An Analysis of Accessibility Issues for Disabled Web-Users

In a short period of time the World Wide Web (WWW ), with its global reach and versatility, has had a huge impact on the way people live, work and study. It provides access to information, news, email, shopping, and entertainment. In fact, there can be very few people left that the Web has not affected in some way or another over the last few years. However, the people that have yet to fully experience the advantages of the Web is a group which is generally overlooked: users with disabilities. Research shows that one in seven people in the UK - about 8.5 million – suffer from some form of disability. Over two million people in the UK have a sight problem and 8-10 per cent of the male population have some sort of colour blindness (DRC, 2004).

With the Web constantly evolving as a key resource for commerce and business, the case for Web accessibility is undeniable. There is simply no excuse for creating inaccessible websites anymore. There is a vast quantity of information on hand to assist a site developer to work around all possible accessibility barriers. Constructing accessible Web pages is relatively simple to do, but research has shown the majority of Web designers do not make an effort to do so.

This paper examines the issues and user barriers regarding the concept of Web accessibility for disabled users. A series of recommendations will also be provided regarding how best to motivate designers to create accessible sites.

In a short period of time the World Wide Web (WWW ), with its global reach and versatility, has had a huge impact on the way people live, work and study. It provides access to information, news, email, shopping, and entertainment. The Web, with its ability to serve out information at any hour of the day or night about practically any topic conceivable, has become a way of life for an impatient, information-hungry generation (Bohman, 2003). In fact, there can be very few people left that the Web has not affected in some way or another over the last few years. However, the people that have yet to fully experience the advantages of the Web is a group which is generally overlooked: users with disabilities.

The need for the Web resources to be accessible to users with disabilities has been a key issue. This issue has been acknowledged in the last couple of years by the establishment of legislations and initiatives in a number of nations, including the UK and the US. These legislations are based on providing legal requirements for certifying accessible resources on the Web for users with disabilities.

According to research by Petrie et al (1999), the Web offers one of the best opportunities to deliver information inclusively of people with many kinds of disabilities. However, the recent urge to deliver ever-increasing volumes of visually attractive information via the Web has repeatedly resulted in designs which create many barriers to access for millions of Web users.

This paper examines the current issues and barriers regarding the concept of Web accessibility. By understanding these principles, it is hoped that many organisations will find the transition to an accessible site much easier than those who choose to ignore it.

Accessibility is a moral concept, politically correct to the core. But there remains a slight disagreement about what it is and how it can be achieved on the Web. The accessibility of websites does embrace much more than just disabled access. It’s about providing people with unrestricted access to a website from different devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Web Accessibility is also about providing access to users who have different screen sizes and different browser types and settings.

This report is not about accessibility in general; instead, it concentrates on one aspect, namely the obligation of websites to provide access to disabled users. Web accessibility in these terms can be described as the “ability for individuals with disabilities to have access to and use of information and data on the Web that is comparable to individuals without disabilities” (WAI, 1997-2004).

Making websites accessible to all potential customers seems like common sense. Research shows that one in seven people in the UK - about 8.5 million – suffer from some form of disability. Over two million people in the UK have a sight problem and 8-10 per cent of the male population have some sort of colour blindness (DRC, 2004). The annual spending power in the UK equates to a minimum of 40 billion pounds and this amount is being virtually ignored by commercial organisations (Pickering, 2003). If the scope is expanded worldwide then the amount of people with disabilities increases to over 750 million people. Obviously, not all of these people have disabilities that make it difficult for them to access the Web. However, if only a handful of these people have disabilities that hinder their ability to use the Web, this is an influential proportion of the world population. It must then be realised that organisations would be silly to purposely exclude 20, 10 or even 5 per cent of their potential customers from their Websites. Organisations such as schools, universities, and other government entities would be not only unwise, but, in many countries, they would also be breaking the law if they did so. Legislation such as the UK’s Disability Discrimination Act and Section 508 in the US now requires websites to be accessible. The United Nations and the World Wide Web Consortium have declarations and guidelines to try and make sure everyone can get access to information delivered on the Web.

Disabled access is about making websites usable by those with disabilities. For example, a visually impaired Internet user can use a screen reader to translate the contents of Web pages for speech synthesisers or Braille displays; but the user will struggle to understand Web pages if, for example, images are displayed on the page without a text alternative (which can be provided in HTML by an alt attribute). This is a common example of a user with a form of visual impairment using the Web. There are also those with motor disabilities, cognitive disabilities and other impairments.

The implications of failing to provide website accessibility for disabled users is two-fold. Firstly, it effectively prevents millions of disabled people from accessing your site, and secondly, it potentially breaks the country's Disability Discrimination Act.

