David Hawdale, head of design and usability at Zendor, looks at moves to make websites more accessible to disabled users
It was of little surprise that a recent Disability Rights Commission report on Web Access and Inclusion for Disabled People highlighted the need for website developers, commissioners and owners to draw on real users for evaluating websites for accessibility compliance.
To ensure adequate website accessibility demands, usability testing with real users is essential. Reliance on automated testing is simply inadequate.
Ten years after the Internet first made its mark, disabled people are still struggling to access websites. Without legislative direction, the recognised process for accessibility evaluation is defined by the guidelines recommended by the W3C WAI (World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative). These guidelines apply to manufacturers of web browsers, evaluation tools, and website authoring tools, and pertinently, to website authors.
The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) are a prioritised list of checkpoints evaluated subjectively by performing automated testing, manual testing, and usability testing.
Although five years old and currently undergoing review, the guidelines do offer a good representation of what makes a website an accessible website. It’s the interpretation of the guidelines that is unclear.
Take, for example, the running of an automated evaluation tool on an inaccessible website. If the tool categorises issues as ?failures? and ?warnings?, does this mean that once the ?failures? are addressed, the seemingly unimportant ?warnings? can be safely ignored? Absolutely not. The warnings form part of the mandatory manual testing stage to discover issues that an automated evaluation tool cannot determine, such as being able to understand the website content without audio, images, colour or mouse.
Manual testing only attempts to uncover the real world issues about how disabled visitors use websites, and it is not an alternative to real usability testing with real users in real contexts.
One of the main findings of the DRC report is that website authors relying only on automated evaluation tools are failing to address usability problems that cause disabled users difficulties in using a website. They found “an apparent disjuncture between the WAI guidelines and real-life problems” with only 55 per cent of specific usability problems covered by any of the WCAG checkpoints.
In fact, the WCAG does instruct evaluators to perform usability testing with “people with different disabilities, different levels of technical expertise, and different levels of familiarity with the site”. Usability problems such as inconsistent navigation, contrast issues and difficult-to-locate information, once corrected, can result in an improved user experience.
But it’s not just users with disabilities that websites are failing. Users of all abilities can be confounded by inconsistent navigation, too much information or unnerving colour schemes. Good visual design and layout should be inclusive - accessible sites need not be blocky and ugly.
Also, it’s false economy to compromise any aspect of design because the building blocks of web standards are inherently accessible. In reality, creating an accessible website costs no more than creating an inaccessible one, and by preventing visitors from using a site, revenue is being lost.
The standard that website authors should be aiming for is to develop websites that are attractive, usable, accessible and that means involving users from an early stage, and not just putting ticks in the WCAG boxes. This may seem common sense, but clearly common sense is still being ignored.
And the result? Frustrated web users and lost revenue ? a lose-lose situation.
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