Web2.0, Ajax and Accessibility
4th September 2006 by Liam McGee
Web2.0 is the latest marketing buzzword in the industry. It refers, roughly, to the idea of working towards the use of web communication protocols to create collaborative web-based applications. For example, social networking tools allow a large number of users to ‘tag’ web pages, adding information about the page (‘metadata’) that can then be used for categorising and searching by relevance and by popularity.
A loose collection of web applications based on Ajax (a javascript-based programming method) has evolved over the last year or two. The applications often allow other developers to piggyback on top of them to create ‘mashups’ — for example overlaying your own data on top of Google Maps.
Examples of successful web 2.0 applications are blogging (e.g. Blogger); tagging (e.g. del.icio.us); photo sharing (e.g. Flickr); mapping (Google maps); collaborative office applications (e.g. Google spreadsheets, Writely); project management tools (e.g. Basecamp); collaborative news (e.g. Digg).
While the applications are interesting and powerful, frequently heavy reliance on javascript, vision and mouse-use is heralding a new challenge for those with a vision of a standards-compliant, accessible web. Well formed, valid HTML is rare. Easy implementation of Ajax scripts for basic functions (online forms, for example) can render the site unuseable to people with older browsers or restricted or disabled scripting. While IE and Firefox are usually supported, users of other browsers are often excluded. Applications rarely give much thought to interoperability, usability or accessibility. Most importantly, there’s not that many people out there using these applications yet — not when compared to the numbers of people using ‘Web 1.0′. Beware Web 2.0 solutions for your shopping site!
On the plus side, the very openness of several of the applications (noteably Google maps) means that people like ourselves can rework them to make them accessible, useable, well-formed and search engine friendly. A start is being made by the good people of the W3C on a set of standards for ‘Accessible Rich Internet Applications’ (ARIA), the WAI-ARIA Roadmap. So first we sort out the teething troubles. And then Web 2.0 can really get going.