There is a growing acknowledgment that users with disabilities must have the same right as any other users to access information technologies. Bonner (2002) states that “many people with disabilities find the Internet and Web makes a difference between living and just existing”. Gristock (2003) agrees suggesting that “often, a computer is a link to the outside world where a disabled person can perform as an equal to a non-disabled person”. Without a doubt, the launch of the Web has created opportunities that ten years ago were inconceivable. However, the critical issue here lies in making sure these opportunities are available to everyone.

The World Wide Web (WWW ) is just over a decade old and has only really been used regularly by people for the last eight years or so. One of the main problems with the Web is that it has no central governing authority. According to the DRC (2004) “This relative immaturity and lack of regulation is both a source of strength and a weakness, giving free rein in equal measure to individual creativity and to irresponsibility. As a result, all who use the Web are likely to experience frustration from time to time, and any site visited can prove to be a learning experience”.

It must be recognised that the Web has enormous potential for disabled people. Bergman & Johnson (2000) suggest that “there is an increasingly wide range of assistive technologies such as screen readers, speech browsers and Braille displays which allow people with varying disabilities to access Web-based information”. A vital issue arises, however, when benefits cannot be provided by these assistive technologies due to a high percentage of Web-based information being provided in a manner which makes it extremely inaccessible to users with disabilities (Sloan, 2001).

Many websites are so poorly designed that many disabled users are suffering from a wide range of accessibility problems which prevent the assistive technologies from effectively interpreting all of the available Web information. This view is backed up substantially by research carried out by the Disability Rights Commission - DRC (2004). They commissioned the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City University, London to survey a large and representative sample of websites used by the British public. Using a commercially available software tool, City University tested the home pages of 1000 sites for technical compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The results showed a staggering 81 per cent of sites surveyed failed to satisfy the most basic Web Accessibility Initiative category (Level A). 100 of the 1000 surveyed sites were also manually tested by disabled users. In total, the disabled user group identified 585 accessibility and usability problems; but nearly half of these (45 per cent) were not violations of any of the WCAG's 65 checkpoints – meaning that they could be present on any website which conformed to WCAG guidelines at any level. These alarming findings show that the guidelines themselves may be inadequate.

The outcome of the survey carried out by disabled users confirm that many sites have characteristics that make it incredibly challenging, if not impossible, for people with certain impairments, especially those who are blind, to make use of the services provided. These troubles and tribulations have become even more apparent over the last few years due to the ever-increasing use of detailed graphics and complicated multimedia features such as animations to communicate information.

Irresponsible and inconsiderate design is an issue which not only puts disabled users at a significant disadvantage but can make life unnecessarily difficult for everyone, whether disabled or not. According to Britten (1998) “making websites accessible to the largest possible population was always a part of the intentions of the Web’s initial inventors, who dreamed of a universal Net-based information medium”. However, everyone knows that the Web is becoming increasingly commercialised. The concept of Web accessibility has unfortunately been politely ignored. This will be discussed in a later section.

In recent years, the physical world has adapted to the needs of the disabled: wheelchair ramps, Braille markings and other helpful innovations. However, the real issue behind the lack of Web accessibility was discovered during a survey from the major computing retailer, PC World. More than 30 major shopping, search, auction, news, and financial websites were contacted by PC World and only a very small percentage declared any interest in taking action to tailor their sites for accessibility. A spokesperson for an electronics retailer who asked not to be named replied, "that is not a market we are interested in pursuing." PC World revealed that many Web retailers declined to be interviewed for the survey and others did not return any of the repeated calls.

The results of the survey did reveal that some sites expressed a vague interest in keeping all users happy. However, others were fairly dismissive. Anna Lonergan, a spokesperson for The Gap, revealed that the company has no plans to make its site accessible. She said. "We are aware of the technologies available but have no plans to implement them” (Bonner, 2002).

Overall, there are several important issues regarding Web accessibility and its importance in today’s technology-driven society. As the analysis of the issues illustrate, it appears the subject of Web accessibility is considered momentarily by developers but then often ignored with the aim of creating the most visually attractive site. However, to a disabled user, an inaccessible website is very unattractive indeed. Organisations are voluntarily losing the business of these users as well as risking legal action and PR problems. This chapter has analysed the current issues regarding Web accessibility and the following chapter moves on to discuss and examine the different barriers to website accessibility for the disabled-user population.

Although the main aim of a majority of websites is to be accessible to all their users, many of these websites fail to realise that they are excluding a large amount of users. When designing websites, many designers exclude those users who have disabilities (WAI, 2004). According to Sullivan and Matson (2000), 95% or more websites do not cater for users who have some kind of disability.

