1. Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Is Web Accessibility Difficult? Creating Accessible Web Pages Is Easy The Case Against The Motion
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN .

2. Although W3C is an international consortium WAI Guidelines the driving force comes from US companies.
Who would gain most from international standardisation of WAI guidelines:
IT industry in countries throughout the world
Microsoft, Sun, IBM, …

3. Background
In Sep 2002 a survey of the accessibility of University home pages was published.
The survey made use of Bobby and reported only on compliance with WAI features which can be measured in an automated way.
Despite:
The culture in UK HEIs of wishing to do a good job
The SENDA legislation (Sept 2003)
The limits of the survey (only entry points
We found:
Only 4 (3 really) pages complied with WAI AA
Only 70 complied with WAI A
If Web accessibility is easy, why such poor results?

4. The Tools Creating Web pages is easy  - my children can do it But:
It's easy because many Web authors (but not us) use tools such as MS Word, PowerPoint, … and simply save as HTML 
Users don't want to be forced to change tools – they are conservative (unlike many of us)
There are significant costs in migrating to better tools (licence costs, testing, training, …) – even for open source tools
There are even bigger costs in moving to a CMS environment (sorry Andrew)

5. The Browser
W3C guidelines generally seem to assume that software implementations of W3C standards will work correctly
Sadly, this isn't true
We should have instigated a large-scale search and destroy policy on Netscape 4 (with its very buggy support for CSS which greatly hindered deployment of CSS)
Instead we hate Microsoft more than we wish to support accessibility and so we didn't do this 

6. Accessibility and E-Learning
Accessibility of e-Learning is probably the most difficult challenge facing us
How do we make this interactive exercise interactive?
Can we design a single system as usable as this?
Isn't it expensive to do this?
And what about graphical quizzes in which we 'obscure' answers in order to assist learning; 3D visualisations, …

7. Workflow
I have a dozen or so PowerPoint files from speakers at the workshop
I wish to make them available on the Web in an open and accessible format
I store the file & the MS-derived HTML
I can use a (currently clunky) tool to produce accessible & compliant HTML
But I'm asked for ALT tags for every image – and the software won't let me save the file until I've done this 
If it's difficult for me I think it's clear this approach won't scale

8. Conclusions To conclude: Universal Web accessibility is a great idea
World peace and harmony is another great idea
But it's a myth that either ideal can be implemented simply and without cost
There is therefore a need to make priorities, make compromises and carry out risk assessment
These are legitimate issues to raise – saying them doesn't make you an uncaring Thatcherite!