Axxlog

The BBC Web presence has been reviewed by an outside consultant, Philip Graf. Press coverage has focused on the sections of BBC Online that will be shut down, and how “external content providers” can add to the site.

• Independent Review of BBC Online
• More-convenient PDF links on this page of BBC coverage

Torin Douglas writes: “Amazingly, Philip Graf seems to have pleased everyone with his report into the BBC’s online services.”

Well, except disabled people. The issue of accessibility is barely even mentioned in 290 pages of reports (including the Independent Review of BBC News 24), all of them published as tagged PDFs.

What do the reports say about accessibility?

Let’s check some of the references, taking care to sort out the disability sense of accessibility from others. Glancing references are excluded.

BBC Online Review, Module 1: Assessment of BBC Online’s Use of Technology (PDF)

The overall site design and accessibility of BBC Online has undoubtedly made the service easy to use… A number of features are also in place to help users with visual or certain physical impairments to navigate their way around the site relatively easily. Every page has a “Text only” link which, when clicked, redraws the page, removing all of the graphics and other objects, leaving just the text. This feature uses an application developed by the BBC called Betsie… which also allows the user to change the colour and size of the text, as well as removing embedded items, such as games and applets. All BBC Web pages have also been created so that the font size can be changed in the client’s browser to make reading easier. [...]

To date, there has been only one instance of BBC Online actively contributing to the “open source” community – an accessibility tool called BETSIE was developed by BBC Online to enable text within Web pages to be adapted in size to suit the needs of visually-impaired users.

1. Text-only pages not only are not accessible, they’re a form of apartheid. The idea that text-only pages – no matter how presented or by what clever tool – are a form of accessibility is entirely wrong. This is quite the red flag to wave before accessibility advocates.
2. Font properties and colour can be controlled much more finely with stylesheets; you don’t need Betsie.
3. The ability to remove embedded items is of dubious merit, though I can see some applications. But why not make the embedded items accessible?
4. Font-size alteration is only a problem using some kinds of px (pixel) sizing and only in Internet Explorer for Windows. Avoiding the problem on a commercial site is so rudimentary it’s not worth mentioning.

Report of the Independent Review of BBC Online (PDF)

[C]entral New Media defines and manages standards in a range of areas which include… [a]ccessibility standards, such as usability for visually-impaired audiences.

Separately, users and non-users of BBC Online ranked “services for specific client groups” like “people with disabilities” as “important” or “very important” about three-quarters of the time.

Under “content issues”:

…the need for accessible and appropriate services for the elderly, the partially sighted and people with learning difficulties. “…It is therefore of prime importance for the BBC to take full account of the issue of accessibility and to consider for themselves whether the information that they provide is truly accessible by everyone who needs it” – Disabled Living Foundation

Service objectives flowing from social purposes: [S]ervices considered to be of social value, but which the commercial market place is not providing and is unlikely to provide [such as] services for users with disabilities (e.g. Ouch!).

Did the authors know of the existing research?

Apparently not.

The BBC is one of the few organizations anywhere whose Web accessibility has been studied through usability testing with actual disabled subjects.

→ Accessibility study of BBCi: Problems faced by users with disabilities (PDF; previous mention)

The report found, in part, that:

• BBCi was a “medium-compliance site” (but then again, it named Amazon.co.uk as a high-compliance site). Users with all disabilities tested, including deafness, had notable trouble using the site, but total inaccessibility and complete user frustration were rare.
• Text-only versions were ignored. “None of the participants selected the text-only version of the site, despite the fact that some of our participants (those with partial vision and dyslexia) had used an ‘accessible version’ of sites before…. One reason for not selecting the text-only site may have been because they were unaware of this facility…. Many disabled people express a dislike of separate, text-only sites. There is a concern that the text-only site may be out-of-date compared to the main site and it may exclude certain information…. [S]ome disabled people regard it as disempowering because choices are being made on their behalf that result in less information. A frequently-repeated criticism of text-only sites is the dislike of ‘special’ provision, as it is felt to be stigmatizing.”

The current Graf report disregarded the existing research. It’s no surprise the report pretty much ignored accessibility, and, in a self-incriminating touch, presented text-only sites as a claimed accessibility triumph.

Does the BBC know what it is up against?

As mentioned before, the BBC plans to digitize an untold sea of audio and video material and make it available online (if only to British subjects).

We have, as it stands now, a set of accessibility deficiencies with the BBC’s text-and-graphics sites and its relatively uncommon multimedia. Now add thousands of hours of multimedia. Is everyone aware of the enormity of the task of making the entire experience accessible? Do you have any idea what an undertaking is involved in captioning, audio description, and transcription of such clips, let alone configuring thousands of database-generated pages to serve them correctly?

Has accessibility even been considered?

Surmounting politics

BBC Online, with a reputed two million pages, is not a badly-run Web site. In fact, it is widely admired and even I like it much of the time. They do a lot of things right, and I know for a fact that smart people work there. It’s a pretty solid foundation, really.

Except:

The Graf report was politically motivated. It was only commissioned because of private-sector complaints that the public broadcaster was treading on ground the private sector coveted. The CBC hears the same accusations from time to time.

The response has been equally political, as, for example, in shutting down five BBC Web sites. I fear that the response will continue to be driven by superficial and ignorant misunderstandings of the Web – the sort of thing we suffered through in the dot-com era:

Imagine the scenario of a qualified developer attempting to present a really solidly built Web site to a manager who can barely type. All he (or, rarely, she) knows about the Web is that the brighter and more saturated the colours, and the more blinking and flashing, the better. That is his (or, rarely, her) sole method of evaluation. It’s very high-level if it can be said to have a level at all, and it has nothing to do with how real people, with and without disabilities, use the Web. It also ignores relevant expertise, as from usability, standards-compliance, and accessibility authorities.

If BBC Online really needs to be fixed, do so intelligently. Start with users, including users with disabilities. Do no harm to them. This will require an inclusion of usability and accessibility at the ground level rather than trying to tack it on later. We are dealing with a very large task of technical architecture; it’s necessary to build accessibility into the very fabric of the improved site. Doing so may require jettisoning some ideas attractive to non-experts that can’t be made to work, but on the other hand, it ensures that every idea that does work works for everybody who uses the site.

In other words, if this is the set of problems we’re given, let the experts solve them.

Version history

2004.07.06

Posted.

2004.07.15

Title changed (from “BBC Online: You’re in trouble”) because the latter was actually unrepresentative. Thanks to an esteemed colleague on that sceptred isle for yelling at me, which resulted in my realizing that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2004 at 13:22 and is filed under Web accessibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.