“A Standard Is Like a Recipe” – Accessibility Standards Canada on Writing the Rules

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Accessibility standards sound like the driest subject in the field. Philip Rizcallah, who runs the organisation that writes Canada’s, has a way of explaining them that takes about fifteen seconds.

“A standard is like a recipe,” the CEO of Accessibility Standards Canada told Double Tap’s Steven Scott and Marc Aflalo on our AMI-tv sister show Access Tech Live, recorded at the Zero Project conference in Vienna. “If you’re baking a cake, it’s nice to have a recipe that tells you you need these ingredients in this order, you cook it for this long, and you come out with a product.”

Applied to accessibility, that means telling people what to do “if you’re building a building, or if you’re posting an advertisement, or if you’re communicating with someone, so that it’s done in a manner that everybody can understand and that it reaches the masses of Canadians”.

What the organisation actually does

Accessibility Standards Canada is part of the Canadian government and, at the time of the interview, had been running for about four and a half years. Rizcallah described two distinct jobs.

The first is developing the standards themselves, through committees. The second is funding the evidence underneath them: “We give out grants and contributions to organisations linked to the community of persons with disabilities. And they do research, and that research helps inform the development of our standards, it helps inform government policy, but it also helps set guidelines and informs the community of persons with disabilities.”

Why it matters for technology

Standards are the mechanism by which good intentions become obligations. An accessibility commitment that exists only as a policy statement is difficult to hold anyone to; a standard specifies what has to be true, and can be pointed at.

For Double Tap’s audience the relevant point is that the scope reaches well past ramps and doorways into communications and digital services — the areas Canada’s first Chief Accessibility Officer, Stephanie Cadieux, has separately described as the harder and less obvious half of the work.

Resources

• Accessibility Standards Canada: accessible.canada.ca
• Zero Project: zeroproject.org