In this keynote transcript, Sandi Wassmer discusses the importance of an inclusive and accessible web. She argues that true accessibility requires interoperability - agreement on open standards so that all people can access information and achieve their goals online regardless of ability or device. She outlines responsibilities for inclusive design, noting that everyone involved in building the web, including browser vendors, content creators, and tool developers, must work to agree on standards and prioritize inclusion. Her "10 Principles of Inclusive Web Design" provide guidance for creating equitable user experiences through a user-centered design process from the beginning of any project.

1. e- access 11: Sandi Wassmer Keynote Transcript
eAccessibility and the Inclusive Web
Slide 1: Welcome
Firstly, I'd like to thank the Minister (Ed Vaizey) for his informative introduction and also for
his ongoing support and commitment to Accessibility. I think we now have a Government
that is taking Accessibility and social inclusion quite seriously. It's wonderful to hear we're
getting joined up thinking. I'm pleased about the fact that the digital inclusion strategy is
now in Cabinet Office and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.
Slide 2: Frank Lloyd Wright
I'm starting here with a quote from someone who gives me inspiration regularly, Frank
Lloyd Wright. For the other visually impaired people in the audience, I will recite the quote.
I promise not to read every single slide, but this is a very important theme and I want to
plant the thought in people's minds for the day.
"All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable."
You can replace architectural with internet or technology or any such term, because what's
most important are human values. Although we're here to talk about technology,
eAccessibility and policy, we're also here to talk about people, the way people interact with
technology and the ability for people to achieve their goals and to be part of an inclusive
society using technology. I think it's really important that we all remember why we're here
and what the goal is.
Slide 3: Open & Inclusive
This is a statement that I make fairly regularly. The world wide web - not the internet, there
is a difference - the web is ultimately websites, web applications and the all important
content, and the internet is the network infrastructure.
(Note: Sandi gesticulates and hits lectern) I knew I was going to do that. Sorry. That's
what generally happens when you're blind.
(Continues) So, the world wide web was developed to be open and inclusive. The reason
I'm saying this now is that I'm concerned that it's not going to be so. When I say that it's
open and inclusive, by open I mean free to use and available to everyone, and by inclusive
I mean that it includes all members of society. In order to achieve this, we need to be
ensuring we use Open Standards and that we think about inclusion when we design.
When we say that the world wide web is meant to be open and inclusive, the key is
access. I think that we do tend to obsess a little bit about technology these days and
concern ourselves with the technology being accessible, which is important, but what's
fundamental is that people can access information and that they can access and use the
things they need, so that they can participate in a civil society. Sometimes I worry that we
want everything to be accessible, which isn't always possible, particularly the way
technology is now. So we need to take a bit of a step back and think about everyone in
society being able to achieve their goals on the internet. I'm less concerned if I go to a
website and my goal is to purchase something, if ancillary video content does not have
audio description, but if has a transcript that I can read at a later date, I'm not that
bothered because the most important thing is that i can access the core content and that I
can achieve my goal on the website. I think we worry about everything being accessible
and need to remember that access and use are the goals. If these more fundamental
things aren't happening, I'd rather not have access to the video if it doesn't have an impact
on making my purchase. I think we need to focus on what the goals are, what we're trying
to achieve and what the purpose of the website is. It's about achieving your goals and
getting access to the information and services you need.

2. Slide 4: Open Standards
So, there are two things that will make an open and inclusive web. The first being Open
Standards; when we talk about Open Standards, on the Internet, there is a slight deviation,
which is that there is one standard that we use that is not open but it's free to use -
JavaScript. When we talk about Open Standards on the internet, or Web Standards, we're
primarily talking about HTML, CSS and JavaScript for now. And so for the purposes of
this presentation, I will refer to Open and Web Standards interchangeably.
The key to Open Standards to me is not only the fact that the standards are royalty free,
unlike closed standards. I come from a film and television background where Intellectual
Property (IP) was everything, so I like the fact that with Open Standards anyone can use
them. Open Standards in IT are like Creative Commons. It's a very different way of
thinking if you come from traditional media or IT because you're used to thinking "That's
my IP. I have to protect it so I can sell it to everyone." IP is the commodity in the traditional
model, whereas here the idea is that knowledge is free and to be shared, where skill and
talent are abilities and that's what you're paid for. The concept of Open Standards
underpins an open and inclusive web.
