Most knowledge workers are likely to write content for web sites or intranets from time to time. Subject experts in every field publish directly online. And all that content has to be accessible, for so many reasons.

Intranet content must also be accessible: staff are citizens too!

Problems, problems. How are these non-technical people going to make their own web content accessible? The decentralised style of web publishing means it’s no longer reasonable to expect the web team to clean up after the writers have written. (If it ever was.)

Well known chicken-and-egg facts about knowledge workers who write web content:

• Content writers are not necessarily adept with technology.
• WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines are written for ICT practitioners, not writers.
• Writers aren’t likely to comply with guidelines they don’t understand.
• But certain accessibility guidelines require writers to understand and follow them: it’s their responsibility.

It’s a vicious circle, an infinite Escher loop, a Gordian knot: reluctant learners thwarted by guidelines that might as well have been written in Klingon, from their point of view.

“Text alternatives are a primary way for making information accessible because they can be rendered through any sensory modality…”

“The human language of each passage or phrase in the content can be programmatically determined except for proper names…”

ICT staff can’t and shouldn’t be responsible for all compliance. And while the current WCAG 2.0 guidelines are easier to understand than WCAG 1.0, the ones that apply to writers need interpreting.

So I guess that’s a job for us. We’ll run a series of blog posts dedicated to this topic, starting next week.

Bethany Cagnol highlights an acronym nightmare attached to international communication. Download her slide show for the full picture.

Most web content in English does need to communicate with people who are not native English speakers. Never mind whether the web site is directed at people living in other countries, because it’s just crazy to assume everyone in the US or UK is a native English speaker.)

So, says Bethany, we need to use a special kind of language: ELF (English as a Lingua Franca).

Oh no! Not Latin! A Latin word for Frankish language? How plain is that?

• ELF , otherwise known as
• EIL (English as an International Language), or
• EILF (English as an International Linga Franca), or
• English as a Global Language, or
• Offshore English, or
• Globish, or
• Panglish, or
• Interlanguage, or
• EIAL (English as an International Auxiliary Language), or
• English for Cross-cultural Communication , or
• EIP (English for International Purposes)…

At last, this is common knowledge: native English speakers cause greater confusion than non-native English speakers.

A Business Spotlight follow-up survey on communication at work (2007) found these bald facts.

Why do you have communication problems in English with native speakers?

• They speak too fast 86.1%
• They use unknown expressions 60.0%
• They use too many idioms 57.4%
• They use difficult words 55.7%
• They don’t speak clearly enough 55.7%
• They have a heavy accent 45.2%
• I can’t make myself understood 15.7%
• They talk too much 13.0%
• They make grammatical mistakes 1.7%

Sobering information. We should take it seriously not only for podcasts or videos but for written web content.

Global English (short version here) is what I called it in 1997. My main concern is figuring out practical ways of fixing the problem. Luckily, it’s not too hard. But in one respect, it’s counter-intuitive.

My main concern it to show you

My message was that native English speakers have to adjust their language if they want to communicate with non-native speakers… who were then called EFL or ESL speakers. (Again, that’s the short version.)

The lineup of speakers for Webstock 2009 was announced last Tuesday night. Impressive and fun: check it out on Webstock’s gorgeous new web site!

As part of this week’s mini-Webstock, Jonathan Mosen updated us on the basics of web content that blind people can access easily. His demo of navigating content without the benefit of sight was riveting. Web Accessibility – Political Correctness, or Smart Design? was his theme.

W3C accessibility guidelines can be daunting, according to Jonathan. Some are out of date, and they’re not all equally important. If you want to know whether a web site is accessible, nothing beats observing a real blind person as they test it. You cannot replicate that expertise just by using a screen reader. So pay them for their expertise, he says.

Jonathan’s favourite web sites include these three, which are extremely easy to use without vision:

• Woolworths
• Radio New Zealand
• Spagalimis Pizza Restaurants

Other snippets from Jonathan:

• Top 3 fixes are alt tags for images, proper coding of headings, and proper use of tables
• PDFs can be accessible (turn on the accessibility flag) but processing a PDF is very slow with screen readers
• Flash can be accessible

Jonathan Mosen’s current activities

Have trouble getting your head around particle physics and particle colliders at CERN? Suffer no more. The wonderful Kate McAlpine reduces the whole story to a hip-hop rap that’s drawn half a million viewers already on YouTube.

Is Kate McAlpine, scientist, a relative of yours, I hear you ask? Yes (but she’s a different Kate McAlpine, scientist).

Hip-hop rapper Kate McAlpine, a 23-year-old Michigan State graduate, calls herself a science communicator. Kate, the world needs you—keep on doing what you do:

I am an adventurer in the realm of ideas, and I have pitched my camp at a crossroads: the intersection of science and writing.

