Making accessibility accessible

Abstract

In recent years, the need for adaptive design in\ninformation systems has come to the fore. Both\nindustry and academia have begun to respond\nto these problems. There now exist recognised\nbaseline standards for content accessibility and assistive technologies (ATs) are available on many\nplatforms. Many exemplary research projects have\nfound powerful and sometimes highly adaptive solutions to a range of accessibility problems.\nHowever, there are signicant difficulties with the\ncurrent state of accessibility as a whole. For current\nATs to be of most use, there is a responsibility on\nthe user to be aware of their access limitations and\nimplement the most appropriate accessibility solution for these needs- indeed, many accessible design\nguidelines for ICT developers are predicated on the\nuser having the most appropriate access solution for\ntheir needs. However, it cannot be assumed that a\nuser will have the most appropriate access technology, or even be aware that they need one, given the\ngradual rate of acquisition of an impairment, the\ndynamic nature of the impact of the impairment,\nor-more likely-impairments, allied with a lack of\nawareness of available technical solutions.\nOther issues include: content and software developers seeing accessibility as a niche and, therefore, prohibitively expensive to implement given the\nexpected gain in market share. Also, most research\nprojects- though providing technically adept solutions to these problems- may not be possible for developers to use due to the wide variety of technical\nrequirements of these disparate solutions. In this\npaper, we discuss these problems in the context of\ncurrent literature and make high-level proposals as\nto how these problems may be addressed.

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