Open Standards encourage all sorts of great things, lots of innovation, collaboration and
thinking, open data, open source. Thinking this way inspires open minds. It's how we need
to be to move forward. To have an inclusive society, we have to be open and appreciative
and understanding of the differences of all people. I really like Open Standards.
Slide 5: Inclusive Design
The second thing is Inclusive Design. I talk about Inclusive Design over Accessibility
because Accessibility is an inherent part of it: It's the blood that runs through the veins of
Inclusive Design. When you design for inclusion you think about everyone.
Accessibility is a fundamental human right for everyone. And Inclusive Design is -
(Note: Sandi hits lectern again) Sorry. Step away from that thing.
(Continues) Inclusive Design fosters all sorts of innovation and furthers inclusive
environments, technology, education and ultimately advances inclusive society.
So, this is all great in theory, but.
Slide 6: Technology
In practice, where we are now is that mainstream technology isn't inclusive, isn't
accessible, isn't usable. Mainstream technology is generally good for some people and not
for others. We talk a lot about Accessibility for disabled or older people and I talk about
Accessibility being a fundamental human right for everyone.
Accessibility is ostensibly free for 80 percent of the people. Accessibility just comes out of
the box for them. The 80 percent of people who don't have disabilities or don't have the
natural signs of ageing that just happen and aren't necessarily labelled as disabilities - You
start to lose hearing like I have or your eyesight degenerates. When most people think
about Accessibility, it's about the 20 percent. We focus on the 20 percent of people with
disabilities, but ultimately, again, which is why I talk about Inclusion, is that Accessibility is
for everybody. The reason why - and for the visually impaired people in the audience - I've
highlighted the word Interoperability. In my opinion Interoperability is the key problem. Not
Accessibility.
Slide 7: Interoperability
I say that Interoperability is everything. Why? Because Accessibility can't survive without it.
If we can't agree on what the basis of the web is supposed to be, then we're not going to
connect and communicate with each other.

3. It's a technical term generally used in IT. It's about having disparate and diverse devices
that all communicate with each other and all have a commonality, where they have shared
values and common goals. In this instance these are Web Standards and Accessibility.
So, the principles at the core of Interoperability are Inclusive Design. The idea being that
the web would have Open Standards and Accessibility as its foundation and everyone
would agree on the part they play. Everyone says that's absolutely what we need to do,
but it isn't happening. All of the people involved in creating the world wide web are
connected to each other, and must work together for the web to be interoperable.
To use a non technical way of explaining it, a postage stamp is interoperable. We have a
system that everyone agrees upon around the world.
The stamp makes sure your letter gets from here to where it's going. It's a system which is
different in each country but it is interoperable on a global scale. I hope this illustrates
interoperable in more simple terms.
Slide 8: Interchangeable
When I think about Interoperability and Inclusive Design, I wish they were interchangeable,
but they're not. They're completely different things, but they really do sit together.
Without Interoperability, Inclusive Design will fail. If everyone doesn't agree on the
commonality of the web, we can design inclusively all we want, but if I have one device
that does one thing and you have another that does something different, if we don't
achieve Interoperability, we won't be able to connect. We all need to agree on what we
want the web to be. And vice versa - without Inclusive Design, Interoperability is
meaningless if we want the web to be accessible to all. If we have Interoperability - if we
all agree on standards and yet we don't design for inclusion, then Interoperability doesn't
matter. Interoperability in itself isn't the answer but it's a start.
Slide 9: The 10 Principles of Inclusive Web Design
The Minister referred to The 10 Principles of Inclusive Web Design that were recently
launched on the DCMS website. These are derived from principles that I completely
pilfered from architecture. They were 7 principles originally. The background to the 10
principles is that we use them as part of our processes at Copious, the web design agency
I run. I wanted to find a way of working, where we considered Accessibility from the
beginning. At the time I developed the original 7 we were building
websites with Accessibility built in from the ground up, we understood technically and
functionally how to make sites accessible, we followed the WCAG and used alt text, labels
associated with forms, proper header nesting, semantic structure - all of the things we
know how to do to make websites accessible from a technical point of view but what
happened was that we were doing all these things, building technically accessible sites,
but we were testing them with users at the end of the build. We were finding out about real
world Accessibility and Usability issues too late and this didn't work. We learned a lot from
these users and I wanted to include them from the start.
