it
provides the best coverage of issues related to other disabilities. 

The use case analyses of design situations are one of the outstanding
features of this book. The authors acknowledge that the sites may no longer
appear as they did at the time of writing. However, since the authors in fact
worked with some of the sites discussed to improve them, the depth of each
description provides valuable discussion that outlives the particular website. 

The second section covers the technical details of implementing
accessibility. Again it covers textual alternatives for pictures first,
although it does point out that there are people who need an alternative to
the text. It also covers forms and tables with a chapter on each. Another
chapter discusses making PDF documents accessible, including sections on what
to do when producing PDFs with Microsoft Word, the problems of legacy
applications, and content slowing the uptake of the best possible approaches
to accessibility. 

This section also includes chapters on multimedia, scripts, applets, and
plugins. They provide a good general introduction different multimedia
formats in wide use and the issues involved in choosing which format(s) to
use, as well as discussion of when to use them and when to use a simpler,
more generally accessible approach. 

The final chapter covers Cascading Style Sheets - the most complete coverage
of the four books reviewed, but more general than Joe Clark's specialised
treatment of colours and fonts. 

Conclusions 

All four of these books seem heavily oriented toward the US market (although
Clark uses a wide range of international examples, his legal discussion is
still focussed on the American situation). However, with the partial
exception of Yonaitis (which is clearly focused on Section 508 compliance)
the technical discussions apparently cover everything the authors think is
necessary for accessibility. Not surprisingly, this leads to slightly
different treatments of essentially the same material. 

There is a heavy focus on accessibility for people who are using screen
readers, the best-known and simplest area of accessibility. However, this is
by no means the only, nor in numerical terms the most common accessibility
need. Each book does cover some other areas, but it seems like an overall
weakness that is reflected beyond the books in the general Web accessibility
community. 

There was a surprisingly strong focus on how to produce HTML source code.
This is important information, but most people producing content for the Web
are now using authoring tools that automate a lot of the process. Paul
Bohman's chapter on authoring tools in Thatcher et al. is the only extended
dis- cussion of using tools to produce HTML. Bob Regan's chapter on Flash in
Thatcher et al., the section on producing PDF in Slatin and Rush, and the
chapters on captioning in Clark and in Slatin and Rush do recognise this
approach to authoring. 

Only Thatcher et al. and Yonaitis give a short treatment on the mechanics of
testing in something like an annotated checklist, and in each case it is only
testing for the Section 508 requirements. Slatin and Rush list the WCAG and
508 requirements (which is, to be sure, better than nothing). 

The CD-ROM that is provided with Clark's book, as well as the one that is
available as a version of Thatcher et al., is a very valuable reference for
people who are conscious of space or weight and are happy reading from their
computer. In each case these CDs also have some useful "extras". 

Overall, I felt the best coverage of accessibility is that of Slatin and
Rush, although each of Clark and Thatcher et al. provide insights that are
unique. Yonaitis, as a very short book that is free, makes a useful quick
introduction to the subject, and is not a reference work in the vein of the
other three. Ideally one would read all four books, but (optionally beginning
with Yonaitis, then) reading any one of the more in-depth treatments and
being aware that there are gaps would be a good sound introduction to Web
accessibility at the level it had reached in general practice about one year
ago.