Kazuhito:  Right now, I am in Los Angeles to participate in the Accessibility related conference hosted by California State University, Northridge.
From here in Los Angeles, we are delivering "Meet the Professionals" to you. In this series, we interview with the experts in various fields who play an important role in the world of the Web.
Today's guest is Ms. Shawn Henry who has been working with W3C to spread and educate the importance of Web accessibility.

Kazuhito:  Thank you so much for accepting this interview. First of all, could you tell us about yourself, for example, backgrounds and current job?

Shawn:  Thank you so much for inviting me. This is a fun opportunity.

Kazuhito:  Thank you.

Shawn: 　My early jobs were in technical communications (like writing software manuals) and also in user interface design. I was mostly working on user interface design of software. I was working for a large organization at first and then a smaller organization, doing consulting to various companies.
Then I had some health problems. I began to have difficulty using the computer because of vision and physical problems and didn't think I was going to be able to continue to work, and then discovered accessibility and the Trace Research and Development Center. I was living in Wisconsin, in Madison, where Trace is based, and so I decided to do something about accessibility.
So my getting into accessibility was a bit self serving at first. [laughs] Although, even once I began to get better, I was very passionate about accessibility once I saw how important it is to people's lives. I was studying and learning about accessibility, even though there wasn't much demand for it. But I was integrating it into my user interface design work when I could.
And then Section 508 came out in the U.S. Once those standards came out, then of course accessibility became more important around the world, even. I did some work internationally for companies who were selling products to the United States government and such.
So I was doing consulting on accessibility and began to focus more on software and Web. I learned some accessibility for hardware and other products from Trace. Then I began to focus on the Web. And I did some work as an invited expert with W3C. I felt like W3C had really given us a lot with the web accessibility guidelines and helping us know what to do for accessibility, and I wanted to give back for that.
And then, once the position for education and outreach became available, I felt that that was the best way for me to be able to contribute on a worldwide scale to the field of accessibility. I've been doing that now, I think, for a little over four years. 

Kazuhito:  Four years?

Shawn:  Yes.

Kazuhito:  Four years at W3C. OK. Thank you. So you are working for W3C or WAI, Web Accessibility Initiative, and focusing on outreach or educational activities. If you have already checked my interview to Molly, she is the former activity lead of the Web Standards Project. You know that I think outreach is really important to W3C at this moment. In your case, what's the strategy, or the methods for the outreach or educational activities?

Shawn:  Well, as you know, W3C has traditionally focused on the technical aspects and hasn't done much in education and outreach. So it's really exciting that WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) has a position for education and outreach, and has put a priority on that.
When I started, we were looking at how to get the message out about accessibility work, to continue it because that had already been a large part of WAI’s work. One of the big issues was our web site. If you remember the web site...

Kazuhito:  Yes.

Shawn:  A couple of years ago...

Kazuhito:  Not so beautiful, not so fantastic.

Shawn:  Right, right, and not only the visual design but, even more importantly, the user interface and the information architecture. There were a lot of great resources already available but people did not know about them. So that was one of the projects we took on right away: Redesign the web site, the WAI web site.
We had a nice project team that worked on that. That really spent a lot of time going through a user center design process. And one of the neat things is that we were able to document all of that and provide it online. Whereas a lot of corporate user centered design projects are secret, you know they don't what you to know the details, ours are all available. So you can go online and see what we did for that.
One of the things we did early on was usability testing. We already knew from our own use, and also some heuristic evaluation, what a lot of the problems were. It was really great to be able to do usability testing to help us further understand the problems. And the big thing was to help us prioritize what the issues were. One of the big things we learned from the usability testing was that people were being linked to the guideline right away, and they would get the technical specifications and the information was too confusing.
One of the things that we did as part of this initial work for laying a foundation for outreach, is to develop introductory materials. So now we have overviews for all of our guidelines and all of our work, and an introduction to web accessibility and some other supporting materials such as how to develop a business case for accessibility for an organization. And it talks about the social factors, technical factors, financial factors, legal and policy factors. We have a document, that is very new, on how WAI develops guidelines through the W3C process. And it talks about the different milestones and stages and how people can contribute to that process.

Kazuhito:  I see.

Shawn:  So that has been this level of outreach, first is getting the materials in place so that people have the information. Now that that's in place, we have been shifting our focus more to really getting out, getting the information out, helping people be aware of it. So we are speaking at a lot more conferences, where I get to see you.

Kazuhito:  Yes, you have come to Japan for several times.

Shawn:  Yes.

