Nearly two-thirds of disability World Wide Web sites were found to have
accessibility problems, a recent analysis found. The study by the Gilbert
Center checked the home pages of more than 100 disability organizations
using the Bobby validation tool for accessibility. the full report is
below.
Is the standard for access so difficult or unclear that our own
organizations cannot meet it?
kelly
URL: http://www.gilbert.org/siteanalyzer/
Nonprofit Site Analyzer
The Accessibility of Disabilities Sites
The Gilbert Center
Nonprofit Online News
Nonprofit Site Analyzer
I surveyed over 200 web sites belonging to organizations working in
support of people with disabilities. I used as my sample the home
pages provided by these organizations to an established list of
disabilities resources. Discarding those pages for which the URL
provided failed, I ran each page through a well accepted routine for
determining compliance with the current standards for web page
accessibility.
In summary, I found that nearly 65% of the sites had one or more
accessibility errors. Nearly 80% had some sort of browser
compatibility error that might lead to an access problem. 20% of the
sites took more than 30 seconds to download, though most took much
less. No site had more than three access errors, indicating that
whatever problems do exist would be easy to repair.
This sample is not at all representative of nonprofit web sites as
whole. The sample was deliberately selected because it would be likely
to have the lowest number of problems, given the issue focus of the
organizations. I will discuss the value of these numbers and of web
accessibility tools in general.
Purposes | Methods | Results | Discussion | Conclusion
Purposes
This project had two objectives: (1) To test the Bobby Tool for
evaluating web site accessibility and thus expand my tool kit of
evaluation methods. (2) To evaluate a highly targeted group of web
sites for compliance with such standards, especially in light of
forthcoming U.S. requirements for sites of organizations which receive
government funding.
Methods
I chose as my sample the 253 URLs indexed as of April 18, 1999 at the
World Association of Persons with Disabilities Resources under the
categories of aging, employment, mental health, organizations,
physical disabilities, sensory disabilities, and services. I chose
this index because it represented a large enough sample of
organizations which, presumably, take accessibility issues rather
seriously.
My software collected the page content from each URL and passed it to
Bobby 3.0b3, an application developed by the Center for Applied
Special Technology to test for most of the requirements of the World
Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Out of 253
pages, 183 returned useful data. Others may be completely
"inaccessible" due to bad links.
I defined my primary measurement of accessibility as the inverse of
the number of accessibility errors discovered by Bobby. I considered
browser compatibility errors and download time as secondary issues
affecting accessibility of the page.
Accessibility Errors: The W3C specifies a very long list of
requirements for full accessibility. There are several that are not
captured by the Bobby tool. Some of the errors that are captured
include: failing to provide alternate text for all images, failing to
provide alternate text for applets, or using server-side image maps
without providing similar functionality within the page.
Browser Compatibility Errors: Browser compatibility errors help to
identify whether HTML tags and their attributes are not compatible
with certain web browsers or the W3C HTML specifications. A browser
error means that a page may not render correctly on certain browsers.
These errors are especially troublesome if the user depends upon
standard HTML for assistance in parsing the data.
Download Time: Download time is calculated based upon a 28.8 kbps
connection with a half second latency for each file and image. High
download times are less accessible for all people, but are
particularly onerous for those already dealing with enormous delays
due to their disabilities.
Results
Of the 183 valid samples, nearly two thirds (64.5%) had at least one
accessibility error. None had more than three such errors. More than
three quarters (78.7%) of the pages had at least one browser
compatibility error, with the highest number of such errors being 27.
Number of access and browser errors
There was a wide range of download times for the pages tested. A large
number of pages (42.1%) downloaded in less than ten seconds. Half that
many (21.9%) took more than thirty seconds to download. The mean
download time was was 17.91 seconds.
Download time
Discussion
With the existence of the WWW Consortium's standards, measuring
accessibility is far less problematic than measuring other factors of
web success. This study concerns itself with the three linear
measurements of accessibility listed above.
Browser errors and download time are not officially part of the W3C
accessibility requirements. The sites surveyed did most poorly in the
area of browser errors. But, in my opinion, nonprofits are hardly to
blame. The failure of the major browser companies to adhere to W3C
standards has led to almost insurmountable fragmentation. More
importantly, most of these errors are not fatal to the functionality
of the site.
Download times concern me. The 22% of the sites that take more than 30
seconds to download are sites which are losing people, especially if
subsidiary pages continue to be hard to download. Fortunately, most of
the sites are reasonably speedy, indicating a minimal use of
gratuitous graphics and applets.
I admit some surprise to discover that a substantial majority of sites
contained full fledged accessibility errors, especially given the
deliberately skewed sample I selected. I worry about the accessibility
of other nonprofit web sites.
Conclusion
Most of these sites throw up at least one barrier to access by people
with disabilities. This presents at least two problems for the sites
in question: (1) Such errors make their site less usable to the very
people they want to serve. (2) As funders, such as the U.S. Federal
Government, increasingly require sites to be accessible, these
organization may be putting their organizational financial position at
risk.
As in my previous studies, I opted to take a shallow look at a large
number of sites. But I have no reason to believe that the subsidiary
pages would be any improvement over the front page. If these
organizations were considering accessibility, that would be reflected
on their front page.
Unlike my previous studies, where I have suggested deeper data
gathering as the best next step, the most intriguing extension of this
study would be to broaden the sample of nonprofits far beyond those
organizations serving people with disabilities.
Your advice, criticism and feedback would be most appreciated. Please
send it to [log in to unmask]
. Thank you.
Michael Gilbert
_________________________________________________________________
Nonprofit SiteAnalyzer is a program of The Gilbert Center. All rights
reserved. Mail comments to: [log in to unmask] This page was
last built on Sat, Apr 24, 1999.
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