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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: Léonie Watson
Date: May 13, 2012 7:22AM

It is an interesting paper to read. The idea of a set of design
principles is also interesting. It's something we've been working on in UK
government recently. The Gov.UK design principles are still alpha release,
but for practical reasons inclusion has already emerged as a principle in
its own right.
http://www.gov.uk/designprinciples/

To answer your question Andrew, I'm not sure that those six points
can (or should) be included in a set of accessibility guidelines. Like most
things it isn't that simple though, so I've put some thoughts down here. You
might want to grab a cup of tea first though...

1) Content found in pages where not expected by users.
2) Content not found in pages where expected by users.

With points 1 and 2 it's difficult to judge whether they should be
covered by WCAG, or whether they may already be covered. There isn't enough
information given in the report to explain why participants were surprised.

Given that the report finds that they were not covered, we have to
assume that the surprise wasn't due to poor preceding link text, poor page
titles or other factors covered in WCAG.

My guess then is that the Information Architecture (IA) is the
underlying problem in these cases. I can't envisage how that could be
addressed through WCAG though. Link text aside, it's a subjective
categorisation problem that is best addressed through card sorting or some
other usability technique isn't it?

3) Pages too slow to load.

I'm not sure why this would be considered an accessibility issue.
Obviously, if you can't get to the page you can't access it, but that's
level right across the playing field.

It also opens up a can of worms in terms of definition. Even if we
tried to come up with a design principle, as opposed to a testable SC, it's
a challenge. Too slow for whom? On which device/connection? In what
environment/context?

4) No alternative to document format.

There wasn't enough information in the report to really understand
this point. If, as I suspect, it was largely about alternatives to PDFs, I
wonder whether it's entirely an accessibility issue.

Given that there may not be a single file format that is truly
accessible to and usable by everyone, there could be an argument for a WCAG
guideline to cover the need for alternatives. The bit I'm uncomfortable with
isn't the legitimate provision of an alternative format, but the escape
clause it opens up for less committed content authors. Perhaps I'm worrying
too much though.

5) Information architecture too complex (e.g. too many steps to find pages).

This has reflections of points 1, 2 and 3. The challenge would be
defining a design principle or guideline that successfully encompassed such
a subjective and context dependent issue.

6) Broken links

This comes back to the point that if you can't access a page it
isn't accessible by definition, but then it isn't accessible to anyone
equally. At the risk of being flip, if we start down this path do we need to
include guidelines for things like factually incorrect content as well?

Taking a step back to the report itself, I understand that
researchers need to choose a limited field of study and that the headline
finding needs to grab attention quickly and concisely. I can't help feeling
that screen reader users have once again become the poster children for
accessibility, and that the headline is at odds with the focus of the report
itself though. The real irony is that the report is an untagged PDF (which
I've emailed one of the authors about).

Léonie.


From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Thu, May 10 2012 2:39PM
Subject: Re: Guidelines are only half of the story: accessibility problems
encountered by blind users on the web

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