February 11^th/ Your mom’s not accessible

A few days ago, Arron Cannon over at North Temple threw up a post titled: Is Adobe Flex Really Accessible… which was full of inaccuracies based solely on his inexperience with Flex (read Adam Lehman’s response on the subject). This isn’t meant as an insult, but rather a factual observation: Arron simply doesn’t have a lot (any?) experience with the technology.

But that didn’t stop him from preaching (all comments are disabled and Arron does not respond to email) that you shouldn’t use the technology. Quite honestly, it pissed me off. I sent an email to Arron shortly after reading his post on Thursday, and Arron seemed fit to ignore my email completely.

Here is the letter I sent to him:

Arron,

While I appreciate your intrigue about Flex, I feel like you’re unfairly damning a technology for all the wrong reasons. As per your technical argument, you’re probably right. However that comes with the caveat that JAWS can rarely navigate the majority of the HTML web as it sits today with any sort of ease. It’s no lie to anyone who’s tried to legitimately use screen readers that the technology is highly divisive and non-functional (different readers render differently, function differently, and support different aspects by default).

The sad and unfortunate fact is that anyone who wants a truly accessible site must work very hard, testing and using various screen readers throughout development. (no free lunch indeed). Using standards & best practices only gets us half-way there.

Suggesting that Flex should not be used (”However, until that happens, I can not recommend Adobe Flex.”) is like saying we shouldn’t move forward with HD programming because some people still have SD TV sets. Flex is a revolutionary technology that redefines the rules of what we’re capable of delivering over the web. It can be accessible, and even more so than HTML ever could if you have the desire (you could script your own narrative to guide visually disabled through the form process, accepting voice input and encoding to textual input to the form if you felt the need).

At the end of the day, if you’re looking to deliver a site targeted at visually impaired people, Flex is almost certainly not your choice. The same way social security benefits advertisements will continue to be broadcast in high-contrast SD programming on TV.

But is that reason to not use a technology?

The summary of the above is twofold:

• Even HTML is not accessible by default. You must work very hard to make a fully accessible website using HTML, CSS and (should you dare) Javascript.
• Flex doesn’t really need to be accessible. That’s not the target of the technology.

Much talk and little action is done on the web in terms of “accessibility” and making sites available to the visually impaired. I encourage anyone who has never used JAWS to go ahead and use it on your own site. Then I suggest you try a couple other competing screen reading solutions. I think you’ll find that it’s kind of a crap shoot. Navigating most “accessible” and semantic web sites is maddening at best. Most of the time it feels as though someone’s asking you to read War & Peace without any paragraphs or headings. Sure, the information’s there — but it’s realistically inaccessible.

My point being: accessibility is not something a technology offers. It’s something that a technology can support (and indeed, Flex supports accessibility just fine) — but it’s not something a technology gives you for free.

Unfortunately I believe that Arron has done his damage to the web community and turned thousands away from an amazing technology simply because he doesn’t personally like it. Undoubtedly, Arron’s response will be: “show me.” My response to that is: Why? You’re persecuting a community without cause. Give me proof Flex is not accessible. All in all, I just think it’s sad — and I hope that anyone reading this won’t throw Flex out because it’s “inaccessible.”

1. 

   Nathan Smith

   February 11^th | #

   Kyle: I think your argument is good, because it counter-balances the attitude of throwing the baby out with the bath water. I do however, take issue to this sentence: “Even HTML is not accessible by default.” Doesn’t that fly in the face of what Jeremy Keith said here…

   http://adactio.com/journal/1224

   “… good markup is accessible by default. As long as you’re using HTML elements in a semantically meaningful way — which you should be doing anyway, without even thinking about accessibility — then your documents will be accessible to begin with. It’s only through other additions—visual presentation, behaviour, etc. — that accessibility is removed.”

   I would say that HTML, in fact, is accessible by default.

2. 

   Kyle

   February 12^th | #

   Nathan: I should have been more specific; I meant reasonably accessible to the visually impaired. HTML by default is not in a usable shape for those using JAWS — not unless it’s a contrived example document.

   HTML is accessible by default in the same way that XML is accessible by default — it’s an open format that’s easily consumed. Past that, it’s up to the technology to make it realistically usable by the visually impaired.

3. 

   tidy

   February 23^rd | #

   ur page is filled with html tidy errors!

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