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A few items on Web accessibility

Busy week or two.

  1. French-language sites in Quebec (“and Canada”) flunk accessibility specs. What a surprise!

  2. 89% of 408 California municipal Web sites surveyed flunked Priority 1 (in automated testing). 75 were manually tested, also with poor results, though the report goes into no detail at all on that point. (In fact, it’s only mentioned on the blog [other entry].) And the actual report is, of course, in a PDF (tagged, with three minor access errors).

  3. Why the ‘statistics defence’ doesn’t stand up:

    The case against accommodating Netscape 4 users is invariably backed up with statistics about how few people now use this admittedly-flawed browser. I’ve heard “the statistics defence”… so often over the years that this latest evocation prompted me to think about why I don’t agree with this approach. [...]

    We can’t argue that we won’t accommodate disabled students because they only make up a small percentage of the student population. Equally we shouldn’t argue that we won’t accommodate users with particular browsers because they are part of a minority. In relation to the particular case of Netscape 4, it is legitimate to ask users to upgrade so that they get both the content and the good design – but not legitimate to argue that they won’t get the content if they don’t upgrade.

    This is a non-starter, really. Disabled people can’t stop being disabled (save for rare cases); anyone using Netscape 4 can upgrade. That browser is hideously broken and outdated and is a thing; we can shun it if we want. We can’t do that to people.

    Besides, any competent standards-compliant designer knows you can use @import to hide stylesheets from Netscape 4 so that a page works adequately in that cœlecanth of a browser and very well elsewhere.

  4. MC May Techno Dance Remix:

    Netscape 2.0 introduced both frames, added in HTML 4.0, and JavaScript, which for the first time allowed client-side forms validation, and later meant the death of us all. CSS, introduced in Internet Explorer 3 and refined over the next seven years, allowed pixel-level control over the display, causing unreadable documents to become the norm, and further blurring the line between Web page and application.

  5. A few surprising facts from an accessibility presentation (edited):

    Users who listen

    1. 2 hours each, typical usability testing scenarios,
    2. Took about twice as long as usual usability tests, which seems typical

    Skipping the navigation

    1. All wanted to skip the navigation
    2. Discovered that they often did not know how to do that with their software
    3. Two jumped to the bottom and read from bottom to top
    4. All sites had a skip navigation link
    5. Most did not know about the link
      1. “skip navigation” is jargon
      2. “skip to content” Jaws mispronounces
      3. “skip to main content” seems best

    Listening only to links

    1. Everybody knew how to listen to links
    2. Jaws can bring up a window with just the links
    3. Example: Looking for “diabetes” when the word “diabetes” is in a sublist of “Diseases and Conditions”
    4. One problem is many blind are poor spellers because they have little practice
    5. Screen readers also pronounce words even if they are incorrectly spelled
    6. Can set Jaws to spell the letters out as you enter them

    Content for users who listen

    1. Do not understand words when the software mispronounces words with more than one pronunciation – content
    2. Web words – homepage
    3. Unususal words – preparedness
    4. Made up words – MedlinePlus, LiveHelp
    5. Acronyms – FY (fiscal year) pronounced “fi”
    6. Get confused if the alt [text] and the words on the page differ
    7. What it said on page was “print answer” but alt [text] on printer graphic said “Printer friendly version”. When wanted to find that location searched for “Printer” which was not found (not in text)

    About forms

    1. Can’t find form if it’s buried on the page or way on the right
    2. Jaws has a command to go to the form, but nobody knew it existed
    3. Do not know there is a form on the page until you encounter it
    4. Users want to stay in Edit mode so you can tab from field to field
    5. Can’t use the form if the field labels aren’t “well behaved”
    6. Need to move from hearing mode to entry mode and back again
    7. Many users had mode problems, hard to do

    We are doing it backwards

    1. Hard to provide guidelines for people who magnify
    2. Today, assistive technologies go on last, on top of regular sites
    3. First build site for most people
    4. Then fix so site works with “special software”
    5. Reverse it
    6. Flexibility
      1. Let people set up personal profiles
      2. One column is very helpful for some people
      3. Some people can handle dense information,
      4. others go into cognitive overload
      5. Wheelchairs are composed of components
      6. Can swap in different components as your body and needs change

This entry was posted on Friday, May 28th, 2004 at 12:33 and is filed under Web accessibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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