 Mr. Mike Park, IT Accessibility Specialist at MEDA, Qatar's Assistive Technology Center. Thanks a lot for taking the time for this interview. And we'd like first to know about your definition about web accessibility. So can you tell us more about it? Sure. I would like to, first of all, thank you for having me. And to answer your question, web accessibility means that everyone can access the website equally. And I'm not just talking about, you know, just normal people. I'm talking about people, you know, with special needs such as vision loss, hearing loss, and people with physical disabilities, cognitive disabilities all have equal access to information. And if websites are not designed to accommodate these kind of needs and awareness while the developers actually creating content, you put up barriers to the website. So there needs to be awareness and there needs to be education about properly creating websites so that everyone can access it and that AT devices of all types can access the information that's being presented on the web. And it's called universal access, giving everyone free access to information without running into any problems. So how does usability differ from accessibility and whether there are overlapping sites between both terms? So can you tell us more about that? There's two components to a testing that we would do on a website to determine whether it's accessible or usable. The accessibility side is more geared towards the guidelines created by the World Wide Web Consortium called WCAG 2.0. WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and there are three different levels. Single A, which is the highest priority, double A, which is the second highest priority, and triple A. No one could truly be triple A compliant but we strive for double A and I think ICT Qatar has complied to double A compliancy. These guidelines specifically tell web designers how to code and how to add content and methods in which you could use to make your website more accessible. They're a very specific code orientated type of guidelines where usability is for example taking a focus group and the focus group could comprise of somebody with hearing loss or somebody who is blind using a screen reader or somebody with physical disabilities using like a switch to access the website. It's basically going in and trying to achieve a task in a website. That task could be filling out a simple form in the website. Can it be achieved by all of the disciplines I just mentioned in our usability testing? So usability is basically what the users experience on the page and whether they identify any barriers or whether they can actually fill out a form as an example. Part of the assessments that we do is taking the best of both worlds and using that to gauge accessibility or use that to build our recommendations and training usually follows after that. So what simple tips will you give to web developers in order to make their websites accessible? First of all, you could follow the guidelines as I mentioned which is the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. It's broken up into four different principles, the first one being perceivable. A good example of perceivable is when you use non-text content in a website, a good example is video. So how would a wider range of people perceive a video? That's the question. If you're hearing impaired, you need captioning or text transcript. If you're blind, you have to make sure that when there's no spoken dialogue, if there's visuals on the screen, it has to be described to them in an audio format as an example. Another good example of perceivable is when you put an image on a website. First of all, determine whether the image has any meaning or relevant meaning on the website. And if this image does have relevant meaning, you describe it briefly and adequately and to the point, of course. And again, one of the biggest mistakes web designers make today is that they'll try to describe all the images once they learn what all text is all about and that comes right down to usability. It's not usable when you over-describe things on a page because really what's important is the content on the site, not the aesthetics and not the need to describe all the aesthetic on a website. Another very important thing is that a web designer should be aware of is that when you make an image or a graphic element on your page of link, it has to be described, right? Otherwise, a screen reader user will come across it and they will just hear image and that has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. It will say image then link. So you should adequately describe the destination, right? Opposed to just describing what the image is because it's actually a link, right? These are two good examples of perceivable. Now, there's another category called operable, right? Meaning, right? Is the website operable with a keyboard when users cannot use a mouse? A good example is flash, right? Like you see flash all the time, you know, nine times out of ten flash is not accessible with a keyboard. But there are white papers from Adobe where they show you how to make flash accessible. We don't discourage people from using graphics and animation as long as it's accessible by keyboard. So keyboard is a very important thing, right? And, you know, sometimes you'll see on websites where, you know, like you have to only use a mouse. For example, like drag and drop is a function that you cannot do with a keyboard as an example. So those are things that we have to avoid. The other category would be understandable, meaning, right? Use simple language on your website because, you know, if your website is going to cater to the whole world, right? You're going to be faced with language barriers and you may be faced with people with cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia, right? And, you know, blind folks using screen readers, right? Trying to make out what the links are on your website. When I talk about links, create link phrases with descriptions, opposed to just saying more or click here. Because one of the ways in which a blind user, as an example, would navigate a website is to list all the links in the website and pick the links they choose to go to and they would just simply hit enter on their keyboard and they would go, opposed to going through all the content on the website. So that's why it's important that all link phrases are described adequately. And at the same time, you know, if you're going to use, you know, link phrases in the content body of your document with like regular read-only text, make sure the link phrases are underlined so that, you know, people with cognitive disabilities and color blindness are able to distinguish easily, very, you know, right away that there's a hyperlink present in the document. And that's another common mistake a lot of web designers make. The last one is robust, meaning, you know, try to always use the most current technologies in your website. And, you know, one of the common, you know, issues that we found in, you know, evaluating over 60 websites here in Qatar is that a lot of the websites were still using table-only formatting, as an example. And that's not using current technology. Current technology today is using the latest CSS style sheets and, you know, while avoiding using table-list, sorry, while avoiding using table formatting. But just use the most current standard coding practices and you should be okay and make sure that, you know, your website's compatible with the wider range of browsers that are available to the general public. Okay, can you tell us more about the web accessibility assessment services that MADDA offers? What MADDA does is we go in and we do this, like, you know, we do this on an advocacy basis. We don't charge for this kind of service. And, you know, we would like to start with the Qatar government, nonprofit, and then we would move right onto corporate-level auditing services. So basically what we do is we go in initially and look at your first and second-level pages and report on the accessibility and usability issues if any are present on the website. We do a detailed report, right, based on, you know, the guidelines and making references to them. And then after that what we would do is we would meet with this organization and discuss the report. And then from there we would discuss training staff. Usually present in the meeting are usually upper management and the key stakeholders of the website. And then the training is more geared towards, you know, the web developers, designers, people who actually, you know, who have hands-on in the website, content providers, people in marketing and communications would all benefit from this training. And this is what we do. It's all done in three stages. And we would encourage, you know, you to contact us. Can you tell us the email with which they can contact you on? My email is mparkatmata.org.qa. Mpark is this M-P-A-R-K. That's great. So at Kitcom, Qatar's ICT conference and exhibition, you've presented an award for best accessible website in Qatar. What was the winning website and how many websites did you evaluate? Well, we've decided to award the most accessible website in Qatar to the Qatar Social and Cultural Center for the Blind. And this was based on looking at over 60 websites here in Qatar, comprised of mostly government and non-profit organizations. And the criteria was like, you know, was based on the lowest number of WCAG 2.0 single-a and double-a errors and usability issues. Now, unfortunately, looking at 60 websites in such a short period of time, we were not able to do a comprehensive review or audit of the websites. So we just looked at a couple of pages, right? We would use an analyzer and we would also test it for usability, right? Just basic usability with a keyboard and screen reader and looking at, you know, color contrast of the website. And that's how we made our determination. Okay, so thanks a lot for your time and we wish you the best of success and luck in your web accessibility services. Thank you very much and we hope to work with all the organizations in Qatar and one day make it fully accessible.