Overlay Technology Does Not Kill Accessibility

by Michael Hingson and Curtis Chong

From the Editor: Last month we ran an article about overlay technology marketed as a partial solution to the problem of inaccessible websites. As the editor of the Braille Monitor, I have not been looking for arguments to divide us, but I will admit that I’ve been looking for some pushback. Too frequently I hear nothing about the articles that are published either in support of or in opposition to their theses. This month’s issue is different, for while no one is attacking the character of an author, there are challenges to assertions previously made that all of us can think about as we come to our own decisions. This article is one of two that call on us to do this.

In the name of full disclosure, we need to state right up front that Michael Hingson now works for AccessiBe and has the title of vision officer in the company. This acknowledgment is in no way meant to discount his strong and significant role in the National Federation of the Blind for almost sixty years or the fact that he is a frequent guest at state conventions speaking on a wide variety of topics that do not include advertisement of his company. To our knowledge Curtis Chong has no financial investment in any overlay company, and his only interest is seeing that he can do what he wants to do when he wants to do it as he uses the World Wide Web. Here is their article:

As some of you may know, the authors of this article, Mike Hingson and Curtis Chong, are two long-time Federationists with a lot of experience advocating for equal access to technology. After reading the May Monitor article entitled “Overreliance on Overlays is Counter to Enculturation of Accessibility” by Anil Lewis, we felt that we should comment about some of the inaccuracies and misconceptions we believe to exist in the article.

What is overlay technology anyway? Well, for the nontechnical readers among us, the term overlay technology, as used here, refers to a technique to improve the accessibility (to the blind and people with other disabilities) of websites by fixing problems before we see them. Suppose, for example, that a website that we use to send and receive email has a Reply object (it could be a link or a button) which a blind person can’t activate with the keyboard. Overlay technology would detect what to us would be this inaccessible control and modify the code so that we could press the Enter key to activate it. The screen reader might regard the result as a button or a link, but whatever the result, we would be able to trigger it by entering a keyboard command. Overlay technology might also attach a generic text description to a picture which would otherwise be identified as “graphic” by our screen reading software. For menus that can be expanded or collapsed only with the mouse, overlay technology could enable keyboard commands to perform the same function. Some implementations of overlay technology make one-time changes to websites to address accessibility issues. Dynamic implementations of this technology regularly scan supported websites (perhaps once each day), detect changes that could pose accessibility problems, and make dynamic repairs to fix the accessibility difficulties detected during the scan.

In his article, Anil Lewis declares that, “The preference of the National Federation of the Blind is for all technology, including websites, to be accessible at implementation through the integration of development best practices that include accessibility during the design and development phase.” He acknowledges, however, that, “Although born accessible is unquestionably our preference, the problem is that the need for accessible sites far exceeds the supply.”

Life experience has taught us that when, in a large company, the blind person is but one out of, say, ten thousand fully sighted employees, coworkers and supervisors (and possibly the larger organization) are willing to make what they regard as minor or reasonable changes to adjust to the needs of the blind person. But since everything in the world is geared for people who can see, the willingness to accommodate drops off if the cost or effort goes beyond a certain point of what the lawyers might call “reasonableness.” In an ideal world, it shouldn’t take a whole lot of extra effort to make a website accessible to the blind. But in the world in which we live today, the overwhelming majority of programmers, designers, and analysts who put large systems together do not, as Anil correctly points out, possess the knowledge and expertise to ensure that their work results in something that is fully accessible to the blind. If obtaining the necessary knowledge and expertise is perceived to take too much in the way of extra training, effort, and/or funding, it is likely to be regarded as an undue burden. When that happens, issues of accessibility are invariably pushed down in the stack of priorities. This phenomenon is not limited to larger organizations. Smaller businesses with fewer employees feel justified in ignoring accessibility issues altogether because they can argue, with some truth, that there simply aren’t enough people and funding available to perform the extra work which they say making things accessible requires.

Anil says in his article, “Some companies claim that these accessibility toolbars, apps, widgets, or plugins allow the user to enable various accessibility functions such as optimizing for screen readers, increasing keyboard accessibility, and enhancing color contrast.” We acknowledge that some companies may indeed make these claims, but what have our own investigations revealed?

We took some time to examine for ourselves a number of websites supported by overlay technology. We did not find any instances where overlay technology actually made a website less accessible to a blind person. But we did find that oreo.com displayed menus, a more accessible shopping cart, and image descriptions which were not present with its overlay turned off. Tupperware.com provided a more accessible shopping cart, better access to menus, and more product information with overlay access operating. NameCheap.com, when overlay technology was activated, made the web registration process easier to perform from a nonvisual perspective. One author, Curtis Chong, found an overlay technology on the T-Mobile website in which the benefit of the technology was not at all apparent. But again, we did not find a specific website where the use of overlay technology made it less accessible. Based on this experience, we wondered what websites Anil was referring to when, in his article he said, “We have found that in some instances, implementing an overlay makes it more difficult for a blind person to use a website.” We would be glad to take a look at a specific website examined by Anil where overlay technology results in less nonvisual access. Overlay technology should never reduce our ability to use any website or web-based application.

In his article, Anil makes the case that relying too much on overlays to solve accessibility problems runs counter to the idea that accessibility needs to be part of the normal course of doing business. We would agree that there is little hope that accessibility will become integral to the corporate culture if an organization purchases a working overlay solution, installs it, and then figures that nothing else needs to be done about accessibility on the theory that the overlay will address all of its online accessibility problems. We wish to point out, however, that what Anil calls “enculturation” around accessibility is equally as unlikely to occur if an organization, large or small, contracts with a third-party accessibility consulting firm and makes no effort to enhance the knowledge and competence of its in-house staff regarding nonvisual access.

While it would be truly wonderful if all website owners made it a priority to learn about nonvisual access and what to do to create and maintain accessible websites, this is not likely to happen while website owners, mostly small and intermediate businesses, are focused primarily on getting their sites up and running so that they can conduct their online business. What is a company with, say, only ten employees going to do if one or two blind customers report a problem of access to its website and the accessibility issue is something that is fairly easy to fix? Should it refuse to install an overlay technology which can be shown to improve nonvisual access and possibly be less expensive than contracting with a third-party accessibility expert? For this small company, what would be the best alternative?

We agree with Anil that there aren’t enough programmers who have been properly trained in the area of accessibility to ensure that every website published complies fully with well-established accessibility guidelines. We also support the vision of a fully accessible future in which students are equipped to enter the workforce with knowledge of and skills in the principles of accessible design and development and the needs of people with disabilities. However, we believe that even if, miraculously, every programmer in the world possessed the knowledge to make websites accessible and began properly coding for accessibility, their efforts would not be enough to handle the growing tide of inaccessible websites—websites which are going to be created by people for whom the sense of sight is integral to everything they do.

We believe that there is a place in our future for both overlay technology that really works for the blind and traditional coding methods supported with proper staff training, third-party expertise, and a pragmatic understanding of the benefits that making a website accessible has to offer. What we who are blind must do is to learn for ourselves the benefits and drawbacks of both overlay technology and manual coding, decide where each technology might fit in the overall effort to improve nonvisual access to websites, and ensure that we have the wisdom and vision to recognize when a new approach or technology can help us in our quest to achieve equality and first-class citizenship.