Australian government sites were mandated to conform to at least single 'A' level of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) standards, by the end of 2001, seen as best practice in Australia (Sampson-Wild and Burmeister, 2001). Yet the recent call for tenders to audit compliance of government sites, which closed 20th June this year (Innes, 2002), is likely to find very few government sites complying with these standards. The following case assumes your organisation was the successful tenderer ...
Your client is a local government agency. You have been asked to develop an accessibility assurance strategy as part of a preliminary contract. You are keen to pick up the contract to build whatever you convince the government to do about accessibility testing, so you are wondering what to recommend. You realise that the agency wants to be told that its materials are accessible, rather than the converse, so you are wondering how high to set the bar for accessibility. You know there are automatic checks available for all the 508 requirements. You could not afford to offer to do all the manual checks required by the WCAG and anyway, suspect the agency's materials would not look good if tested by WCAG.
Like the earlier case, this one has multiple facets with no easy resolution. Recent scandals in the US have involved large accounting firm practices where auditors also have consulting roles, creating a conflict of interest that has caused various now well-publicised problems. Such conflicts are not peculiar to accounting, as is seen in this case.
As mentioned above, one use of scenario design is to explore the domain knowledge of participants. Both cases above involve the government. This was a deliberate, because it raises questions about the applicability of legislation concerning accessibility. Also, in the 2nd
case, are legal implications which can either be teased out by a facilitator or left to arise naturally in discussion by participants querying 'WCAG' or '508'. Thus, there is the possibility to discuss the boundaries between legal and ethical considerations. More is made of this point below.
The technique began in a student context, but to be more suitable for professionals, it should be extended. IT work today brings together people from different disciplines. This is especially common in complex systems design, typical when building web sites. The multi-disciplinary requirements of professionals might better be met with some additional modifications.
Q Who is affected?
There are some situations in which, in addition to asking 'who' is affected, it may also be appropriate to ask how the 'environment' is affected. Further, this need not be limited to the 'environment' outdoors, but could also refer to workplace culture, the connectedness of a community, or other situational circumstances. As stated above, it is significant the government is mentioned as the use of government funding or publication by the government may change the potential liability of the developers and publishers.
Another environmental consideration in Case 1 involves small rural schools that cannot afford specialist teachers, given their small class sizes. In that case, other kinds of accessibility considerations come to the fore, especially in terms of telecommunications access. Low bandwidth might have implications in Case 1 on the type of multimedia design. For instance, high-quality images, ideal for high-speed transmission, might not be appropriate. If a rural student is also disabled, then that further complicates the issues. One frequently employed multimedia technique involves the use of 'chat' environments, yet rural students with disabilities would possibly be totally excluded from participation in such class activities.
Q What can be done about it? - What options are there?
This question could be extended to include the following three sub-questions:
I. What would be 'the right thing' to do?
II. Who/what suffers if you do not do the right thing?
III. What additional costs will be incurred if you do the right thing?