Survey: 97% Of World's Websites Do Not Meet Minimum Accessibility Standards

Survey: 97% Of World's Websites Do Not Meet Minimum Accessibility Standards


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6210068.stm

 

But what are those "minimum accessibility standards"? Probably has something to do with also allowing acces to deaf people, or people with limited vision...

 

To be perfectly honest I don't really care all that much about accessibility on 97% of the websites I design!

 

but i want to care about it.

 

You want to care about it but most people don't, they think that it's someone else's problem.
And to be honest I don't care either.

 

Tell you what. If you tell me how to make the equivalence of 11pt font using percentages, so that visually impaired (but sited) users can change the font size in their browser, I will personally include that code in the style sheet I am writing for a professional website, which I am currently designing at work.

 

Fact is, by not making it accessible you are excluding a rather large chunk of your potential audience and in countries like here in the UK it is in fact illegal since October. Like high street shops requiring disabled access, websites should discriminate against disabled/impaired people either.

Fix your site or get sued eventually.

 

Out of curiosity. Do text readers for the visually impaired read over alt tags for images? If so, that would be a good way to find a way to provide accessibility to any kind of image heavy site.

 

People with disabilities account for more like 20% of the population in developed countries like the USA or Western Europe.

Why so high? It's not just about blindness or deafness, motor skills (accuracy with the mouse or input device) and cognitive skills (ability to read or comprehend more complicated sentences) are other examples of disability. Plus many people are not completely blind, but suffer low vision or severe colour blindness that requires high contrast between text and its background.

And LOL at a blind person not wanting to buy a TV - so his kids or wife must be blind too right? Or he should get them to go buy it online and spoil the surprise? Most people with disabilities don't want a free ride, just a fighting chance to do what the rest of us take for granted when we go online.

I'm happy for my clients to accept the 20% of potential sales lost by sites that 'don't care about accessibility'

 

In case I didn't mention, I do care about methods of making sites more accessible. Please, share any you have! I'd be happy to include them on sites I design. If not, I guess I'll have to do some research on methods, but I may miss some gems that you have discovered.

 

@Josh - You can use 'em' or '%' instead of 'pt' to size scaleable text in CSS. And yes, screen readers read the alt text for images. If there's no alt specified, they generally read the path to the file and/or its file name in the hope of generating something useful, but given most sites use a CMS and the image filenames are very long and non-sensical it's not usually a nice outcome!!! So even alt="" is usually better than nothing.

 

@josh - http://www.456bereastreet.com is a blog by Swedish web standards and accessibility advocate Roger Johansson. His site has a wealth of useful information that can teach even the most experienced web designers a trick or two - it really is that good, and rightly deserves its PR8, I'd give it 10!

 

Well we’re including names and alts for all images on the site for SEO anyway, so hopefully that will help make the images more understandable. We’re also doing the menu in text, and the only images are background images, buttons, and a logo.

And while I do know about em, or %, the problem is in trying to translate the size of "normal" text to the equivalent point size (so that those visiting the page on "normal" will see it with that point size).

Thank you for the link though, I’ll definitely check it out.

 

Its just the Tripple A standards i think

 

Hmmm. Interestingly enough, FireFox allows me to resize the 11pt text, but IE does not. I did find that 70% is either the same size as 11 point text, or close enough that I can't tell the difference.

 

Yea, as usual it's only IE that doesn't follow the standards... all other browsers allow the user to resize the text no matter how you specify it in the CSS.

@Certix, the OP said 'minimum levels', AAA would be maximum.

 

hey dude
i m agree wit u.

 

hhmm...this is kinda like a blind guy driving or a fat athletic trainer......just sounds wierd but i can imagine a time when it will be like building codes and you can be fined for not "providing" access to your site for the disabled, hey i feel for the disabled but i don't know if i agree with this. hhmmmm...interesting topic

 

No, actually. It's more like a blind man reading.

If you want a blind person to be able to read your book, all you have to do is make sure that you describe anything you use an image to demonstrate in text as well. Then, when the book is transcribed to braille, they won't miss out on the content due to it being 'picture only'.

By the same token, just make sure that any content in the website is accessible through text of some kind, and the braille reader keyboard extension, or text reading software will be able to read it.

The one difference, is that you can use an alt tag to describe the image, and should at least provide an alt of "" so that the blind user won't have to listen to a file name.