JeffCroft.com

Allow me to start by providing a little context. I work for a media organization. I have a full-time day job. I’m paid on salary. I’m not a freelancer. I work every day on sites for newspapers and TV stations. I work on sites that are all about content. I don’t work on sites (generally speaking) for rock bands or upcoming movies. I don’t work for an agency trying to make the hottest eye-candy-laden site for a hip client. And I don’t, believe it or not, spend the majority of my time working on a blog or personal website. More than anything, I work with the news.

I believe too many people are trying to make accessibility a binary (yes or no) matter. It can’t be. It has to be a continuum. Every additional thing I’m expected to do for the sake of accessibility has a trade off of some kind. At the very least, there’s a time and effort trade off. If you ask me to make a separate stylesheet for those folks who read dark text on a light background more comfortably, it’s going to take me a bit of time (and hence, cost you a bit of money). Sometimes there are aesthetic trade offs. If I, as the visual designer, have decided that such-and-such color scheme provides the ideal aesthetic to properly convey your brand and you tell me to change it because your great-grandfather had a hard time reading the light blue text on a dark blue background, then you have lost some of the identity I created for you. And so on.

So, adding accessibility almost always has a trade off of some kind. In the real world, where real employees work on real projects that are supposed to make real money (as opposed to ideal world, where web geeks tinker with their blogs to impress their web geek friends), decisions have to be made. Just which of these accessibility additions are worth the trade offs they command?

This seems like obvious stuff. So why am I taking the time to spell it out? Because the web community at large doesn’t seem to realize it, that’s why. If there’s some accessibility feature or enhancement missing from a website, we pounce, assuming the reason it’s not there is that the web designers were either lazy, or simply don’t give a damn about handicapped people (or people on mobile devices, or people with low vision, or…you name it). But this is not normally the reason. Normally, the reason your favorite pet accessibility feature is missing is simply that a decision was made that it wasn’t worth the effort. Is that insensitive? No, it’s business. Feature x is going to take four hours to implement and only going to benefit 0.5% of our readership? Nah, it’s not worth it. We don’t have time.

What is irritating me of late is that there seems to be an expectation that we web designers account for every possible ailment, discomfort, handicap, browser choice, mobile device, or personal preference of every single visitor who might crawl along to our website. Would it be nice to do this? Of course. I’d love to. But it’s simply not practical.

Look around on your desk. Chances are you have some printed material. Pick it up. Can you spot any possible accessibility “gotchas?” Of course you can. Hell, almost everything that printed has type that would be considered too small online. And guess what? It’s not resizable! Gasp! How dare they?! Oh look, this business card has light text on a dark background and the person that gave it to me didn’t even give me an option for an alternate dark-on-light version! How could he?! And this brochure has light blue text on a white background — it’s kind of difficult to read. And yet, no high-contrast option!

I’m certain the same accessibility mavens have called out these print designers for not covering the obvious bases they should have here, right? Of course they haven’t. And why? Because, for some reason, people understand that it’s impractical to account for every possible preference in print. They can wrap their minds around the fact that printing is expensive, and printing both the sexy, hot-shot designer version that 90% of people will love and the Jacob Nielsen version with the blue underlines is simply not worth the money. But for some reason, people don’t understand that the same thing applies online. It costs money and time to do these things online, too.

For hundred upon hundreds of years, there have been accessibility problems with design. So how have they dealt with historically? I’ll tell you how. The designer, using his expert knowledge of these things, made logical, educated decisions that allowed things to be usable (or readable, or accessible) by the vast majority of people while still allowing him or her a level of control and aesthetic freedom that he or she was comfortable with.

So that takes care of the vast majority of people. What about the others? They dealt with it. It wasn’t the designers job to account for every possible difference in the individuals who would be reading or using their product. Got poor vision? Get a magnifying glass.

The more and more I think about accessibility, the more I feel that the burden of accommodating the minorities who have low vision, are color blind, or just have a simple person predilection towards having text really damn big should fall on the operating system and browser makers, not web designers.

And guess what? Most of the work is already done. All modern browsers support text scaling. Some even support page scaling — and this will become even more common with resolution-independent UIs like that of Apple’s Leopard. Most operating systems include a loupe at the system level (i.e. a magnifying glass). Apple provides a system-wide key combination (ctrl-cmd-option-8) for inverting the entire screen. There's built-in text-to-speech and voice-recognition. And the list goes on.

More and more, I’m feeling like taking a hard-assed approach. “What’s that? You’re complaining because you can’t scale the text of my site in Internet Explorer 6?” That’s your problem. Get glasses. Get a better browser. I can’t account for the fact that you have low vision and have chosen a shitty browser. The tools are out there to make your experience better, so use them.

Obviously, I would never go that far in the real world. I would never encourage web designers to throw accessibility out the window. I would always encourage designer to make good, logical decisions that cover the vast majority of uses and take the time to cover some of the more common minority cases if you can, as well.

But at some point, you have to draw the line. You have to say, “these are the browsers we have full support for,” or “sorry, we don’t have time to make a dark-on-light version of this site. You’ll need to use a tool to invert your screen if you’d like to read it that way.”

And that doesn’t make you an asshole. It makes you practical, and dammit, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Update: I’ve clarified my stance on this matter in another post. Please do not comment on this post unless you’ve also read Accessibility follow-up.