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

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: May 10, 2012 2:39PM

The study was very interesting, but suggests an expansion on the category of accessibility which I'm interested in hearing whether people agree. I do agree that the issues raised in the study are problems for users, but I'm not convinced that they are _accessibility_ problems that need to be covered in an accessibility standard.

The six categories of errors that the study identified as not having any WCAG 2.0 requirement to address, and the six which are covered somewhat are worth mentioning - I'd be interested in whether people agree that these should be part of WCAG.

Not covered in WCAG 2.0:
1) Content found in pages where not expected by users
2) Content not found in pages where expected by users (example provided: "on a museum website, users followed a link to an object in the museum collection but did not find any information about the room in which that object is displayed, which they expected.")
3) Pages too slow to load
4) No alternative to document format (e.g. PDF)
5) Information architecture too complex (e.g. too many steps to find pages)
6) Broken links

Covered at least in part by WCAG 2.0:
7) Functionality does not work (as expected)
8) Expected functionality not present
9) Organisation of content is inconsistent with web conventions/common sense
10) Irrelevant content before task content
11) Users cannot make sense of content
12) No/insufficient feedback to inform that actions has had an effect

So, what do people think? How many of 1-6 should be added to WCAG?

AWK