Author: Khutso Nkadimeng
28 Feb 2020
The day before writing this blog an eye opening coincident happened to me. I took out my phone and it was displaying everything in black and white. After restarting it, nothing changed, and I got frustrated trying to fix it. As a true member of my generation I did the right thing, searched for answers on the internet. It turns out its an operation mode designed for people with colour-blindness. Something I considered frustrating is a life saver for someone else and on the same day our lecturer said a lot of things about accessibility but what stood out for me was this: “Your design decisions are political statements” and suddenly my perspective changed.
The internet is a revolutionary tool in every segment of our society and maybe more so for students, academics, researchers, activists and politicians. Given the importance of the World Wide Web in the modern world, it is important that we remove access barriers for all members of our society including people with disabilities. Access to the internet is becoming a basic human right, just like access to electricity or clean water and some progressive government around the world are declaring it a crime to design websites without necessary accessibility tools.
Currently in South Africa there’s debate between telecommunications regulatory body, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), telecommunications companies, the public and the government. The debate is about high costs of data bundles, the movement DataMustFall was born out of this. ICASA says phone companies must reduces prices, phone companies say the government must release more spectrum and the government say phone companies are simply greedy. In the meantime, the rest of us struggle to access the internet once we leave free Wi-Fi at universities. So, access is not simply a problem of web developers and robust design, it’s about infrastructure and socio-economic status.
I will conclude by pleading with developers to follow the ethical guidelines provided by W3C in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. The four principles of WCAG 2.0 are:
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Perceivable
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Operable
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Understandable
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Robust