Dr Scott Hollier's web accessibility experience in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Transcript

21 June 2015

Roberta: Recently returning from a trip to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, delivering digital accessibility training to students in the region, Dr Scott Hollier shares his experience, learnings, accessibility findings and feedback from providing the Professional Certificate in Web Accessibility in the Kingdom. That is PCWA. Welcome, Scott.

Scott: Thanks, Roberta, great to be back again.

Roberta: Welcome home, indeed.

Scott: Oh, thank you.

Roberta: Now, what led to the need for teaching a web accessibility course in Saudi Arabia?

Scott: Well, it's interesting how it came about. We were contacted as a result of a need to upskill IT staff connected to work in the Kingdom and, as I found out when I was there, a big part of the catalyst for this was that the Saudi Government recently signed up to the United Nations requirements around the rights of people with disabilities. As part of that they're looking to try to bring people with disabilities into employment through the government. So part of the reason for this training was looking, firstly, at the need to comply with that UNCRPD and the second one was to see if they could set up something internally to government so that their information was accessible and therefore they could employ people with disabilities, a really exciting outcome and great to be a part of that process.

Roberta: So how was the course structured?

Scott: Well, the way we did it was in person because normally the course is delivered online. So we had to start off the day with a three-hour lecture and then I would present on all things relating to web accessibility and the user experience and then from there we would move on to a group discussion. So we had the students in tables and then they would discuss some things I would propose to them within their groups. Then they'd come back together as a class and we'd discuss them overall. Then in the afternoon session, we'd look mainly at doing the assignment work. So the course has three assignments and the assessments for those include things like using a screen reader, being able to caption a video, being able to build an accessible website prototype and being able to turn on the accessibility features in their own tools and also how to audit a site, how to check that a website is accessible, compliant to the Web Content Accessibility Guideline 2, or WCAG 2 as we call it, standard, so making sure that the students had a really fundamental understanding of how people with disabilities use technology, how to comply with that WCAG 2 standard and then how to incorporate it into their work. It was really good to do it in person because with the course online you often read online the experiences of people but to actually see it in person, their experiences with screen readers, and doing those assignments in captioning videos, it was a really exciting thing to do.

Roberta: So, Scott, what are the main accessibilities issues in the region?

Scott: Well, the number one issue that kept coming up again and again was the fact that there is very few resources in Arabic. Given that I was told about a billion people speak Arabic, it's surprising that there aren't many resources around web accessibility actually in Arabic. The other issue that was raised by the students was that one of the requirements of WCAG is to ensure that the readability of a website is very easy to understand but they were explaining to me that this is a difficult thing because in Arabic there's traditional Arabic and informal Arabic and there's not really much room to have traditional but an easy-to-read version of Arabic. So because of this, yeah, the lack of translation into Arabic and also the lack of that sort of language support in a web context makes it a bit tricky. The other issue which was interesting is that if people don't declare the language in a website, then your screen reader will do all sorts of interesting things. There were some issues around the support of screen readers with Arabic and also what happens if an Arabic screen reader tries to read a page in Arabic when it's actually written in English and that can have really interesting outcomes. So, really, language, I think, was the number one issue that they come across.

Roberta: Were there any differences in the technologies used there?

Scott: Well, this is one of the amazing things about the world of the web and technologies that the answer is no. One of the students was telling me about how very happy he was that his wife gave him a Galaxy S6 smartphone for his birthday and so we could talk about how awesome that phone is and the accessibility features built into products. I think one of the things that going on a trip like this really highlights is that when we talk about the web and we talk about technology the world is as one when it comes to wanting to support people with disabilities. So it was just amazing that the conversations and the discussion around technology and what's used is pretty much uniform across the world.

Roberta: Thank you very much, Scott, for all of that today.

Scott: No worries, Roberta.

Roberta: I've been speaking with Dr Scott Hollier, who was sharing his experiences of when he was presenting the Professional Certificate in Web Accessibility in Saudi Arabia. For further information on web accessibility and completing the PCWA yourself, you can call Media Access Australia on 02 92126242. Media Access Australia is a supporter of this program.

Go back to Dr Scott Hollier's web accessibility experience in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia page