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Re: Best Online Survey Tool

for

From: Jim Thatcher
Date: Aug 1, 2011 4:30PM

Dennis,

I am really disappointed that after our correspondence prompted by your
negative tweets about Survey Monkey, now you refer to me "Rubber Stamping"
Survey Monkey. Those surveys are accessible like none I have seen. And we
all worked hard to make them usable with a screen reader. Some of the issues
you raised are important and I told you I was contacting Survey Monkey about
those. In particular the lack of focus indication in Firefox is a critical
problem. I tend to live in IE where the focus indication is fine.

Jim Thatcher
http://jimthatcher.com

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Denis Boudreau
Sent: Monday, August 01, 2011 10:48 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Best Online Survey Tool

Hi Gary,

I've used Survey Monkey for one last week and the results so far have proven
quite satisfying, even though the accessibility support is imperfect:
<http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BT95K7M>;.

The problems we found while auditing the survey were:

* No <h1> tags
* No visible focus using the keyboard
* Mouseover effects are not visible when using the keyboard
* The main language of the document is not determined
* Some tags aren't used in the way the spec intends them to be (ie. the use
of <abbr> to specify a mandatory question using the *)
* Font sizes being fixed in absolute values

To me, the most important problems aren't the ones a blind user would
experience. It's actually users operating without a mouse I'm more concerned
with. No visible focus, no onfocus effect, etc. All this makes using only
the keyboard almost impossible for them. Making sure those effects also
worked with the keyboard would have made a world of differences.

When it comes to screen reader users, as a french speaking individual, I
tend to be more concerned with documents whose lang attributes haven't been
specified. I have screen reader user friends that have their ATs configured
in FR, so for them, this survey becomes impossible to understand as well
because the document doesn't tell the AT to switch to EN.

So, between non-english speaking users and keyboard only users, that makes
quite a few accessibility concerns we should be worried about as well.

On the plus side, SurveyMonkey decided not to resort to using fieldsets and
legends because it does become repetitive using screen readers. The way it
was implemented, with the question being repeated once for the very first
option only is actually clever. Also, tables are actual data tables, coded
properly with with th and scope. Questions are all h3. Page title is h2. No
h1, couldn't understand why from talking with Jim Thatcher who rubber
stamped it as Section508 compliant a few years ago.

Finally (and I admit it's a much smaller issue), defining font sizes in
pixels makes life more difficult for low-vision users still using IE6. And
while most have better browsers where zoom can compensate, it's not everyone
who benefits from that today. Setting up a relative for value instead is not
such a big deal and would have also helped in this matter.

Besides that, everything else, while being perfectible, actually works for
those who've tried it. So overall, pretty good if you happen to live in the
real world.

/Denis




On 2011-08-01, at 5:48 AM, < <EMAIL REMOVED> > < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> Surveymonkey should work. I use it to complete surveys with JAWS and
> thern't any problems eusuallywith this site.
> Chuck
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Gary Barber" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> To: < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 3:03 AM
> Subject: [WebAIM] Best Online Survey Tool
>
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> First post here in a long long time.. so be gentle
>>
>> I need to send out an online survey to about 2000 people with various
>> disabilities. The budget does not allow for a custom survey build.
>>
>> Which online survey tool would people recommend.
>>
>> I have heard, anecdotally, that SurveyGizmo isn't that good with AT
>> despite all their promotional claims.
>>
>> --
>> Gary Barber
>> User Experience Designer
>>
>>
>>