ilikecake
accessible website design & development
by Vivienne Trulock
The study undertaken for this paper is based on an automatic testing study entitled ‘Web Accessibility Reporting Project Ireland 2002 Baseline Study’ undertaken in 2002, by Dr Barry McMullin of Dublin City University (DCU). Dr McMullin’s findings were that 94% of the web sites analysed were not compliant to even the most basic Compliance Level A. McMullin did not undertake any manual checking, user simulation or user testing. The purpose of this study is to see whether, in the past 3 years, any increase in compliance level has occurred in this particular batch of sites.
The home page is generally the point at which most users access a web site Therefore, if a home page is inaccessible, there may be no way for a disabled user to access the rest of the site (Lazar, 2001 cited by Lazar et al, 2003, p.7; Sullivan and Matson, 2000, p.141). In addition, the home page of a web site tends to be the page that is the best planned and coordinated, unlike lower-level content pages which can be managed by different departments or individuals. Therefore, it is likely that if any web pages are accessible, the home page is. (Lazar et al, 2003, p.7). In addition, the entry page can be taken as a good signifier of a web site’s overall accessibility level (Williams & Rattray, 2003, p.713). Therefore, this study will only check the index page in detail. However, all automatic and manual checks will be checked for each page so as to ascertain a true measure of compliance. As some manual checks cannot reasonably be checked without user simulation, some amount of user simulation will also form part of the research.
With regard to assessing the actual accessibility levels of partially accessible sites, there are drawbacks to using all of the previously mentioned techniques. This study therefore, will take a different definition of partially accessible, being that a site is partially accessible where it meets the needs of at least one of the disability groups blind, partially sighted, colour blind, deaf & hearing impaired, mobility impaired, and, cognitively impaired. This study will attempt to identify if, on those sites which are partially accessible, whether any particular disability group is completely catered for. Therefore, it will be necessary to identify which checkpoints are relevant to particular disability groups, and which sites pass these subsets of the WCAG.
As access to disabled individuals is limited, and the amount of sites under investigation is large, real user testing using think-aloud protocol or some similar method will not be possible. However, to include some element of real user analysis, a website will be created as part of this investigation which will allow disabled users to give feedback on the subset of sites which claim to be accessible. These users will be alerted to the presence of this site via a monthly newsletter from the Disability Federation of Ireland, which is sent to 95 national disability organisations with members of varying disabilities. Participation by disabled users is entirely voluntary however the author hopes that these individuals will be empowered by their ability to contribute to furthering web developers’ knowledge of accessible website design. The site is hosted at http://www.accessibleireland.net. (Appendix 14)
In summary, the four questions to be answered as part of this study are:
Cheshire Ireland
Ballyfermot College of Further Education (BCFE)
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A Comparative Investigation of the Accessibility Levels of Irish Websites
- accessible HTML
- Word format (.doc)
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