From architecture I found the 7 principles of Inclusive Design on the CABE website, which
led me to the Royal institute of British Architects and found RIBA's Work Stages
documentation. I saw that each project had an Accessibility Champion from the start of
each project who remained throughout to ensure the project stayed on track. I liked this
and adopted both the 7 principles and the RIBA work stages and adapted them for the
web.
We decided we were going to have a panel of user experts working with us throughout
each project. At the beginning of the project, our pan-ability panel, as I like to refer to them
- some have disabilities, some don't, some want to use a mobile phone, others bring their
laptops. We have different people, different devices, different abilities and so on.
We usually start with research - surveys, focus groups. We get to understand users'
needs. They look at what we're scoping and say that's rubbish. Kick that out. We then
develop a prototype and test it with them. We find out that some assumptions we made

4. were wrong and chop and change features until we get the core functionality and user
experience right. We finally build the website and our panel tests features as we go along.
At the end we do final Accessibility and Usability testing and sit around scratching our
heads because at this point the website is what it needs to be.
I don't know where he is, but I have with me today someone that everybody should talk to.
Jason Bell, who is the digital media manager at Action for Blind People. He's been through
the process and the evolution of the principles because they eventually became 10 during
two projects we worked on together, the Action for Blind People and Vision Hotels
websites.
The 7 principles are contained in the Government's eAccessibility Action Plan, which I co-
authored. And so the 10 principles will now replace the 7 in the plan.
And they are not something that I wrote as theory. They've evolved over time and are for
anyone designing websites and by design I mean this in its broadest sense, as in product
design. Websites are products that people interact with. I think the principles are very
useful. They're practical. They're not technical. You'll find you really think about what
you're creating, whether you're developing a website or writing policy, whether you're a
web design agency or a brand. I think if everyone starts thinking about them, not as ideals
but as guidance, it will make a real difference. The ultimate objective of Inclusive Design is
to have different user experiences that have equally valuable outcomes. I know the
Minister talked about equivalence of service earlier and it's an essential component.
Everyone approaches things differently: We're not all going to do things the same way.
There isn't a one size fits all on the internet. We have different devices, different abilities.
We're just going to do things differently. We want to cater for these diverse user
experiences.
Slide 10: Interoperability
So, how do we do it? We make the web interoperable. If everyone involved in making the
web a whole agrees on what the web is, what it should be and we all agree on what roles
we play in making it so, then it's simple.
If we have Interoperability, then we have access device neutrality - it doesn't matter what
your device is.
It we have device independence, then users will have choice. If we build on Open
Standards, we are allowing anyone and everyone to contribute. It means there will be a
much more open and free market. We will not have a situation like we do in mainstream
IT, where there is Post Facto Interoperability, with the market being dominated by one
player. People who are interested in developing open source technologies will be able to
do so alongside others working with closed source and proprietary technologies. As long
as everything works together. This leads to a much better, more competitive marketplace. I
think that will lead to a lot more innovation.
Slide 11: Responsible
So, who is responsible for Accessibility and Interoperability? Everyone. Everyone who is
involved in building the web is responsible.
Slide 12: Everyone
Who is everyone? Well, for the visually impaired people, I'm sorry, but I cannot explain this
slide. It's taken me forever to put this together in a visual form, in a way that explains it to
sighted people. Although the web is quite complex, what I tried to do is to explain that what
happens on the web is simple - people want to access content. That's what they need to
achieve.
How do they do this? To start, they have different devices. Some of these devices can be
phones, assistive technologies that hook into other devices like Braille readers, pointing
devices, switches. Ultimately, the devices can work with each other. They're interoperable
as they should be. These devices have their operating systems. Then they have different

5. software - whatever it is that helps you perform your tasks. Some might be assistive
technologies. These rely on what's called an Accessibility API, which is something that
says to the operating system or browser, "I have a piece of assistive technology here that
wants to talk to you." It's the hook. It's the intermediary between these technologies. I said
it was complicated.
For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to stick to the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) and it's Accessibility arm, the Web Accessibility initiative (WAI) terminology, as this
is the home of the Open Standards and Accessibility Guidelines that govern the web
industry.
