Accessibility matters

Accessibility is important. But we seem to keep forgetting about it.

I am part of the world’s first generation of Internet-first adults. My generation grew up as the Internet developed, and we’ve never known a world without access to so much information. I’m a little older to be a post-Google, post-floppy, post-fax person, but those things certainly didn’t last long in my life.

Consider all the progress that the Internet has brought us: the near-instantenous global postal system known as email; the world’s largest reference librarian, Google; the plethora of Internet-dependent mobile apps, which conjoined our greatest hardware invention, the smartphone, with our greatest communication network to produce wonders like the augmented reality game Pokémon Go.

I’m know I’m skipping over some of the terrible stuff about the Internet to make my point, but I do think the point is still true: The Internet has enabled some truly amazing things.

What pains me, then, is how I’ve increasingly begun to realize that the wonders of the Internet are not accessible to everyone.

This has been known for a while, and the cause has been championed by many people both on and off the Internet long before I got here. But I hope I can still add my voice to the chorus: There’s an entire group of people who struggle to enjoy the wonders of the Internet because it’s been made inaccessible to them.

It’s a touching story, but I got worried after I noticed that the text I was reading were within the images, not specially-styled text in HTML; an examination of the source code confirmed my suspicions. There were no alt tags and no text within the article body — just picture, picture, picture, picture, bam: “Angie Wang is a Los Angeles-based illustrator, animator, and game developer.”

The story was beautiful and touching to me, an able-bodied man navigating the Internet with a standard screen, mouse and keyboard — but if you’re trying to read that Eater article with a screen reader, I doubt you’ll even know where the author first had the elusive water boiled fish.

I’m sorry to pick on Angie Wang and Eater, considering this isn’t a problem just limited to them or to Eater’s owner, Vox Media. The lack of accessibility thinking is chronic across much of the Internet. Sometimes, it just seems like Internet creators can’t be bothered, but other times they’re downright ignorant, such as using closed captioning on YouTube as a place to insert in-joke and failing to recognize that closed captioning is essential to people who can’t hear your video — which could be because they’re a little deaf, or it might be because they’re on the quiet car and need to keep the volume muted.

These are not just unfortunate accidents. The inaccessibility of great web content, like the Eater article, is the result of deliberate decisions on the part of the content’s creators and Internet publishers. Whether it was conscious or not, the decision to publish this story as a series of pictures means they’ve chosen to exclude a group of their potential readers on the basis of their ability (or disability) status.

And you wonder why I think diversity in journalism is so important.

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