According to Access Web (2004), there are different disability groups that usually have problems in accessing the Web because they are not catered for or thought of when designing the website. The groups can be grouped under the following main disabilities:

1. Co-ordination difficulties;
2. Hearing difficulties;
3. Sight difficulties.

Users with co-ordination difficulties are those people with disabilities such as repetitive strain injuries, cerebral palsy, arthritis and many others. These users main problem is the use of the mouse. Most of these users will have difficulties in guiding the cursor with accuracy. This is particular a problem where the links are too small for such users. There are many questions that designers do not consider when designing their website such as, is the size of the links big enough for all users? Will the size of the links be the same on different resolutions? Is the overall site easy to follow- i.e. does the user have to jump of one place to another to get to where they want to? Also if the user has to fill in a form, are their alternative methods for example, phone/fax numbers, mailing address? This is because a majority of forms that need to be filled in on the Web need some sort of mouse use.

Users with hearing difficulties can be split into two different groups. The first is those users that are hard of hearing or partially deaf and the other group are those users that are fully deaf. Both kinds of users normally have access problems for those sites that are audio orientated. Web designers need to consider whether audio-intense pages offer users with hearing difficulties alternative methods of gaining that same information. This also applies to websites which use video and animation clips.

This group of users is one of the main groups that need to be addressed. This is because there are over 400,000 people in the U.K that are visually impaired (Scottish Executive National Statistics, 2004). There are different types of visual impairment.

The first is difficulty in seeing small things. Web designers need to consider whether or not the information they provide can be magnified. Also designers need to consider whether or not the quality of the information remains the same after the information is magnified.

The second difficulty is colour blindness. Colour blind people have great difficulty distinguishing between certain colours, such as, yellow and blue and red and green (VisCheck, 2004). Designers need to make sure that when they are designing their websites, they do not mix colours that can affect those who are colour blind. It also has to be considered whether or not the website is just as effective in grey scale as it is in colour. This is because many colour blind users tend to prefer having their screens defaulted to grey scale.

The third difficulty is moderate- to fully-blind users. Web designers need to ask themselves how to cater for blind users. The first thing they need to consider is whether or not users can access the information in audio form. This is particularly important where images are used. Designers need to consider describing the images in text form, in such a way that blind users can effectively understand the information about the images in the same way all other users can. These images include tables, pictures, graphs, charts, etc. This is also the case for video clips. Web designers also need to consider whether or not information and/or the whole website can be converted into Braille. This is important for those users who prefer to use Braille over audio.

Web designers are essentially visual people. They have spent many years honing their skills in the visual media - planning, designing and creating websites. Accessibility is not a visual phenomenon - it is a technical problem. Designers learning about accessibility need to go through a second learning process to understand the difficulties of non-accessible sites for disabled users: the way screen readers work, the importance of simply marking headers correctly or having resizable text.

The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 states that the user should be able to navigate in a variety of ways i.e. via links and searches (Brewer, 2004). Constructing a search engine on a site is not a trivial task and many Web authors do not know how to do this without additional training.

There is a conception amongst designers that making a website accessible will take a lot of time. There is the need to put in alt, title and label tags and attributes. The need to learn to separate design from content, by using style sheets for layout and colour instead of font and table tags. Implementing access keys & skip navigation links all takes time.

In addition, most clients are none the wiser. If the client doesn’t specifically ask for an accessible site, then supplying it costs the designer. Other Web companies not ensuring accessibility can charge less for what seems superficially to be the same site.

Many designers like to retain control over their design. They don’t want people to be able to resize the text or apply a different style sheet to their site, because it will look ‘ugly’ or ‘boring’ (WebAIM, 2004(b)). There is a general conception amongst designers that accessible sites are ugly and boring looking (Brewer, 2004). Accessibility is often viewed as a limitation on design. Usability guru Jacob Nielson, although he knows a lot about usability and accessibility, is often not taken seriously by designers as his own site (www.useit.com) is so basic and visually uninspiring.

The concept of ‘accessible design’ is a new one. Web authoring tools such as Dreamweaver have begun to aid designers to create accessible sites with their ‘Accessibility Preferences’ option. This option is off by default but, when turned on, prompts the designer to create title, label, caption, summary and long description tags and attributes when inserting images, form elements and tables (Macromedia, 2004). However, this is only of use when creating a new site from scratch. Modifying an old un-accessible site and trying to make it accessible requires doing everything the hard way – by laboriously hand coding the html. Macromedia have made a token effort to aid accessibility, but that is all.

Many screen readers were designed to read text only documents. Since then they have been adapted to reading Web browsers, but many don’t work very well. Rather than parsing the source code and reading the content of each table cell or div tag individually, Jaws for Windows, for example, presents the screen as a series of lines of text. This approach can be a problem when nonlinear (columnar) information is forced together such as vertical navigation and content (Leventhal, J. & Earl, C., 2000). Of course part of the problem stems from the fact that designers (being designers) started using tables for page layout, where tables were originally designed for data.