The Large Hadron Rap on YouTube

Three new Arabic scripts work in small sizes and have Roman equivalents — something I find hard to get my head around.

We know English is harder to read onine than on paper. We’re the lucky ones, though. Sure, there are problems forcing the rounded letters of the ABC into pixels, and we’re said to read them 25% more slowly than on paper. Think we’ve got problems? Big deal!
The problems facing those reading and writing web content in Arabic start here:

1. A student interested in mastering the Perso-Arabic writing will need to memorize the convoluted spellings of almost all words, and their complex rules and many exceptions. To master reading and writing in Perso-Arabic takes at least 9 years of dedicated daily practice. Yet, a large percentage of the educated adult population of Iran has difficulty correctly reading the literary works of the great writers and poets such as Golestan and Boustan of Sa’di, Masnavi of Balkhi (aka Rumi), or Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. Another significant percentage of the educated adult population has difficulty reading through a newspaper article without pronunciation errors or writing essays without making spelling mistakes.

Last week I had a 5-day migraine, or maybe that was 6 migraines in 5 days. That’s my annual allowance in a single week.

I tell you not to gain sympathy (oh all right, if you insist) but because it reminded me just how amazing our faculty of sight is. And especially the gift of reading. I bang on about accessibility all the time, but the problems for me personally are largely hypothetical. In real life, I can usually read and write. How marvellous is that?

But last week text splintered into bits and bobs, holes appeared in paragraphs, book pages pulsed with yellow and grey polka dots, staircases and shells and sparkling diamonds competed for my attention, and I could not fixate on more than one word at a time.

And although I am a gun touch typist, errors; ega appearing on mewhave i wort. [Sic: that was a demo.] I couldn’t recognise a typo if it jumped off the screen and bit me; it was just another blur. Moreover, the words I wanted were often just out of — what’s that word — stretch, beach, windsurfer, pie — reach!

Nothing new here, just the duration of that particular brain blitz in the experience of one of the world’s neurologically privileged. A migraine is a small stroke. We don’t like them.

But after my second visit to the GP I came away relieved that this was “only” a migraine. It passed. It got no worse. It’s not eye disease or a brain tumour. Which means this week I revert to reading with ease.

Lucky people like me take sight and reading for granted. Even so, it’s not easy reading on a screen. Computer work is the main cause of a heck of a lot of people’s migraines. I’m fine today, but super-sensitised, I dare say. I can still see glimmering patches of light and shadow on the screen, and those letters are not entirely still. I dare say our clever brains usually edit out these flaws.

When writing web content, have mercy on your readers. Orderliness and white space help us. So does conciseness. So I’ll stop now.

Recently I posted an appeal on Webgrrls for tips on creating a PDF for a blind student, David. The message spread and I received great advice from many sources — thank you, everyone! It’s been interesting, and I’m not through yet.

Background: David needs access to my own book Better Business Writing on the Web, used as a textbook by the Open Polytechnic. I have the original Word file, and fortunately I used styles throughout. Its 286 pages include many screenshots, 13 pages of URLs (many of which will already be obsolete) and an index.

I had a hugely rewarding chat with Luke Smith, a (different) blind student yesterday. As a result, the first thing I’m going to do is check what format David prefers. Perhaps that will be a Word document, not a PDF. That’s just one of many comments that surprised me.

I was surprised to find how many choices a blind student had, and how smart the latest screen readers are. Luke stressed that many of the things he did were personal choices. One example: he leaves documents open and the computer continuously switched on to avoid the 10-minute delay (!) when the screen reader opens a document, and to save his place in a document. Luke uses JAWS 6 or 7.

Fortunately I used styles in the original Word document. Conversion to an accessible PDF could be much more straightforward than I expected.

Strangely, the more Luke spoke, the more reassured I was.

My book is full of screenshots, so I thought I’d have to write long descriptions. But Luke said that JAWS just skips images, and usually they are unnecessary. Indeed, they do always support something textual in a visual form, giving readers two shots at getting the point. This was humbling! It’s funny: I’m a writer, so you’d think I’d prefer eating information in verbal form, but I hunger for those supplementary illustrations. Lucky me, to be able to see them.

For example, I like theJISC TechDis guide, because the document has great screenshots.

Luke also said he personally found bookmarks nothing but a nuisance. And he also made me wary of using hyperlinks for anything but URLs.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and it seems unexpected problems appear regardless. So I’ll have to be responsive to feedback on this specific document.

John E. Brandt recommends Adobe’s videos on the topic, but notes wisely, While the screencasts provide great content, they themselves are not accessible!
Articles on accessibility by Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research