Transcript of the morning plenary at e-Access 11, 'Motivate and mobilise: getting started', presented by Nigel Lewis and Peter Abrahams.

1. e-Access 11: Transcript [Final, edited, approved]
Opening plenary: Motivate and mobilise: getting started
Speakers:
Nigel Lewis, Chief Executive, AbilityNet
Peter Abrahams, Accessibility Practice Leader, Bloor Research
>> Nigel Lewis:
So we've heard from the minister and we heard from Sandi about her 10 principles. As I was
introduced at the beginning, I'm chair of the snappy titled ‘One Voice for accessible ICT Coalition’.
Nothing to do with the coalition government. The coalition, my coalition, not the government's
coalition, is about trying to bring like minded individuals and organisations together to work on a
common agenda and purpose so we don't all repeat the same things, we don't keep doing the same
things and wasting our resources. Our main focus is around 3 areas:
We want to promote what's already out there. There is a lot out there. In fact there's more than
enough out there to help people with their accessibility issues.
We want to campaign to raise the awareness because lots of people still don't get it.
And we want to professionalize the I.T. industry. If we can get the I.T. professionals and the industry
and all the project managers etc., to build-in accessibility right at the beginning, then we have a good
chance of actually getting accessible systems and solutions and content delivered. It's a bit a shame
that alpha gov had a blip at the beginning. Let's hope that's the end, Adrian, for government
procurements.
The one thing we want to do in One Voice is we want to be practical and provide practical guidance.
We want to launch today, and Peter will take us through a detail in a second, what was originally
going to be called the 10 steps program. We were having a debate about how many steps there
should be. We're launching the practical steps program, which is about trying to provide
organisations and individuals simple steps, what to do, where to start, where to go for advice. This
program will hopefully be built and developed over time. And we're going to create a series of
practical guides. The areas we're looking at are listed here.
We're launching here today the web accessibility guides, and some of you when you see it might say
it's simple but you've got to start somewhere. We've got to build upon these. We want to help
within the mobile space. We've all got one of these phones that rings incessantly and beeps. What
about gaming, VOIP, the desktops operating environments, Windows and Mac. We're launching with
web accessibility. And the steps will grow and grow. Now I'd like to hand over to Peter.
>> Peter Abrahams:
A few months ago we had a One Voice meeting and we decided that one of the issues in the world is
that there are lots of websites out there that don't get accessibility at all or at least their owners
don't get accessibility. And Nigel and Graham and Jean decided that what is really need is the first 10
steps, what do you do first, and for a while we called it the first 10 steps.
I remembered a mantra, from my early days in IBM, which talked about the magic number 7 plus or

2. minus 2. You shouldn't have more than 7 things on your list of to do list. If you have too many, you
get confused. If you have too few, you're not working. 7 seems like a good number. It may be 5, 6, 7,
8, 9, but it shouldn't be more than that. Sorry, Sandi, 10 is too many.
So you'll notice on this slide, which points you to where all this information is going to be, it's called
the 7 steps; but you will notice that on the next slide it says 8 steps. And one of the reasons for that
is that there is another announcement today on education that wasn't available when I started, that
becomes the 8th step. I'll talk about that in a moment.
So I believe that most of the people in this room are into accessibility, that's why you're here. You've
got to recognise that, unfortunately, there are a large number of websites, alpha gov being one of
them at the moment apparently, but lots of other where accessibility really doesn't exist. If we went
to the owner of some of those websites and said, what you've got to do is you've got to take all the
principles from Sandi, all the principles from WCAG and you've got to fix all of that, they'll probably
just look and say, “I'll do it another day”.
Why we're sticking to 8 is we think 8 is do-able. It's not overwhelming. If we say to someone there
are only 8 things you've got to do immediately, they might actually go and do it.
Also 8 is not trivial. If we just said there's one thing you've got to do, and that will make your website
more accessible, it's not good enough.
I'm the editor of the book that's coming out, well, the online book that's coming out. And the
question is going to be when people see it, and see the 8 steps, all the people who know anything
about accessibility are going to say, why haven't you got this? Why haven't you got that?
The way we did this was to say, if we're going to have 8 steps, the first 8 steps that people are going
to take then:
They have all got to be important. Some things in accessibility are I have to say more important than
others. I think everything on here is important.
They have to apply to most websites. If I told a website owner that you've got to do 8 things and
none of them apply to their website, that would seem a bit odd.
I think the most contentious one is the next one which is they are relatively easy to implement. I
have to say having been working on the website, that this is put on, some of the things that I'm
suggesting are not fully implemented yet.
The 8 steps will undoubtedly improve accessibility of most websites.
And finally if you go through these 8 steps you'll then have a much better idea of what else you have
to do.
So steps 1, 2, 3.
The first thing, Step 1, I'm suggesting is that people do a quick accessibility check of their website.
We provide a methodology for doing that to give you an indication of whether your website is very
accessible, reasonably accessible, partially accessible, or is an absolute nightmare. One of the
reasons for doing that is, unfortunately, I know that there are websites out there that are an
absolute nightmare and it would be difficult technically to fix them. It's worthwhile figuring that out
fairly quickly.
I should say that the steps don't need to be in this order. This is the order I'm presenting them in.
Step 2 is to publish an accessibility policy. A statement on your website which says, you intend to be

