A Comparative Investigation of the Accessibility Levels of Irish Websites

Achieving accessibility to any level is not an easy task. It requires, on the part of the developer: awareness, education, training, organisation, diligence, perseverance, communication and persistence. For the organisations involved it requires time, money, interest, understanding and compromise. For the countries involved it requires public awareness funding, legal consequences for inaction and the belief that disabled individuals have rights to information equal to that of other citizens. While there has been an increase in accessibility levels and awareness of the issue much still needs to be done.

There are several iterative steps involved in implementing online accessibility under the current guidelines. First of all, there needs to be an awareness of the accessibility issue, in that there is an issue. Education of web developers and promotion of accessibility issues will raise the profile of the accessibility movement. This should include the updating of all web modules currently taught in third level colleges and universities to include accessibility issues. In addition, public awareness of accessibility and equality mandates and laws should also increase the likelihood that a client will request an accessible website during the initial consultation phase. This can be accomplished through general advertising in the newspapers and the radio, or delivered during seminars to public interest groups.

Web developers need to understand how to actually implement a site which conforms to their relevant guidelines whether they are Section 508 (US), WCAG 1.0 (EU and Australia) or the Common Look and Feel Guidelines (Canada)). This may require additional training on the part of the developer. This may be self directed or formalised in seminars and should include both understanding of web accessibility issues and specific practical skills development on how these guidelines should be implemented. One third of sites are at least partially compliant, more should be done regarding raising education levels of designers.

Web sites should be created with accessibility standards in mind. An accessibility statement should be created as part of the design guidelines to ensure that standards are adhered to both during the initial design phase and during subsequent site updates. This statement should include the level of accessibility to which the site is being designed. The site should then be tested for conformity to the guidelines. Several automatic checking systems are available. These are a good place to start, however, all the manual checks should also be checked and passed by the designer. This can be difficult as they can be ambiguous and subjective. The methodology section outlines some techniques to use when undertaking manual checks. In addition, a resource website, hosted at http://www.accessibleireland.net, has been created as part of this dissertation which elaborates further. It may help developers to join a mailing list or network of like minded individuals, such as the

• IRL-DeAN (Irish Design-for-all eAccessibility Network),
• E-DeAN (European Design for All e-Accessibility Network),
• IDD (Institute for Design & Disability),
• EIDD (European Institute for Design & Disability) &
• GAWDS (Guild of Accessible Web Designers).

Sites should be retested regularly for compliance. In some cases, changes made to the site can themselves be non-compliant. It is therefore necessary to retest the site after changes are made, to ensure that the changes themselves are actually compliant. If they are not, the site should be re-updated and retested until the site is completely compliant.

Ideally, the site should be evaluated by actual users, both disabled and otherwise, on a variety of platforms, systems, resolutions, text sizes and colour availability. This is necessary to ensure that the site is actually usable. A study by the Disability Rights Commission claimed that up to 45% of the problems experienced by disabled users were not a violation of any WGAC 1.0 Checkpoint, and would not have been detected without user testing (Disability Rights Commission, 2004, p.12). Where rigorous testing is not possible due to financial or practical constraints, the site should be submitted to http://www.accessibleireland.net or other similar site for general user feedback.

Again, changes made may actually cause further confusion to another group so all changes must be retested and re-evaluated by users to ensure that they are effective. Subsequent to user testing it is also necessary to retest the web site for conformance to the guidelines, as changes made during the user testing updates may themselves be non-compliant. This testing should also be done on normal site updates before they are posted live.

Finally, a feedback form should be included with the web site in the event that unforeseen problems arise for some users. The feedback should be checked regularly and any required changes made as soon as possible.

Adding automatically checkable checkpoints which are not currently tested by accessibility tools to their repertoire and creating a site-wide batch process where all pages would be tested at once would raise the likelihood of compliance.

Further refining of these accessibility tools to eliminate false positives and false negatives would also render more confidence and increase the accuracy of the compliancy results. The redesign of the w3c website to facilitate navigation of the space in an intuitive fashion would also help, as would more detailed instructions on some particular accessibility authoring techniques.

In the proposal, 4 main questions were identified. Three of these have been answered as part of the study.

• To what extent have the websites in the 2002 study addressed accessibility issues in the last 3 years? (Finding & Results section)
• What, if any, recommendations can be proposed for version 2 of the WCAG guidelines? (Discussion section)
• What factors are inhibiting the accessibility movement in Ireland? (Discussion section)

The strengths of this study are noted below.

This study follows on from a comprehensive review of a particular sample of sites completed in 2002, so direct comparison of the findings is possible, both in general and on specific checkpoints.

The study completed all of the manual checks required so as to ascertain a measure of true compliance to the WCAG guidelines.

Further, the study addresses in a logical fashion the concept of partial accessibility, and publishes results which enable analysis of those disabilities which are more or less facilitated. This concept has been the focus of several studies in the past, however, the authors in general used reductionist methods, further clouding the issue.

As the author is an accomplished web designer, it has also been possible to estimate the time required to comply with several of the checkpoints for a range of websites.

In addition, the study facilitated direct input by disabled individuals through the creation of a dynamic accessible website www.accessibleireland.net, which allows real users to comment on the sites, and developers to see what the effect of their actions, or lack thereof, are.

Further, given the lack of navigational and content support on the W3C website, (www.w3.org) this site has been developed into a resource for developers, with detailed instructions on how each checkpoint might be complied with and tested for compliance.

Several limitations have been noted with regards to the W3C website, the WebXact testing tool, the WCAG checkpoints and authoring tools, specifically Dreamweaver. It is hoped that this will prompt those individuals who can facilitate change within these structures to do so.

There are several limitations to this study, as follows.

The fourth question posed in the proposal has not yet been answered, but may be answered in time, via the www.accessibleireland.net website.

• To what extent do the WCAG 1.0 guidelines meet disabled user needs?

Human error is likely to account for some distortion in the figures. Whilst every attempt has been made to test each site thoroughly, it is almost inevitable that some false positives or negatives have occurred.

Many of the checkpoints are subjective by nature. While every attempt has been made to identify exactly what techniques were used to measure compliance it is still possible that other people using the same criteria would arrive at different results. It is also possible that some people might disagree on the validity of the criteria set out in this dissertation.

False positives or false negatives on the part of WebXact as mentioned in the Discussion will also further distort the figures.

The original study used Pavuk software to download a specific amount of data from each site. As this study required that manual checks be completed, it was not possible to conduct the study in an identical fashion, and so the index pages were used instead.

Only the home page of each site was checked for most of the checkpoints. It is likely that the home page is the most well designed page on the site, and therefore has a higher likelihood of being accessible than other internal pages. If this is the case, the results shown in this dissertation may be falsely high for compliance.

Further, as the 2002 study limited its testing by available data, rather than by pages the comparative results may not be entirely accurate. The overall results are further skewed at it was not possible to assess the entire 159 sites on which the 2002 study was based.

One of the aims of the original proposal was to contact web developers and clients of the sites and survey them with regard to their knowledge of accessibility issues. This part of the proposal was not completed, as it was possible to make conclusions based on the findings of automatic and manual checks. In addition, the work involved in setting out the methodology, conducting the manual checks and creating the online resource, took longer than expected therefore less time was available for the survey.