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womble -> RE: 148 page report (12/23/2007 7:03:39)
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I had a quick look at this last night, and there's some good stuff in there, and certainly a lot of useful information for anyone who's new to accessibility and isn't sure why all the accessibility checkpoints are so important, and how people with disabilities use the web. As the report stresses though, accessibility in it's truest sense is about more than just ticking the boxes, and usability and accessibility go hand in hand. One's useless without the other.
quote:
Inaccessible and unusable sites abound. Even sites that are theoretically accessible often have low usability for people with disabilities. Our studies indicate that Web usability is about three times better for sighted users than for users with visual impairments.
That's not a surprising figure really, but it should be of great concern to anyone who cares about making their site available to the widest range of users. The really nice thing about the report is that it doesn't stick with the rather dry recommendations of the WCAG, but using real life examples, and screenshots and photos really demonstrates exactly what the problems are.
The one thing I found disappointing with the report was that it doesn't cover, "people who are hard of hearing, deaf, or color-blind, nor did any participants have cognitive disabilities". It would have been nice to have a comprehensive view of all aspects of accessibility, but I suppose for free we really can't complain.
The one thing I've found so far with the report that I disagree with is to do with their methodology with usability studies, where it says:
quote:
Because the Web’s use of audio is currently limited, we did not include users with auditory impairments.
That kind of makes it sound like if a site doesn't have audio content that it's accessible to people with auditory impairments, but I did some courses with groups of deaf people as part of a voluntary group I was involved with last year, and particularly for profoundly deaf people, people who have been deaf since birth who are sign language users, whose written English skills commonly aren't as developed as hearing people's, due to the education system for deaf children, sign language users have huge problems using the web, probably more so than blind users because their needs are rarely considered except on specialist sites for deaf people.
That's a shame, because it can only take some relatively minor changes, like the addition of some visual cues such as using appropriate icons to give deaf people who's first language is sign language a better idea of the content of a site and what links are for, along with making sure that the language used is accessible to all (in much the same way as using the simplest language possible, as suggested in the WCAG guidelines for users with cognitive disabilities), to make sites much more accessible to deaf people.
Overall though, I think particularly with using case studies and screenshots this report is good, and offers something that others on accessibility don't, because it shows rather than tells what the problems are, so it's much easier to relate the problems people with disabilities have to your own experience of using the web. At first glance it does seem like an incredibly long report, but it's definitely worth reading, if only to dip in and out of areas of interest or to get an overview of what the problems are.
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