Kazuhito:  I know.

Shawn:  Yes we get to come to Japan, and all over. And really focusing on some target audiences, and getting key messages out, that we can talk some more about. And also, getting information to other speakers and other trainers and bloggers.

Kazuhito:  I see.

Shawn:  And helping them have the information so that they can also spread that information.

Kazuhito:  OK, so next question. In Japan many web designers or developers have already known the importance of web accessibility, at least I believe so. But I am not sure about other countries or areas in the world. You are traveling all over the world I know. Could you tell us the current state of accessibility from viewpoint of worldwide?

Shawn:  In many countries it's similar to Japan. There is a lot of awareness. In many places, designers and developers will know what you mean when you say “accessibility”. They will have heard of it now, but they still don't have a good understanding of what it means. They certainly, right now even people who are aware of some of the specific standards and guidelines, don't have a lot of experience with how real people with disabilities use the web. As you know, that's a passion of mine as well, to get that information out. So there's still not a lot of implementation. Most web sites aren't accessible, and a lot of the basic accessibility things are not being done in web sites.
In developing countries, there's much less awareness. So we still need to work on awareness in many of the developing countries.
Really, overall there's a need to just further integrate accessibility into policies and practices and make sure that it's getting incorporated throughout the development process and throughout education. So there's still a lot of need throughout.

Kazuhito:  OK, thank you. So the forth of my question was mainly focusing on web designers or developers, but I know W3C provides the guidelines about accessibility for user agents vendors, and authoring tool vendors. How about them? Are they positive to adding some more functions or features about accessibility?

Shawn:  That's a very important point, the authoring tools and the user agents. Just the direct answer is that it's very similar. There's a lot more awareness. There's still not a lot of implementation. Things are getting much better. The authoring tools and the browsers and the assistive technologies are all doing better with implementing what's needed for accessibility. Of course they tend to have a little longer development cycles than many web contents, so it's slow to get those integrated. But we are seeing some things happen, particularly happen faster, particularly with browsers...

Kazuhito:  Browsers.

Shawn:  ...because of the competition.

Kazuhito:  Yes.

Shawn:  Yes, and because of some of the open source movement going fast, going forward, but this is really a key aspect. We talked about outreach and key messages -- and the importance of authoring tools is one of those key messages. We have millions of people developing web sites and there're so many things that authoring tools can do to make it easier to make those accessible...

Kazuhito:  Yes...

Shawn:  ...and that's very important. And one of the other key aspects is to understand what is an authoring tool so, not only is the regular plain software that you think of (I'm trying not to mention specific tools)...

[they both laugh]

Shawn:  ...that you think of to make a web page, but also content management systems.

Kazuhito:  Oh, yeah. It could be a big issue.

Shawn:  Absolutely. So many sites are developed using content management systems, and they are authoring tools, and so how they support accessibility is very important. And in addition things such as, I mean blogs are authoring tools, blog software and photo sharing web sites and social networking sites, and all these things that we use to create content are authoring tools and so they need to be doing a lot to help support accessibility and that can really make a big change in how accessible the Web is.

Kazuhito:  In your opinion so, online services which create web content should consider the authoring tool guidelines?

Shawn:  Absolutely. Yes, so an online service, if you're a photo sharing site you're an authoring tool, and should follow the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines to know how to help make your tool produce accessible content and be accessible. Absolutely.

Kazuhito:  OK. Thank you. OK so, number fifth question. Well, in my opinion, if browsers evolve and the users get more ability to browse the web in their favorite ways and contents are implemented by web standards properly, some popular techniques like a skip link, you know what it is, will be not necessary. It's my opinion, because they are not contents. Not contents itself, it's not the unique existence in the document in the site. So, do you have any opinions about the relationship between contents and browsers or user agents.

Shawn:  Yes.

Kazuhito:  It's slightly changing, you know.

Shawn:  Yeah, that's very important, that relationship. You're familiar with the document we have on the Essential Components of Web Accessibility and it talks about the relationship between authoring tools and content, and browsers and content -- and another very important aspect there is assistant technologies. And so, absolutely that relationship is important in terms of understanding the guidelines and in terms of what is the responsibility of content developers.
And right now skip links is a very good example. You know this is for people who either can't see and use a screen reader, or can't use the mouse and use a keyboard, and if there's navigation - a lot of links to navigation - they want to be able to skip those. And some people say to provide a link at the beginning so that you can skip those. Well, of course the technology exists today so that that's not necessary in content, because if a web site designer puts good headings, and there are browsers and there are assistive technologies you can use to navigate the headings, it's not a required aspect of content to provide an additional skip link. However, in practice not all browsers provide heading navigation, and older assistive technologies don't, and not all users know how to use it.
But the biggest problem right now is that providing good headings is one of the things that most content doesn't do well anyway. Even if I'm using a browser and a screen reader that can do headings and I know how, it's not going to do much good right now because most of the sites don't have good headings.
While there becomes no need to have certain things, there are still other responsibilities for the content developers. That relationship is very important.

