A Comparative Investigation of the Accessibility Levels of Irish Websites

by Vivienne Trulock

2 ABSTRACT

The importance of access to the world wide web cannot be underestimated. This is particularly so for those individuals who are disabled in such a way as to render access to traditional media difficult to attain or to use effectively. Online accessibility has recently become a focus of both EU and Irish legislation. A communication from the EU Commission in September 2001, proposed an initiative dedicated to achieving accessibility of both public and private Web sites during the European Year of Disabled, 2003.

In 2002, Dr. Barry McMullin carried out the Web Accessibility Reporting Project (WARP), a baseline study of the accessibility of Irish websites (McMullin, 2002). This dissertation uses the same sample of websites and assesses their accessibility and compliance levels in 2005. In addition, the research addresses the limitations of the WARP study by examining the ‘manual checks’. Verification by disabled users is also a priority. The research includes building an AAA accessible dynamic website whereby disabled users can comment on and rate the websites which claim to be accessible. The results will be made available as an online resource. The findings of the research are summarised below.

Accessibility levels have increased among the 152 sites tested in 2002 during the WARP study. This is clearly indicated by the automatic testing compliance results, attained using WebXact online, which have risen from the 2002 levels of 6.3%, 0% and 0% respectively for Compliancy Levels A, AA and AAA to 36.2%, 8.6% and 3.3% in 2005.

Further manual checks on the same sites indicate that the actual compliance levels for 2005 are 1.3%, 0% and 0% for A, AA and AAA Compliance Levels respectively. While over a third of web developers know about accessibility (as indicated by the 55 sites which are compliant with the automatic checks at level A), the automatic checks have become the standard, and fully testing the sites against the WCAG 1.0 guidelines is generally not done.

Of the sites which claimed accessibility, either by displaying a W3C or Bobby compliance logo, or in text on their accessibility statement page, 60% claimed a higher level than their automatic testing results indicated. When these sites were further manually checked it was found that 100% of sites in the sample claimed a higher level of WCAG compliance than was actually the case.

Most sites in the sample were not compliant with the WCAG 1.0 for the entire set of disabilities. However, the concept of ‘partial accessibility’ was examined by analysing which websites complied with subsets of the guidelines particular to different disabilities. Some disability types fared worse than others, in particular Blind, Mobility Impaired and Cognitively Impaired each had full support from at most 1% of the websites in the study. Other disabilities were better supported, including Partially Sighted, Deaf and hearing impaired, and Colour Blind. Support was available from 11%, 23% and 32% of the websites, respectively.

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