No session on accessibility, though.

No session directly about accessibility, anyway. Which is weird, given the dedication to accessibility usually witnessed amongst standards-committed website-makers. Or maybe not. AEA is, after all, based on the premise that standards = good, and for many, standards = accessibility. Look at thenetawards.com description of their category ‘standards champion’ – ‘This gong will be awarded to a site, individual or organisation promoting accessible design in 2009’. It’s true, standards and accessibility do go hand-in-hand, clutching each other tightly, but they’re not the same. Adherence to standards doesn’t guarantee accessibility.

So perhaps the absence of a session devoted specifically to accessibility at AEA is compensated for by its spoken and unspoken presence in (almost all) sessions. This was notable in Dan Cederholm’s talk on ‘Progressive Enrichment with CSS3’. Cederholm demonstrated some unbelievably amazing things that can be achieved with ever-so simple CSS3 in some browsers – transitions, re-sizing, movement and more. But he preceded his talk by saying, more or less, ‘none of this matters – and that’s why it’s OK to do it’. In other words, the fact that these effects can only be viewed in certain browsers, or not at all if CSS is disabled, doesn’t get in the way of what really matters – the content. Make content usable and accessible, and then add bells and whistles. In fact, from an intellectual disability perspective, the bells and whistles might make content more accessible.

Eric Meyer couldn’t avoid the accessibility question in his talk ‘JavaScript will save us all’. What if you haven’t got JavaScript? But again, he was talking about using it for progressive enhancement, not for core content. And again, what he was talking about might make content more, not less, accessible for people with intellectual disabilities.

What was really interesting in Eric’s talk was the call – in something of an aside – for a Web Accessibility Project, along the lines of the Web Standards Project. It makes sense. Many web designers complain that the WCAG guidance is complex to understand and implement (see this blog and our ‘core findings’ page). So evangelical translators are needed. Individuals are already doing this, but banding together under the label of the Web Accessibility Project might add impact.

So accessibility was there at AEA, albeit discretely. But accessibility for people with intellectual disabilities was, as ever, absent.