The true reason to design for accessibility is greed. Quite simply, I want it all, and so should you. Give us everything you’ve got. Give us everything there is to give.
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Designers assume accessibility means a boring site, a myth borne out by oldschool accessibility advocates, whose hostility to visual appeal is barely suppressed. Neither camp has its head screwed on right. It’s not either–or; it’s both–and.
I want nothing less than spectacular graphic design, intelligent, well-tested usability, high-calibre writing with typography to match, top-flight photography and illustration, and resolute cleverness. I want standards compliance, with old, incompatible browsers left to die on the ice floes.
And while all this is happening, I want the highest practicable accessibility standards. I brook no compromises. Why should you?
I’ll tell you where all this comes from. I respond strongly to visual stimuli and to words, an unusual combination. If you’ve read Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Basic Books, 1983), you’ll be familiar with the idea that the human brain fires on a number of different cylinders, as it were, which explains why kids who are good in gym class are often lousy in math. Now, in my case the faculties are asymmetrical: I can write but I can’t draw. Yet both words and pictures speak to me.
I go back over twenty years in accessibility, dating from a prophetic night at age 13 when I stumbled upon an open-captioned television program, The Captioned ABC News. Curiosity immediately took root about this newscast, with its heavily-edited visible words partially duplicating the news anchor’s delivery. One detail grew significant: Why did the W in the captioning typeface stand higher than the other lower-case letters, and why were the quotation marks two little dots? Posing those questions to the actual captioners led me to discover typography and graphic design, which I have obsessed over, written about, and practiced ever since
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