Great expectations

It’s amazing how an off-the-cuff remark about the use of typographic characters as symbols can get you thinking.

The question arose as to whether the use of » or > is acceptable as a right arrow (e.g. Next» or Next>), or whether that essentially qualifies as the dreaded “ASCII art” when it comes to accessibility auditing.

All very laudable as a semantic argument, and a potential accessibility concern for non-visual browsers given that JAWS reads “>” as “greater” and IBM Home Page Reader says “greater than”. For “»” JAWS says “right double angle bracket” while HPR says “blank”.

This scintilating conversation then took the scenic route and detoured into the question of whether this was even a necessary question.

Users of screenreaders and visual browsers alike have come to accept the implicit convention that an asterisk next to a form field means that it is a required field - the asterisk has no direct semantic meaning in this case, but has evolved a well understood implied meaning in this context for both visual and non-visual browsers. Could this not also be true of the use of > and », or is the rather clunky spoken version too much to bear?

I think that the more important issue here is more broadly in how we cater for users of non-visual browsers as a whole, rather than focussing on such minutiae, and whether we should actually be actively countering their expectations rather than catering to them.

The sad fact of the matter is that many users of non-visual browsers have had their experience and expectation of the web shaped by sites that have not been built with their needs in mind.

To put it bluntly, a lot of websites are bloody awful if you’re not using an up-to-date version of a mainstream browser and wouldn’t know clean, valid, semantic markup if it slapped them in the face.

So is there merit in continuing to cater to expectations based on a generally sub-standard experience, or should we actually strive to make things better and potentially confuse users by breaking those established conventions that they have come to accept? A Big Mac may stop you being hungy, but wouldn’t you prefer an expertly cooked steak?

So I guess the question is: Is a little pain in the short term worth the eventual gain?

Personally, I think it is. If we blindly follow convention (if you’ll pardon the pun) then we run the risk of firmly entrenching that ill-founded expectation and it’s adoption as an unquestioned “standard”. If on the other hand we stop to consider what users (irrespective of their browsing medium of choice) actually want from the sites we build, then we move away from relatively trivial semantic arguments and open up the possibility of genuine progress and a better experience for all users, not just a specific subset.

That, my friends, is accessibility.

• Thursday 8th June
• Posted by Andy Hawkes