The following guest post, by Jutta Treviranus of OCAD University in Toronto, kicks off our series of articles on the topic of accessible online content for people with disabilities. Building on our recent report on Authorship & Accessibility in the Digital Age, these posts will examine accessibility issues in greater detail over the coming weeks.

Checking Your Unintentional Message

It’s not only what you write that communicates your attitude toward social justice and equity. The format and mark-up of your works can inadvertently discriminate and deny access to a large number of your intended audience. This includes anyone that relies on alternative access systems, such as the millions of people that experience disabilities. It is unlikely that you would intentionally leave out headers, titles, paragraph breaks; jumble the order of your sections; or make your figures and images invisible or undecipherable; but that is the effect for many readers if accessible practices are not followed.

The good news is that the mechanics of avoiding unintentional barriers can be built into the authoring tools you use so that the required process becomes largely automatic, or the tool prompts you to provide the information needed to communicate your intent. This prompting includes asking you what information you hope to convey with an image or visual element, so the message is received by someone that can’t see the image. It can also include checking your work to make sure that you didn’t unintentionally exclude, similar to spell checking and grammar checking.

Unfortunately, most authoring tools still don’t provide these features despite decades of exemplary models. The cost of this omission is considerable. Retrofitting works is far more onerous than authoring them correctly from the start.

Many authoring tools also continue to exclude authors who require alternative access systems. This can mean that even if you currently have no difficulty using the tools, you’ll face barriers to authoring as you age. In effect, this deprives our society of the possible richness and diversity of expression.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which governs the Web, has created a set of guidelines for authoring tools, the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. These guidelines provide criteria for creating authoring tools that ensure that what is authored is accessible from the start, and that people experiencing disabilities can be producers, and not just consumers, of content. It is up to us to demand that the companies, that develop the authoring tools we purchase, follow these guidelines.

Jutta Treviranus is the Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre and a professor at OCAD University. She was the Chair of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group of the W3C.