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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

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Bryan Garaventa
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 1:04 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.
> > >