Kazuhito:  Will it be changed?

Shawn:  It will. With WCAG 1 (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0), we had the clause 'Until user agents do this'.

Kazuhito:  I know the phrase, yes.

Shawn:  You know this. We have the same idea in WCAG 2. It's worded differently. I suppose there always will be, they will always say this is what the user needs, and it's best if the browsers and the assistive technologies provide that, but until they do, there may be some additional responsibility for the content developers to provide that.

Kazuhito:  OK, I see. Next question. It's a little bit different question. What do you think of the most difficult thing or a kind of challenge about web accessibility is, at this moment in the web 2.0 era?

Shawn:  There are a lot of difficulties, but one of the things I want to point out before I answer that directly, is that there are a lot of easy things. I think it's important to work on the difficult things and to keep developing those, but I want to be careful that we don't shift the focus too much to the difficult things, because there are so many web sites that aren't doing the easy things. We were just talking about headings. That's a perfect example. That's relatively easy to do, to mark up your headings, and one of the things that very few sites do. I think we need to keep remembering to do the basics and to do the easy things as well.
Of course, there are difficult things. One of those is just that so many people are adding content. While we have all these authoring tools, we also have many more authors. Author contributed content and aggregated content is one thing. Then, of course with “Web 2.0”, AJAX applications. Some of the specifics, there are keyboard navigation and screen readers; being notified of changes on the page; people creating custom widgets that the assistive technology doesn't know how to interact with. So there are some aspects of that that are more difficult.

Kazuhito:  OK, OK. So I asked you about some difficult or kind of challenges, do you have any insights or solutions for the issues?

Shawn:  We're working on that, and one of the...

Kazuhito:  Guidelines?

Shawn:  Yeah, with the guidelines. One of the neat things with WCAG 2.0 is that we're developing those to be broadly applicable, so they apply to different technologies now and in the future. And then we can have techniques, we have a separate techniques document that we can update with the best practices as we develop additional solutions to these.
There are things that you can do now to improve accessibility, although it still tends to be not very usable for people with disabilities. But we're working on additional improvements to that with, for example, the WAI-ARIA Suite.

Kazuhito:  Oh yes.

Shawn:  This is a relatively new work, and it's on making ARIAs, accessible rich Internet applications. This work is on how we can make DHTML (Dynamic HTML), and AJAX, and other rich Internet applications accessible. We're working on those technologies, and that work is going very fast and very well.

Kazuhito:  Yes.

Shawn:  And one of the especially neat things about that is that it's already being -- As the standards are being developed, they are being tested in browsers and assistive technologies. So those are already working.

Kazuhito:  OK.

Shawn:  And that work is coming along very fast, so we'll continue to see that develop yet this year. So that's exciting about the new technologies that are being used and that we are working on making them more accessible.

Kazuhito:  It's exciting but you need to work very hard?

Shawn:  Yes. [laughter] But always.

Kazuhito:  [laughter] OK. So next one is the last question. Lastly, could you tell us your hope for web designers or developers like us in the world, not only in Japan? Even if it's not related to, not only specifying the accessibility issue. What do you hope?

Shawn:  Well I hope that web designers and developers would understand the importance of accessibility, and how when the Web is accessible it is just amazingly empowering to individuals with disabilities, and also to society as a whole.
I would hope that developers and designers would be very challenged in their work, and would see their work in developing the web as exciting. And when they come upon a problem to really embrace the challenge, and then come up with a solution and feel very rewarded by the solution.
That web designers and developers would understand that they can change the world through their work. And develop the Web so that they can use it and contribute to it now and in the future, whether or not they have a disability.

Kazuhito:  OK, thank you, thank you so much for answering the questions.

Shawn:  Thank you, I really appreciate the opportunity to have the interview, and this is a very helpful thing with outreach, which is so important.

Kazuhito:  Thank you.

Kazuhito:  I hope you enjoyed the interview. Ms. Henry has a disability herself. And she is very passionate about accessibility. I would like to work as hard as she does so that I can contribute towards overall improvement of accessibility.