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Web Inclusion

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[Brief synopsis of 1-2 sentences]

Contacts

Page author(s): Simon Harper

Other contact(s): Máté Pataki

Keywords

Inclusion, Developing Regions, Internationalization, Low Income.

Description

I think we are moving past accessibility and into the realm of exclusion, indeed, I'd suggest accessibility is bigger then we may think and would include - combinatorial disability, Illiteracy, Developing Regions, Social Exclusion and low Income, and Situational Impairments. If this is the case then we need to start addressing these areas directly as opposed to focusing on the areas which we see more as our 'home turf'; but where to start, what to include, and where to go?

Background

WCAG 2.0 is only concerned with people who are disabled. But there are a lot of people who have the same difficulties accessing the pages as disabled people but we don't consider them disabled. Here is a list - just examples - what I (Máté) would also consider accessibility problem:

  • using a mobile phone's display, or ATM machine in daylight
  • using different screen sizes (very small-very large)
  • using an old computer, operating system and/or browser
  • accesses a page written in a foreign language, even if the user speaks it quite well
  • accesses an automatically translated page (for example in chrome browser)
  • writing style, grammatical and spelling errors also make a page harder to read
  • internationalization is also an important issue (date format, clothes sizes, units, writing names, encoding...)
  • some data which are often missing from pages, and could make it easier to understand: time of creation, last modified, intended audience, region/country it concerns
  • accessibility errors on the webserver side: page 404 returns code 400, mime types are not set correctly (for example for PDF), character encoding differs in file and header, there are too many redirects (Iphone doesn't like it for example)
  • Text selection does not work on the page (to quickly invert color or mark a place), to search for a term in search engine, or on a map, to call a number...

Discussion

  • Are we at a point where we are moving past accessibility and into inclusion / exclusion / or barriers?
  • Is it useful to still talk of accessibility and if not what should we be talking about?

References

[References to related works and activities]

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