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

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: May 9, 2012 1:53PM

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.
>> >> >> >
>
> > > >