Business Logs

Movable Type Accessibility In Question

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005 by Mike Rundle

Joe Clark, one of the loudest voices in the world in regards to accessibility, has a boombastic writeup on his weblog that discusses how Movable Type is an application that generates content, and should therefore adhere to the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines or ATAG:

A detail of note here: Many browsers comply with most of UAAG, and we have a few thousand sites more or less accurately claiming to comply with WCAG, but nothing whatsoever complies with ATAG, including demo projects created by the W3C itself, like Amaya.

We could sit around and wait for inconsequential and minor products like Amaya to comply, or we could go big right away. Movable Type is pretty big, isn’t it? And aren’t they committed to standards compliance and accessibility, at least on paper?

Joe is referring to the A List Apart interview where Anil discussed TypePad’s concerns for accessibility and web standards. Joe’s point being that content generating tools like Movable Type and TypePad should adhere to the ATAG guidelines because they’d be an amazing example of highly-accessible products. I’d have to agree.

Reader Comments

10 Responses to “Movable Type Accessibility In Question”

Anil Says:

Joe’s got some great points, and we definitely want to get better at our accessibility efforts, but I question his point that we’re not committed, when we are the only web publishing tool vendor with a large presence that’s elected to talk about this *without* being prompted by the accessibility community.

Not to say we shouldn’t be held to our statements of intention, but if you’re going to hold a company’s feet to the fire for having a lot of resources (we’re still a small company, no matter what the impression is) and not doing right by users who need accessible tools, there’s some other places I’d look first. Some examples that pop to mind are Microsoft, for FrontPage and MSN Spaces, or Apple’s .Mac and Blojsom-based tools, or Sun’s Roller, any of which have infinitely more resources than we do, haven’t chosen to raise the issue to their user base, and haven’t even tried to get as far as we have. Don’t punish the people who try to do right, punish those who aren’t even willing to stop doing wrong.

January 11th, 2005 at 8:33 pm

Joe Clark Says:

I think the word you’re looking for is “bombastic,” by the way, unless you’re making a 1980s Dream Warriors reference.

Anyway, yes, we are indeed holding Six Apart to its public statements. I thought the computer-industry maxim was underpromise and overdeliver, not the converse.

As for the competing products? [shrug] They didn’t go around saying standards compliance and accessibility are important. Apple and Sun have people working on accessibility, and Microsoft has an entire department; the problem is getting them to deal with all the various tendrils of the problem (Web standards *and* WCAG *and* ATAG). Six Apart claims to have the first two taken care of. Time to actually deliver on the third.

We need all those tools accessible. We’re picking on Six Apart first because they set themselves up for it.

January 12th, 2005 at 1:20 am

Mike Rundle Says:

I was trying to make a Shaggy “Mr. Boombastic” reference but maybe the allusion ran a bit thin. Anyway… :)

Movable Type is the market leader when it comes to install it yourself weblog software and no one is questioning that. I feel as though MT — or any other industry-leading software — could really put accessibility closer to the front of people’s minds, which is an amazingly positive thing.

Is it Six Apart’s place to take accessibility on at full steam? Not necessarily. Would it be a fantastic example of an accessibility-conscious software company? Hell yeah.

January 12th, 2005 at 1:26 am

Paul Scrivens Says:

I believe one of the issues we have here and is something the majority of us are at fault with is when we build an application we tend to follow these steps:

1. Design
2. Build
3. Try to fit in accessibility if we find the time.

Now I am not saying 6A fits into this mold since I don’t work there, but I do know that this is how a lot of people work. A major concern with any company, especially one with investors, is that they tend to look at only doing stuff if it is cost-effective to them. It’s quite possible that 6A is doing the same thing.

However, credit must be given to the steps that they have taken so far to reach full accessibility. Hopefully though, these are steps to bigger things.

January 12th, 2005 at 11:24 am

Matthew Oliphant Says:

Just some general comments.

The data in this linked post is 6 months old, but I was at a presentation on the Business Benefits of Designing for Usability at the UPA conference last year.

Seeing some of the issues brought up here reminded me of that post I wrote. And one of the data points in the post, “90% of the world’s blind population live in developing countries,” made me think of the keynote presentation by Tony Salvador, in which he made the point (which I am paraphrasing) that just because they live in a developing country doesn’t mean they don’t have access to computers. They just tend to use computers differently.

Now if you look at MT, in this example, as not blogging software, but a web site management tool… well who who doesn’t need that! :)

Designing things to be usable (and I include accessible in that) can also be about managing emerging markets.

On a related note, that emerging market China has some blog happenings going on this week. What is the MT and TypePad penetration of that market?

January 12th, 2005 at 3:11 pm

Joshua Porter Says:

This attack against Six Apart is a bit much. First off, Joe seems to be setting the goal for accessibility compliance (including ATAG and UAAG) and then holding Anil to public comments he made that were in reference to other guidelines (XHTML and CSS). Even if their private conversations were about these other guidelines, it doesn’t seem fair.

