Book Review: Building Accessible Websites

I have to agree with Veerle: Joe Clark, the author of Building Accessible Websites, might’ve missed his call as an actor. If only Stanley Kubrick auditioned Mr. Clark for the part of Sgt. Hartman, we would’ve had a different Full Metal Jacket. To set the tone for the book review, let’s rewrite the opening scene.

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[Sgt Clark]: My name is Sir Joe Clark, your Senior Accessibility Instructor. From now on, you will speak only when spoken to, and the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be accesskey and tabindex. Do you, maggots, understand that?

[Recruits (in unison)]: Sir, yes, sir.

[Sgt Clark]: Bullcrap, I can’t hear you. Sound off like you like you know the WCAG guidelines.

[Recruits (in unison, louder)]: Sir, yes, sir!!

[Sgt Clark]: If you ladies leave this session, if you survive my training … you will be a weapon, you will be a minister of accessibility, praying for inaccessible JavaScript. But until that day you are pukes! You’re the lowest form of life on Earth.

Because I wrote my book half in French and half in funky Canadian English, you will not like me. But the more you hate me, the more you will learn.

There is no racial bigotry here! I do not look down on Limeys, Aussies, Yankees or Russkies. Here you are all equally worthless! And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack their iBooks to serve the disabled community. Do you maggots understand that?

[Recruits (in unison)]: Sir, yes, sir!!

[Pvt Budd (whispering)]: Is that you, Jeffrey Zeldman? Is this me?

[Sgt Clark]: Who said that? Who the [censored] said that? Who’s the slimy little communist [censored big time] down here, who doesn’t know how to caption Flash? Nobody, huh?! I will 508 you all until you [censored] die!

[Pvt Budd]: Sir, I said it, sir!

[Sgt Clark]: Well… no [censored]. What have we got here, a [censored] CSS expert? I admire your honesty. Hell, I like you. You can come over to my house and type my emails in Simplified Chinese.

[Sgt Clark punches Pvt Budd in the stomach. Pvt Budd sags to his knees.]

[Sgt Clark]: I’ve got your name! I’ve got your blog! You will not laugh! You will not cry! You will learn by the spec. Now get up! Get on your feet! You’d better add alt text to every image from now on, or I will sue you under the Moroccan Disability Rehabilitation Act!

You’ve got an accessibility expert face? Aaaaaaaagh! That’s an accessibility expert face. Now let me see yours!

[Pvt Budd]: Aaaaaaaagh!

[Sgt Clark]: Bullcrap! You didn’t convince me! Let me see your real accessibility expert face!

[Pvt Budd]: AAAAAAGGGHHH!

[Sgt Clark]: You didn’t scare me! Work on it!

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I hope by now you’ve figured that the book, Building Accessible Websites, is aggressive, religious, convincing, educational; sprinkled with French clichés adding to the otherwise nerdy content some glamour. Joe Clark’s writing style is very eloquent and somewhat similar to the manner of speech of Alex de Large (A Clockwork Orange, anyone?) who injected a Russian word in every other sentence.

I’ve learned from this book more than I’ve ever read on the subject of accessibility. It was quite interesting to get familiar with issues around captioning of TV programs. Although I doubt I will ever deal with TV captioning, it’s good to stay informed.

Joe Clark is the kind of person who comfortably defies a spec if it makes little sense in practical applications or is not well thought through. I would expect this rubs some people the wrong way.

I spent quite a bit of time on Chapter 9, Type and Colour, where you get a crash course on types of colorblindness. It was this content that sent me searching for color matching algorithms for my online color blindness simulator tool.

What I’ve learned is that accessibility is such a multifaceted discipline that there are no cut-and-dried guidelines. Read Veerle’s recent post and an informative rebuttal, and you’ll see what I mean. Pretty much the only way to practice web accessibility correctly is by testing with disabled people. Interestingly enough, finding such people is no easy task, especially blind web surfers, as described in the book.

The colophon at the end of the book is quite interesting. This is the place to find out what’s up with the surrealistic book cover. You also get the inside scoop on the now-famous story of an Australian suing the Olympic Committee and actually winning the case.

Eyes-a-Poppin’

In a bit of a weird twist, I find the font of body copy illegible. Simply illegible. Pardon my incompetency in the celestial matters of typography, but the typeface is too light ("thin", if you will). You read in the colophon how most computer books are designed poorly, so Mr. Clark wanted a non-mainstream book with a unique typeset for the body, but the funkiness went too far.

I first opened my brand new copy of this book at a car alarm shop. I knew it would take those guys a couple of hours to tweak my alarm into place, so I brought this book. After a couple of hours I thought my eyes needed adjustment too—the font was not cooperating. In most settings: on a subway train, at work, at a doctor’s office, etc—lighting is sub par and it calls for a sturdier typeface. My wife, too, glanced at the book and noted the font looked "too light" even without me asking.

Conclusion

I do wholeheartedly recommend this book. Even if you disagree with the author’s point of views, it’s good to get the word out and educate people even if they don’t develop or design. Even the makers of Sesame Street need education once in a while.

Does the cover of that book remind anyone else of a certain popular Slashdot troll?

/shudder

That cover is total goatse.

Interesting review. On the subject of the font size I did speak to Joe about this at @media and it turns out he had very good, practical reasons for choosing that size. He did mentioned that he'd been trying to get the book published in braille, but alas to no avail. However he did say that the book is also available online, providing readers with a much more accessible way to read the book as it can be read by screenreaders, the font size can be enlarged etc etc.

I couldn't use your CAPTCHA in Lynx. Nor could any blind person.

En tout cas, my designer Marc Sullivan and I remain as annoyed as many readers are with the lightness of the print in the book. It could have been remedied by opening the ink spigots up a little, a trivial change we could not make because we were not present to do a press check in Indiana or whatever other state the book was printed in.

In retrospect we should have bumped up the type size 0.25 point (yes, just that little) and simply dealt with the publisher's griping that it would push us into a new signature (the gathered sets of pages you see bound together at the spine). We did do a test at +0.5 point and we added something like 60 pages to the count, which would have been two signatures.

The cover illustration has nothing to do with whatever your terrribly, terribly amusing other contributors are talking about.

Thanks for heads-up, Mr. Clark. I think increasing the type size by 0.25 point would've helped, like you said. As to the book cover: I don't have issues with it. I think it's a little creepy, but it doesn't bother me.