This article is concerned with something I realized while reading "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies", by Naomi Klein. Much of her thesis centres around how brands are trying to usurp and take-over most of our public "space" & culture in the interests of corporate profit.
A point that is made several times throughout the book (I admit, I'm only halfway-through at the moment) is that while brands seek to swamp us with a plethora of products and variety, they also rob consumers of any real choices. Competition and choice are the antithesis of what Brands are all about.
Accessibility is a choice, not a right?
Cascading Style Sheets represent a promise for real choice to web browsers and their users. Cascading Style Sheets are intended to separate content (text) from style (appearance). Designs using only CSS are, by their very nature, fluid, and ultimately subject to the will of the user, who can even go as far as to turn off Style Sheets in some browsers. This technology is often lauded as the gateway to accessibility for the web. Indeed, there are many guidelines on how to make your webpages more "inclusive" and "accessible" (see the "Web Accessibility Initiative" put forth by the W3C for an example).
One of the major strengths of CSS is its ability to negotiate between the designer's preferences, and those of the user. Usually, the user's preferences override those of the designer, if they conflict, or if they are even specified. How many of us actually have a custom style sheet for our web browsers? However, someone with visual impairements, who may have trouble reading small text, or certain color combinations, can tell their browser to make all the text it displays larger, or use certain colors on certain backgrounds. Some users may not even be looking at the page, but relying instead on a screen-reader to read it out to them. As a web designer, it is sometimes difficult to remember that some users are listening to our pages instead of seeing the flashy layout we've constructed.
Many of these accessibility technologies can be thwarted if a web designer uses certain methods. Non-standard HTML
code, browser-specific tags, the dreaded <font> tag, even table-based layouts can all interfere with a
screen-reader, or user-defined style sheet. Table-based page layouts often require the use of a number of "spacer' graphics,
which screen readers often read out, making a page appear quite garbled when the content, including normally blank space,
is read out in a different order than the eye might expect.
None of this is new to anyone familiar with CSS, but the point I would like to make is that web designers and developers can choose to design their pages to be inclusive, or exclusive. Why would anyone want to make and exclusive page or site? Because it allows the designer to take advantage of exclusive technologies offered by certain platforms, browsers, etc. to create a desired effect, usually a visual, or multimedia effect. Indeed, if web designers aren't careful, they can unintentionally (or intentionally) make pages that are quite inaccessible to people who literally see things differently than the designer. This may be due to a visual impairement, or because they are using an older browser, or can't afford the latest bleeding edge in browser or display technologies. I have endeavoured to be as inclusive as I can with my own site design, but even I don't claim that my site is totally accessible, mostly because I simply don't have the experience to make that claim with confidence. I hope it is, though.
Why Brands won't like CSS
So, given that designers can choose to be inclusive or not, I realized that as the internet becomes more and more commercially-driven, that choice is threatened by the very forces that have made the web so popular and "accessible".
Following Naomi Klein's argument about how brands operate, it seems to me that, although large branded companies want you to get online and experience the multimedia entertainment that is their site, they want you to experience it the way they intended it. Microsoft may want everybody to get access to the internet, but when you visit their site, they would rather have better control over how their information is displayed to you.
Because brands require strict control over how their information is accessed, they don't want to allow any control to the consumer (in this case, the browser or user) in this respect. Cascading Style Sheets are the very antithesis of a branded entity's desire for control over how their content is accessed. To a brand, the content (text) and style (appearance) are one and the same - inseparable. More often than not, the style is the content, or at least the most important aspect of it.
The danger I fear is that, as more public web "space" becomes commercial, and branded, the more control these brands will desire over how content is accessed over the internet. This does not bode well for true accessibility to internet content, or even the idea of "free speech" and any sense of culture on the internet. This web "space" includes not only the content of the pages downloaded from the servers, but the servers themselves, the servers that create the very infrastructure of the network that is the internet, and ultimately the producers of the programs we use to browse the web. Let's not forget about how Microsoft "bundled" Internet Explorer with it's OS , without giving consumers a choice, so that users never knew there were better alternatives.
Concluding Thoughts
The internet has always seemed to be beyond the reach of corporations and lawyers, but they are catching up. As oppressive forces learn more how to control the internet, many exciting new technologies may be threatened by corporate brand extension. For examples, just look at Napster, mp3s, and other technologies that were, for a time developing faster than the corporate infrastructure could keep up.
I just hope CSS isn't driven out by the brand bullies. I like my choice, and I like being able to give others a choice in how they interact with my content. I believe that will ultimately encourage more people to experience and participate!
Related Links
- At the bottom of this article, you'll see how branding has affected a corporate site's functionality, and possibly accessibility - but at least they're using standards-compliant code :-)
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