You are probably familiar with the WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which
are primarily for web designers and developers to follow, but there are also two other sets
of Guidelines - the ATAG, Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, which are for authoring
tool creators to work to, and the UAAG, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines, which are for
user agent vendors to use.
User agents refer to software that renders web content, of which browsers are the most
well known, but there are also media players, plugins, as well as browser add-ons and
extensions. This also includes Assistive Technology, and although technically this is where
they belong, when it comes to discussions about Accessibility amongst the disability
community, AT is seen as a separate thing entirely.
Authoring tools refer to software used to create web content, such as Content
Management Systems, Blogs and Social Media.
Although the WCAG is being used by those who are interested in Accessibility, the UAAG
and ATAG have not been adopted. People don't really care about them as it is a case of
market forces. To me, this is really what needs to be resolved before we can have an
inclusive web.
I'm going to pick on the browser vendors now. Where I'm at at the moment in my thinking
about Accessibility and Interoperability is that the browser vendors are the gate keepers.
The browser is ultimately the window to content. It's up to browsers as to whether they're
going to allow the delivery of accessible content. It's also about how content is created, of
course. And it's also down to the other user agents to make sure they're accessible, but all
user agents ultimately deliver content to people through a browser.
At the moment, I'm sure everyone has heard of HTML5. I realise that it's being heralded as
the Messiah of the internet, which it is not, but it does offer a really great opportunity to
build Accessibility into its core, into the specification. There are some amazing people
working very hard to make this happen. There are also people who aren't, which is
frustrating. There is a lot of discussion going on in the WHATWG, W3 and the Accessibility
community at large. Hopefully we'll win.
But for now, Accessibility comes down to the technology that we use to build websites and
to create web content. Many web designers and developers use authoring tools, which
they invariably manipulate. Accessibility does not come out of the box and so we create
workarounds. Some people hand code HTML and CSS, some hand code JavaScript and
some use code libraries like jQuery.
We have to know what tools are best and how browsers render the content we create and
how assistive technology consumes this content. We need to know how to modify media
players so that screen reader and keyboard only users can access them. We need to
accommodate all of these things and it is not always possible. But with HTML5, we have a
really good opportunity to build-in and not bolt-on Accessibility. I think that providing
accessible no-brainers within the HTML5 spec just makes sense. I'd be happy if they do
that.
That hopefully explains where we are and why right now we can work hard to do the best
we can. The issues, however, are far greater than Government. Government can put

6. policy in place which is really important, but will not solve the problem. Of course, we all
want to work towards an inclusive society, but the real responsibility lies with the web
industry. If user agents and authoring tools aren't accessible, we can only manipulate them
and try to make them as accessible as possible. If browsers don't want to display what
we've done, we're not necessarily going to be able to deliver an accessible web. So, all
these things need to work together.
Slide 13: Standards
I'm not suggesting, by any stretch, not to do our best to build accessible websites. What
we need to do now is make sure that we use the current specifications and guidelines,
standards and best practices, because these things are the tools we have now. We know
how to build accessible websites. If we have the tools and resources, whether that be
human or financial, and we have the ability to build accessible websites, it's our
responsibility to do so.
But we need to think about everyone and not just disabled or older people. We need to be
thinking about universality, inclusion, innovation. We need to be creating websites that are
user centred, beautiful, engaging and accessible.
Slide 14: Humans
So, I've finished with another quote. I do like my quotes. I wanted to bring us back to the
reason why we're here.
"Human rights are moral principles which apply equally to all human beings, without qualification."
This is a quote from one of the world's leading social anthropologists, Dr Evelyn Kallen.
She was one of the first academics to conceptualise human rights in the context of
diversity. She outlined the processes through which stigmatised minorities are socially
constructed and the social, psychological and institutional means through which we can
eradicate the stigma. She pioneered our current understanding of human rights. And I am
lucky that she inspires me every day, because she's my mother.
This quote is really important for us to understand, because we cannot look to Government
for all the answers. When we talk about human rights principles, these are not laws.
They're moral principles. These precede law. As human beings, we all should agree that
human rights are really important. This is after all what we're looking to achieve. As
human beings, we are all equal. We should not ever have to qualify that.
That is me for today. I want to say thank you for listening to my talk.