There are two specifications which may be adhered to: WCAG 1.0 & US Section 508 Guidelines. In addition within the WCAG there are 3 levels (A, AA & AAA). Only level A is ‘required’. AA and AAA are advised but optional. Different standards may be required at national, state or organisational levels (Brewer, 2004 & Sullivan, 2000). Not surprisingly, this can cause confusion among designers.

Accessibility testing tools such as bobby.watchfire.com or WAVE can generate results which are unwieldy and difficult to understand and interpret, especially for non-professional Web designers. This may deter some designers from attempting to make their site accessible. In addition, testing tools may be inaccurate: they can check that alt text is present, but cannot check that it is correct and appropriate (WebAIM, 2004(a)). Moreover, some sites may partially conform (Sullivan & Matson, 2000). It is not an ‘all or nothing’ scenario.

Accessibility has a low profile: for example, the ‘Webby Awards’ criteria include content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity and overall experience. “The most functional sites also take into consideration those with special access needs.” (Webby Awards, 2004). Accessibility is not listed as a criterion for a successful website on its own merits; it is a subset of functionality.

A site may technically conform to the W3C or Section 508 specifications, but may still be unusable to disabled users (Brewer, 2004), for example, through incorrect use of the ‘skip navigation’ option.

Introducing laws to ensure accessibility is a crude method of enforcing it. The best way to create an inclusive atmosphere is to convince the designers that accessibility is fashionable and trendy. The Guild of Accessible Web Designers has this ethos. This site is devoted to accessible Web. Not just the how and the why of it, but competitions for accessible sites, promotion for accessible sites via theirs, status for accessible designers and a portal for viewing sites that are both accessible and highly designed.

"Promoting a vision of the future that assumes accessible Web design to be, relevant, obtainable, and not at odds with successful business practice or good visual and usable design." (GAWDS, 2004).

The British Web Design & Marketing Association has a “Visionary Design Award”. The sites are chosen by the National Library for the Blind, and indicate progress that is being made and raises awareness of the need for useable and accessible Web design (BWDMA, 2004). All of this lends credibility to the accessible design movement; more of this is needed.

A redesign of an industry standard Web tool like Dreamweaver would go a long way towards resolving some accessibility barriers; specifically the properties window should allow easy modification of accessible attributes for each element and the ‘Accessibility Preferences’ should be turned ‘on’ by default.

Designers can form discussion groups consisting of those users with the above disabilities and ask them to describe the difficulties they face and give opinions and suggestions about how to overcome these barriers. After creating the website, designers can do various tests to see how effective their ideas about overcoming such barriers have been resolved and if they have met the needs of all users. Evaluation by disabled users in addition to testing with usability evaluation software will more accurately predict the sites accessibility and usability. This also has the advantage of exposing designers to accessibility problems associated with their site and of personalising the issues. Accessibility will no longer be about guidelines, law and good business: it will be about people.

The complex issue of Web accessibility requires an investment of time, money people and resources on the part of individual organisations. Training and re-education may be required for many designers. Exposure to wonderfully designed accessible sites such as csszengarden.com will enthral designers and inspire them to the same end.

The Web provides so many new opportunities to people with disabilities that are unavailable through any other medium. It provides a method for accessing information, making purchases and communicating with the world that does not depend on the responsiveness of other people. The Web offers independence and freedom (Bohman, 2003).

With the Web constantly evolving as a key resource for commerce and business, the case for Web accessibility is undeniable. There is simply no excuse for creating inaccessible Web sites anymore. There is a vast quantity of information on hand to assist a site developer to work around all possible accessibility barriers. Constructing accessible Web pages is extremely simple to do, but research has shown the majority of Web designers do not make an effort to do so.

Web accessibility is now not only a legal requirement and a social responsibility, but the organisations that are not taking action to guarantee accessibility are willingly neglecting a highly accessible online market. Accessible websites will benefit every user. Pickering (2003) puts it accurately by stating “Web pages that are created with a disabled audience in mind will be pleasing to the eye, fast loading, easy to maintain, present information in a direct and simple manner, navigate with consistency, and will function across a range of browsers and rendering devices”.

It must be accepted that all specifications for accessibility of websites do not absolutely guarantee a perfectly usable and ultimately satisfying Web experience for every single disabled user. However, by following these formal guidelines, an organisation can effectively target an untapped market.

This paper has thoroughly examined the issues and barriers regarding the concept of Web accessibility. A series of well-researched recommendations have also been provided on how best to motivate designers to create accessible websites.

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