Second, though I agree that both sites and authoring tools should be accessible, it rarely enough to lobby for something simply because “it’s the right thing to do”. I do appreciate Joe’s comment that “Lousy code and poor accessibility are bad for business”, but I ask: where’s the proof? Is Six Apart losing business because their authoring tool doesn’t validate against ATAG standards? Proving that would be a great way to lobby Six Apart!

Also, accessibility is only partly about following certain guidelines to the letter. Guidelines, in general, are only helpful if you don’t understand the context people are using your tool/site/content in. If you understand the context of use, then you know enough to use guidelines at your own discretion. I’m not suggesting that Six Apart is doing this, but what if their customers happen to be more concerned with, say, an easier installation process?

January 13th, 2005 at 10:36 am

Matthew Oliphant Says:

Second, though I agree that both sites and authoring tools should be accessible, it rarely enough to lobby for something simply because “it’s the right thing to do”. I do appreciate Joe’s comment that “Lousy code and poor accessibility are bad for business”, but I ask: where’s the proof?

Even though my comment above was just general commenting, it was in part to speak to why worry about accessibility.

It is not proof that I offered, but a way to think about accessibility beyond just being the right thing to do for people, but as the right thing to do to expand the market.

But the market is made up of people, so…

January 13th, 2005 at 10:42 am

Joe Clark Says:

Joe seems to be setting the goal for accessibility compliance (including ATAG and UAAG)

No, just ATAG. Six Apart isn’t making a browser.

and then holding Anil to public comments he made that were in reference to other guidelines (XHTML and CSS). Even if their private conversations were about these other guidelines, it doesn’t seem fair.

i.e., don’t hold them to what they say. Even Anil Dash responded that we could and should. In any event, Anil’s interview stated, “[W]e want our pages to be valid so that they’re accessible to the largest possible audience. And we want that broadness of accessibility to be a motivator for people to do justice to the breadth of their audience in terms of the quality of the ideas they express using our tools.”

Great. What if you can’t use the tool?

Web content is merely part of the accessibility question. Six Apart set itself up as a standard-bearer for compliance and accessibility in blogging software. They are, however, notably behind in delivering.

Is Six Apart losing business because their authoring tool doesn’t validate against ATAG standards? Proving that would be a great way to lobby Six Apart!

I don’t know how you’d prove that in any walk of life. If you make an inaccessible business accessible, you cannot make the claim that the difference between before- and after-period sales represents the true business cost of the previous inaccessibility. All you will have done is provide the viable option for a person with a disability to use the business, not a guarantee or a requirement.

The business benefits of accessibility (analogous with race or sex discrimination) can only be assessed in the aggregate. You could do a reasonable before/after study of an entire business sector, for example, but then you’d still be stuck with the task of dealing with confounding factors, like expansion and contraction of that industry as a whole.

In short, no, neither you nor I nor Six Apart nor anybody else could prove that they’re losing business. It does, however, stand to reason: If they can’t use your product, they won’t buy it.

If you understand the context of use, then you know enough to use guidelines at your own discretion. I’m not suggesting that Six Apart is doing this, but what if their customers happen to be more concerned with, say, an easier installation process?

I don’t see how this is a zero-sum argument. Movable Type isn’t a hobbyist project; they’ve got staff. They can give us a better installer and ATAG compliance (and an accessible installer, for that matter).

January 13th, 2005 at 2:07 pm

Joshua Porter Says:

We agree on the difficulties of proving the business case for accessibility, and though I don’t think it is fair that you’re publicly calling “bullshit” on Six Apart for their failure to comply with ATAG guidelines (when the ALA article mentions ATAG zero times), I understand your argument.

However, I don’t agree that any piece of software ever goes from being “inaccessible” to “accessible” the moment it complies with a set of guidelines (your comment “what if you can’t use the tool?” seemed to suggest as much). From my experience accessibility is a spectrum, not an either/or.

An example of what I’m talking about is language. Couldn’t one argue that to be truly accessible, all web sites should be delivered in all languages? Wouldn’t this be much more far-reaching than meeting any set of accessibility guidelines that we currently have? I would argue yes. However, this is a point on the spectrum of accessibility that is neither practical nor economical for most companies.

Every company has to decide at what point on the spectrum their product will sit. As we mentioned, proving that a tool/site should comply with a certain set of guidelines (only a certain set because there will always be more guidelines!) from a business perspective is difficult. So that leaves the company with two choices: either comply simply for the sake of it or to make a judgment about how people are using the product and comply with a level they deem appropriate. You point out that Six Apart is not taking the first route of full compliance. My suggestion is that perhaps Six Apart is seeing the use of their product in a different way than you are.

Or, maybe that’s giving them too much credit and they’re taking the other route you offered: they’re simply lazy. But from my experience with them and their products I doubt it.

January 14th, 2005 at 5:58 am