3. accessible. That is your intent. Now, I think a lot of websites are very frightened of doing this
because they're frightened people are going to say, but you're not... I have to say I was -- I write for
Bloor research, and when I first started writing accessibility the Bloor website was not accessible. We
got real flaming about this. It's uncomfortable when it happens. Notwithstanding I think it's
important people say that. They can say in the policy: “we know we haven't got it all right yet. We
are working on it. We will get better. We'll come back to you in 6 months time, a year's time, with an
update”.
If you have an accessibility policy saying that, then the next step, Step 3, is to provide a way for
people to give feedback. So that when something is not right the user can easily go onto the website
and say I have found a problem. The reason this is really important is it is a way for the website
owner to begin to understand the things that are really important, the things that really effect the
users. This information can be used to prioritize the changes. It's also I think very useful in terms of
the user of the website. There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to do something on a
website and then not being able to tell the website owner that there is a problem. So providing a
very simple way for people to contact us and provide that information I think is very important.
Steps 1,2 and 3 are sort of setting the scene type steps. The next four steps are really a few technical
changes that you ought to make to your website.
Step 4 is providing a ‘jump to content’ link so that when someone tabs into a web page, it says, press
this and you'll go to the content. That means that you jump over all the menus and gets to the real
content. You jump over all the adverts and rubbish that's either side of it and get directly to the
thing you were interested in when you got to this page.
I suffer from a limited version of RSI. I don't like using a mouse. I tend to use the keyboard. I find
some websites are absolutely appalling. I hit the tab button and the tab button and the tab button…
until I get to what I want. It is a nightmare and it's unnecessary, jump-to content fixes it.
Step 5 is ensuring the tab sequence is logical. I've been to websites and you click on the tab button
and the first link you get to is the top left. The next link you come to is halfway down the right side. It
goes around like that. It's absolutely impossible to understand what's happening. It's impossible for
me to use it with my RSI problem. It's also a nightmare for people who use screen users. They don't
know where they are. It's a problem for people who use screen magnifiers. They only see a bit of the
screen. They have no idea where they've got to.
Step 6 is ensuring that pictures and links have alternative text when they need them so the screen-
reader users get the information about images and links in a useful format and don't get information
about images they don't need.
The 7th step is to ensure that text sizing works. So that if you press control plus on a website, you
can get the text to increase in size. I do it all the time I have to say. Partly, I have to say, because I've
got a large iMac. I sit away from it. All the text is too small. It gets bigger and comfortable. It's very
important to people who have rather more serious vision impairments than I have.
So there are the four technical things I think need to be done. I know there are lots of other things
people would suggest. Remember, these are the first steps.
Right, let me just show you roughly what the website looks like. You're not expected to read that.
This is the content structure of each of the steps. There's a page on the website for each step. And
within that there are sections, which talk about:

4. The reason for this particular step. Very short.
Some information about the implementation, not the technical implementation but the kind of
things you should do.
Links to good and bad examples.
I have some videos on there showing you how this works.
There is a section on further reading. Very often there's a link to the WCAG guideline that is relevant
to the particular step we're talking about.
And then there are going to be techniques, which says, if you want to do this step, this is how you do
it.
Now, this is where we ask whether the technology is going to work. This is the live site. You can see a
little bit better. This is an example of the ‘jump to content’ link. You can see there's a little section
about reason. I'm not going to go through the detail. There's stuff about implementation, what you
should do, pointers to examples. This is where we try some really clever stuff and show you a little
bit of the video.
I'm going to stop it there. All I really wanted to show you was that we have videos in there. It has a
voice commentary so people who want to listen to it can hear it. I'm afraid it's my voice, that's the
best I can do at the moment. It also has closed captioning included on it. So that people who are
deaf or hard of hearing or potentially are in an environment where they can't use speakers can
access the information.
So that's what we've done so far.
Which brings me to step 8. Step 8 is new. One of the things that becomes fairly obvious when you
think about the initial steps is that the people who are involved with the website (web owner and
the web developers) need some education about accessibility.
When we originally did this and there were only 7 steps, I didn't talk about education. The reason for
that was there wasn't any obvious education for them to have. I'm glad to say that today we're
announcing the first module of some education specifically about accessibility. It is called digital
accessibility e-learning. It's about web essentials. It has been commissioned by the Equality and
Human Rights commission, by AbilityNet, Nigel, and by the BCS, I suppose in particular Jean. It's a
learning module and online examination.
It's an accredited qualification. If you take this, you get points. It's only initially level 1 at the
moment. This is an introduction to accessibility, probably exactly what the kind of people that we
are talking about in the 8 steps need.
And there's a plan to do qualifications for level 2 and 3 for accessibility as part of e-learning. It says
visit partner demo, down in the corner later in the coffee break.
So we've created the 7 steps. We've created the portal. We've created the booklet. Where do we go
next?
We need to add more detail to those 8 steps. It has been created over the last few weeks. There are
places where I'm sure if you read it you would say, we can improve on that. We would like to do a
further booklet on where you go next, what the rest of the steps of the journey are.
There are other accessibility areas, the list that Nigel produced at the beginning, with all the others,

5. mobile, etc., where he mentioned Windows and Mac. It occurs to me, Nigel, that we ought to add
iPad to that as well.
>> Nigel: Absolutely.
>> Peter: And there's a request to all the people in this room because I know you all understand it,
come and join One Voice. I believe that if we get more people involved with that, we will have a
better chance of making sure accessibility gets out into the community.
I would love to get responses back; validation of what's in the 8 steps and what else should be there.
I need some help in fact with the techniques. There are certain things in there about how you should
do it technically which I need some help with. We need to extend it. We need to create new areas.
There's plenty of more work that can be done by the community that's here today.
Thank you very much.
(Clapping)