For Learning Sake

The results from WebAIM’s most recent survey are now available at http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/. Thank you to those who participated. We had 665 responses to the survey. The data collected is informative, useful, and will help direct development of accessible content for screen reader users.

Be sure to check out the results of our previous survey as well.

While the full details are available, here are a few findings we found interesting, surprising, or relevant:

• JAWS continues to be the most popular screen reader (75%). Window Eyes use remains at 24%. However, NVDA (26%), System Access (23%), and VoiceOver (15%) all saw tremendous increases in usage in the 10 months since our previous survey.
• 83.6% of respondents updated their primary screen reader within the last year.
• 50% of respondents (53% of respondents with disabilities) use a screen reader on a mobile device.
• 75% of respondents do not have javascript disabled in their primary web browser.
• 42% of respondents did not know that ARIA landmark functionality even exists.
• CAPTCHA, Flash, ambiguous links, poor/missing alternative text, complex forms, and poor keyboard accessibility are cited as the most problematic items on the web
• YouTube (51.3%) and blogs (47.7%) are the most commonly used social media tools, with LinkedIn (13.4%) and MySpace (9.0%) rarely used.
• The majority of respondents found blogs, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube to be accessible and most reported LinkedIn as being inaccessible.
• 62.6% say it is somewhat unlikely or very unlikely for Flash content to be accessible to them.
• Headings are the primary mechanism (50.8% of respondents) for finding information within a page.

Please take some time to review the survey results. We will be posting observations and details from the survey’s open ended questions in the near future. If you have questions, want us to analyze a particular piece of data, or have recommendations for a future survey, please contact us or leave a comment below.