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Re: Guidelines are only half of the story: accessibilityproblems encountered by blind users on the web

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: May 9, 2012 2:48PM

Firstly I recommend reading the article.

What it boils down to is that standards by themselves are not enough for
developers to deduce what constitutes accessibility, since standards can be
interpreted in many different ways, and are often interpreted wrongly. The
findings of the study support this.

It also states that we should have a proactive approach to accessibility
instead of relying on a reactionary approach geared only on fixing problems
that already exist, which causes accessibility to be an afterthought in most
cases.

Quoting from the article

"The results of this study indicate that it is time to move away from the
problem-based paradigm for web accessibility, where our primary goal is to
eliminate problems encountered by users. Taking a lesson from usability
research, web accessibility research must define a much broader set of
design principles, based on user data, that focuses on the use of the web by
people with disabilities - not just on the problems they encounter."

I agree with this, and have been working for years to promote the same idea.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karlen Communications" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "'WebAIM Discussion List'" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 1:26 PM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Guidelines are only half of the story:
accessibilityproblems encountered by blind users on the web


> One thing I see is that the WCA Guidelines are being used as "standards"
> for
> all types of file formats when we are developing standards specific to
> those
> file formats.
>
> I haven't read the study but in our language we seem to talk about
> guidelines and standards as if they were the same thing.
>
> Hopefully as we develop standards for specific document formats and types
> of
> content they can be incorporated and referred to in the WCA Guidelines as
> specific standards for specific types of content.
>
> Cheers, Karen
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Birkir R.
> Gunnarsson
> Sent: May-09-12 3:54 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Guidelines are only half of the story: accessibility
> problems encountered by blind users on the web
>
> This is a very interesting study, and I need to sit down with it and a
> bunch
> of coffee for an hour or so, to fully appreciate it.
> However, Iahave a few initial reservations.
> Like Gary said, this report seems too blind-centric.
> For another, I have seen a similar article to this, making bold claims
> about
> user issues that WCAG does not address. In that case the gentlman in
> question clearly did not know or understand WCAG at all, and made a lot of
> eroneous claims regarding its shortcomings. There is no connection, as far
> as I know, between that and the report this group has produced, so I am in
> no way questioning the depth of their knowledge of this issue, only that I
> need to study the details of their tests to see if their evaluation agrees
> with my understanding of WCAG.
> The third concern I have is whether the users know how to use their
> assistive technology. You can implement the most accessible site in the
> world, according to standards, but if the user does not know how to
> utilize
> these to explore a website these are useless. As someone who works closely
> with A.T. instructors I see this time and time again, the A.T. training is
> often simply not up to bar, so that part of it needs to be pooked at
> specifically to see if, or how much, of a part this plays in the problem.
> Related to this is the Assistive Technology itself, if that does not
> support
> whatis being implemented on the site, the benefit of sticking with
> standards
> does not end up with the users.
> It just seems people are very quick to blame deficiencies in the WCAg
> standard for all perceived web browsing issues, putting all the
> responsibility of the user experience on the web site developer and the
> accessibility standards, and none on the users themselves or the
> technology
> they use (GW Micro, for instance, does not support ARIA landmarks and
> won't
> till version 8, this even if the landmarks have been around for years and
> are supported elsewhere).
> I have some issues with the Success Criteria specifically, and I think the
> standard could be simplified a lot, and it is a fact it has not been as
> effective as many of us would have hoped, whatever the reason.
> But I think our assessments of the standard, which is a necessary and
> useful
> thing to do, must take these other issues into account and understand the
> part they play in the usability problems.
> Cheers
> -B
>
> On 5/9/12, Morin, Gary (NIH/OD) [E] < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> Speaking ONLY for myself, and I don't mean to be insulting or
>> insensitive, but "accessibility" is not defined solely on whether only
>> blind users and not other persons with disabilities can use the web or
>> any
> other technology.
>> I know that, for example, on Google's Accessibility listserv I was
>> told bluntly that that is the definition of accessible and that any
>> other group had to specify the term (i.e., accessible to Deaf persons,
>> accessible to persons with dexterity impairments, etc.), as if by some
>> majical decision the definition was restricted to only group of persons
> over another.
>>
>> I write this because it concerns me that we're almost having to play
>> against each other - i.e., my oppression, my disability, my lack of
>> access is worse than yours - rather than what do we have to do
>> collaboratively to ensure that technical is meaningfully accessible to
> each of us and to all of us.
>>
>> Done for now with my two shekels worth of your time on my soapbox,
>>
>> Gary
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Bryan Garaventa [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 1:03 PM
>> To: WebAIM Discussion List
>> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Guidelines are only half of the story:
>> accessibility problems encountered by blind users on the web
>>
>> Sorry about that, forgot to add the description.
>>
>> This paper describes an empirical study of the problems encountered by
>> 32 blind users on the Web. Task-based user evaluations were undertaken
>> on 16 websites, yielding 1383 instances of user problems. The results
>> showed that only 50.4% of the problems encountered by users were
>> covered by Success Criteria in the Web Content Accessibility
>> Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). For user problems that were covered by WCAG
>> 2.0, 16.7% of websites implemented techniques recommended in WCAG 2.0
>> but the techniques did not solve the problems. These results show that
>> few developers are implementing the current version of WCAG, and even
>> when the guidelines are implemented on websites there is little
>> indication that people with disabilities will encounter fewer
>> problems. The paper closes by discussing the implications of this
>> study for future research and practice. In particular, it discusses
>> the need to move away from a problem-based approach towards a design
> principle approach for web accessibility.
>>
>>
>> Full text PDF:
>> http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id"07736&ftid16890&dwn=1&CFID
>> 545442&CFTOKEN`990192
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Bryan Garaventa" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>> To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 9:08 AM
>> Subject: [WebAIM] Guidelines are only half of the story:
>> accessibilityproblems encountered by blind users on the web
>>
>>
>>> This is an interesting article from the University of York
>>> http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id"07736
>>>
>>> I'm glad I'm not the only one saying this any longer.
>>> >>> >>> list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>>
>>
>> >> >> list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>>
> > > messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
> > >