Last week I was talking about Deep Accessibility, and trying to define what it might be (who knows if I’m right). I said that in reality I thought it was pretty difficult to create a kind of Deep Accessibility, but that it was possible and necessary, and it was not just about disability but about all of us being able to access the information and functionality as we want or need.

Last week I said that ‘If open data, and its access by citizens, is as important as governments seem to think, then the deep accessibility of that data is just as important.’ Now, we’ve seen the specific case in relation to Big Open Data; but what do I mean by deep accessibility in more general terms…? Most of us know what accessibility is - or at least we think we do.

It seems to me there is a gap between accessibility as we understand it today and the new requirements implied by todays fast moving, complex, and large data. This data is beyond the ’limited’ user/author created content for which the current guidelines (focused on P. O. U. R.) were designed. Indeed, think back to Christmas and the analysis and collation of usability principles resulting in the principles of: Dialog Yields Closure; Consistency & Standards; Exploit Constraints; Support Control & Freedom; Simple Error Handling; Familiarity; Informative Feedback; Help & Documentation; Resumption of Interrupts; Self Describing; Heuristic Evaluation; Learnability; Real-Virtual Mappings; Reduce Memory Load; Support Navigation & Freedom; Easy Reversal of Actions; Safety; Provide Shortcuts; Simplicity; Attention Singularity of Focus; Task Suitability & Conformance; Flexibility; Universal Commands; Utility; and Make Things Visibility.