2009: British Accessibility Standards - PAS-78 to BS8878

Jonathan Hassell Acting Chair, BSi IST/45 European Accessibility Summit, Frankfurt am Main 27 th March 2009 British Accessibility Standards - PAS-78 to BS8878

What are the British doing and why?
why did we need a British Standard?
because we have British law around accessibility
and not just for public-sector websites, all sites…
in 2005, research by the British Disability Rights Commission revealed sites weren ’ t doing well
and no existing standards made it easy enough for site owners to know what to do
so the DRC commissioned BSi to create PAS-78 to try and help

Aims of PAS-78
to give a guide to the whole process of commissioning, producing and maintaining a website from a site owner ’ s point of view
to not replace other standards , but to provide a non-technical person ’ s guide to how those standards should be used to help ensure a development project results in an accessible product
it focuses on, advising site owners on:
a quick background in disabled people ’ s use of the web ;
how to create an accessibility policy for the creation of their site
what to look for if they are contracting the work out to a supplier
how to choose technologies to uphold that policy (making much reference to WAI)
how to test the resulting site against that policy – are best-efforts enough cf guidelines, or does it actually have to work with users?

Drivers to bring PAS-78 up to date…
Web 2.0 ’ s much wider purposes for websites, including:
the move from informative web content to:
web as tools ( “ Software as a Service ” )
web as rich/media-media entertainment (games, IPTV, eLearning etc.)
the move from Provider-Produced content to User-Generated content (blogs, Facebook etc.)
the increasing use of non-W3C technologies
the use of “ off the shelf ” tools rather than bespoke development

BS8878 – progress and debate
work began early 2008
a first draft was created by end Nov 2008 (before WCAG 2 was confirmed)
NB. the final version is very likely to use WCAG 2 as the base of its technical guidelines
there were some things which were maybe a bit premature in the first draft
however, the comments on the draft have been very illuminating on its future direction
many of the comments completely disagree with each other on many fundamental issues
it ’ s already obvious that our standard, like many out there, cannot please everyone
but, from these comments, we know what issues it must cover

The big issues BS8878 will cover
whether accessibility is about disabled people or more than that
are we talking about accessibility to users, devices or browsers?
if users: whether we are aiming for “ access for all ” , access for targeted groups of disabled users, or should include the needs of elderly people
whether the level of access to aim for should be accessibility, usability, or even user-experience
whether the standard should dictate a level of conformance …
or be a best practice guide stating a number of levels which could be aimed for and the implications of selecting each level
what the best way of testing is: how well automated or manual checklist testing based on a standard (like WCAG 2), or task-based user testing with disabled people, can capture barriers for disabled people
how to avoid being too constraining about technology use
when we should encourage best practice in interfacing with assistive technologies and when to encourage sites to provide accessibility features or preferences themselves (personalisation)
how much to include guidance on authoring tools (cf. ATAG)

e: jonathan@hassellinclusion.com t: @jonhassell w: www.hassellinclusion.com Contact me

2009: British Accessibility Standards - PAS-78 to BS8878

by Jonathan Hassell

Accessibility

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2009: British Accessibility Standards - PAS-78 to BS8878 Presentation Transcript