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Re: Web development; How to identify if a screen reader is in use

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From: Jordan Wilson
Date: May 12, 2017 2:41PM

I'll jump in on Jon's side of this - I believe better data and tracking is important.

At scale its very difficult to manage accessibility priorities with so little data. I'm not looking for data to weigh accessibility against no accessibility, I'm weighing 90 accessibility projects against each other and looking to optimize the accessibility of what's already been made accessible.

A lot of this discussion has been fixed on the legal reasons for accessibility, but the marketing opportunity reasons can be even more compelling. If I'm missing 32,000 visitors a month because my site doesn't provide strong accessibility I don't just want to remediate to the minimum standard, I want to enhance the experience so that it's driving business. That means Marketing and Sales are now advocates and not just Legal/Compliance. Marketing is driven by data, without it we'll never get them on board.

How many of you are building sites that are compatible w/ IE5 or IE6? The answer is (hopefully) none. Because of data. We make decisions because of data all of the time. We've all been in a meeting where someone uses theory craft to voice an opinion but then someone else shows the actual data and the opinion shifts.

The same is true of accessibility data - my accessibility budget is large, but we all have limited resources. I have hundreds of sites and millions of assets that I need to make accessible. Stronger data would allow me to better allocate our resources to benefit the most people over time. Without it, I'm doing the best I can in the dark based only on opinion and I have very little information about what is really going on.

Here's how I would use good data if I had it:

Prioritization:
Two sites get a ~ 8 million hits a month. Site A gets 150,000 AT hits a month, site B gets 63,000. Let's remediate Site A first then Site B.

Identifying Pain Points:
90% of AT users started this particular form and didn't complete it. We should re-evaluate that form to make sure we didn't miss an issue.

Showing lost opportunity:
There are 130,000 AT users visiting the site but only 500 completing a transaction. That rate is much lower than the site average. How can we optimize the experience?

Avoiding waste:
Only 112 AT users / year are using this archival PDF service but the effort to remediate will take a ton of resources. We'll provide an appropriate on-demand solution until we have finished other more important accessibility projects.

Identifying trends and outliers:
Across all of our sites, AT user's average time spent per visit is 105% of non AT users. Site X is at 20% why is there such a discrepancy?

Showing improvement trends:
Ever since we remediated the site, AT users are spending on average 4 minutes per visit which is now comparable to the average and up 140 seconds.

Having AT data is not about disability detection - in fact as Jon described that's not even possible. Detecting keyboard input doesn't tell us anything about a user's individual disability. It really is about technology patterns. As a manager of multiple digital projects, the disability of one individual is not useful and is protected under security and privacy laws.

What's useful are cumulative technology trends, outliers and prioritization of solutions.

-Jordan


On 5/12/17, 10:13 AM, "WebAIM-Forum on behalf of Jonathan Avila" < <EMAIL REMOVED> on behalf of <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> sniffing for a screen reader (for example) doesn't mean that the end user is actually using the screen reader themselves (it may be a shared machine, where 1/2 of a "couple" need a screen reader, the other doesn't), or situations where both sighted and non-sighted users are looking at the same web page together at the same time.

I'm not talking about whether a screen reader is installed but rather looking at the user's behavior on the site to predict whether the user is navigating with a screen reader. I agree that a person could be using a screen reader and also use a mouse and the person may not have a disability. That supports the point that I am trying to make that the purpose is not to detect people with disabilities but to understand user behaviors using different technologies. So this isn't about disability -- many people without disabilities use speech output for navigation and speech output (and input) with Alexis and Siri. So it's more about understanding how the user is interacting with the site regardless of anything else.

> Thus, the presence of AT alone is meaningless, and attempts in using that data to modify the user-experience will likely fail as often as succeed.

I never suggested that the data should be modified or redirected for a screen reader user. That's the knee jerk reactions that everyone has had. I am against alternative sites. Separate is not equal.

In the future we will be interacting with content in many different ways both accessing the information and operating the content. Having information on those interactions is important to supporting different method of interaction, adaption, etc. It's nice to say just create your website using universal design and it will work for everyone. But that's an oversimplification that doesn't address the real world obstacles that even WCAG conformant sites have. We are living in a situation where assistive technology is always behind the current technology and where huge gaps in user agent support exist. This isn't just about screen readers -- for example, we need better data on other user behaviors such as zoom. Low vision people are asking for 400% zoom with no scrolling in the direction of the text in WCAG 2.1 on sites and some on this list are pushing back suggesting 150% is only possible. But without data we don't know what most people are using and we don't know what sites are really capable of. Data is an important part of research and can help us make more informed decisions on how prevalent zoom is used and at what level, etc.

Jonathan

Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group
<EMAIL REMOVED>
703.637.8957 (Office)
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