Caring about Accessibility

At a panel presentation at this year's South by South West (SXSW2004) Interactive conference, Jeff Veen publicly said: "I don't care about accessibility."

That's some statement. Read it again:

"I don't care about accessibility."

Looks pretty bad doesn't it? Jeff Veen said that? Yes, he did, I heard it and so did many others attending the event. But ... they heard it in context, and what Jeff really meant that was 'as a practitioner of web standards, by doing things correctly he almost doesn't have to think about accessibility, that it almost comes automatically as a by-product'.

The trouble is, this is not always the case, and the other problem is that too many people are latching on to the Jeff Veen soundbite and the message is getting twisted along the way (something that Mr Veen surely never intended!).

Matt May, a W3C guy with a special responsibility for accessibility (namely the Web Accessibility Initiative, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and more), has put his thoughts on the issue together over at his personal web log, BestKungFu:

I know he didn't mean that, because I saw the presentation, and I read his notes. Veen gets it, because getting it is his job, and has been since before most Web designers got their first cramps from typing angle brackets. He knows you have to care about it, even if you are a standardista. And if you heard that in his message, you can stop here.

But if you quoted him out of context saying "I don't care about accessibility" on your blog, as many did, you need to read on.

Accessibility is definitely not a no-brainer, even if coding to standards is. You cannot assume that a site will be completely accessible simply by using the correct markup (but it helps).