Access the survey at http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/. The survey will take approximately 10-15 minutes. Please redistribute, particularly to screen reader and disability groups. The survey will remain open through October 2009.
As a follow-up and update to the original WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey, we are happy to provide an updated survey. By completing this survey you will help inform development choices for those creating accessible web content. All screen reader users, even those that use screen readers only for evaluation and testing, are invited to participate.
Totally inaccessible.
That’s the most accurate way that Google Wave (not to be confused with the original WAVE) accessibility can be summarized. It must be disclaimed that this is a very early preview release of Google Wave, and functionality and accessibility will certainly be improved along the way. Still, it is rather disheartening to see no attention paid to accessibility. For example:
- Alternative text is not provided for any images.
- Background images are used to convey content.
- Roles, states, and other accessibility properties are not defined.
- There is no document or heading structure or semantics. None! Not even a list!
- Form elements do not have labels or titles.
- Keyboard focus indication is hidden, making keyboard navigation nearly impossible.
- Most interactive elements are not in the tab order or do not respond to keyboard activation.
- Keyboard focus is often trapped, requiring the page or browser to be closed to resume keyboard navigation.
- The application becomes unusable and unreadable when text size is increased only slightly.
… and I think you get the general idea. One positive point – the welcome and introductory videos are captioned.
Possibilities
Despite it’s rudimentary nature, e-mail continues to pose a relatively significant accessibility issue to users with disabilities. This is primarily due to its dual-threaded nature – meaning that messages can have replies, but the content of replies often takes an entirely different form. The response text of a particular e-mail might be top-posted, bottom-posted, or intermingled throughout the original message. This complexity is compounded by the fact that participants can join or leave the e-mail discussion at any point.
Google Wave does a wonderful job of addressing these issues by presenting the conversation in a way that does not rely on threads or quoted replies. The entire history of a conversation can be viewed or replayed. Conversation participants can join or leave along the way without losing context, history, or content. Additionally, Google Wave adds real-time interactivity and collaboration to the communication.
In short, the potential for Google Wave to streamline and enhance communication for people with disabilities, especially screen reader users, is great. Could Google Wave be made accessible? I believe it could be. I would never advocate that accessibility constraints should limit innovation – indeed many of the most accessible technologies now available started as accessibility black holes. Of course it is always easier and better to implement accessibility as part of innovation, something clearly lacking in this case.
With ARIA and modern-day user agents and screen readers, Google Wave can be made accessible and become a powerful tool that ALL users can enjoy and benefit from – and people with disabilities have particular need for such enhanced communication tools. With a bit of education or guidance, and typical Google ingenuity, Google Wave has great potential to not only be a wonderful tool, but a wonderfully accessible tool.
(Contact the author through Google Wave at jaredsmith36459@googlewave.com)
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.
Update: The United States signed the treaty on July 30, 2009.
This Friday, July 24th, at 4:45pm, President Obama will indicate his intention to sign onto the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The document will likely be delivered to the UN on July 30th. This is a historic occasion—one that will positively affect web accessibility here in the U.S.
Many WebAIM readers are familiar with the impact that this UN treaty will have on accessibility (We have posted on this topic before). The CRPD embeds requirements for accessible information throughout the document and it includes an entire section (Section 9) devoted to accessibility. The authors of the CRPD view the work of accessibility as an important mechanism for a “civil society” to affect true social inclusion.
Once the U.S. is a signatory to the CRPD, we will begin the long process to align our national laws and policies to that of the UN treaty. There will be much work ahead for those of us who advocate for accessible web content. We in the U.S. have waited a long time for this moment. Although our internal ratification process may take some time, let us give thanks that our nation has begun to join 140 others who have already signed onto the CRPD. As the 19th anniversary of the ADA draws near, this is a fitting step toward providing persons with disabilities with important extensions of their civil rights.
Dennis and guest Jennison Asuncion discuss the upcoming CSUN conference, formally titled The 25th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference. Discussion includes helpful hints about the conference, session previews, and special events. The event is March 22-27 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown San Diego, California.
Download Web Axe Episode 79 (CSUN 2010 Preview)
[transcript of podcast 79]
Related Links:
Twitter And Assistive Tech
Dennis Lembree (@dennisl) and Joseph O’Connor (@csunwebmaster) are presenting “Accessibility of Twitter for Mobile, Desktop and Web” at the 25th Annual International Technology and Persons With Disabilities Conference in San Diego, California. The conference dates are from March 22 to 27. The presentation is scheduled at 8 a.m., Thursday, March 25.
You Can Help!
We are asking you to tweet about using Twitter with assistive tech on two topics:
- How do you deal with the interfaces?
- How has Twitter changed things for you?
Optional: audio record the written Tweets at http://twaud.io/ or whatever you want to use. If you do record, please be sure to record what you have written in each Tweet you write. Write a Tweet, record that Tweet. You don’t have to record your Tweets to participate.
Accessible Twitter
This might be a good time to try Dennis Lembree’s Accessible Twitter site and to Tweet about the experience.
How We’ll Use Your Tweets
We will use the Tweets/audio in our #csun10 presentation. We’ll present the Tweets on screen and hear the words – something for everyone. We’ll be looking for patterns such as the use of desktop applications with ZoomText, or mobile text with Talks, or mobile app with VoiceOver. These patterns will be touch-points for our presentation.
Hashtag
The hashtag for these Tweets will be #csun10s with the “s” representing story.
When Do I Start?
The days/dates we’ll be collecting Tweets and audio are Friday, February 26 – Saturday, February 27 in the northern hemisphere; Saturday, February 27 – Sunday, February 28 in the southern hemisphere.
Be Creative!
Feel free to be creative, to have fun, to be serious, to be furious, to be whoever you are. You know you want to do it!
NOTE:
This article on Joseph O’Connor’s web site Black Telephone
On February 12, Jebswebs and I twittered that the Vancouver Winter Olympics web site is not accessible. Jebswebs reported 58 errors on the home page alone using the WAVE tool. (View the re-tweet from Jennison.) I listed examples such as several navigation issues and Flash and JavaScript issues.
Ten days later, Joe Clark published an excellent article Vancouver Olympics Web sites are inaccessible to disabled people. He first points out that John Furlong (CEO of VANOC) broke a promise to make the web site accessible. (Even after a a blind man in Australia won a human-rights case against the Sydney Olympic organizing committee and IBM for an inaccessible web site.) Joe provides a report on the inaccessible content and also publishes responses from the VANOC and his replies.
It doesn’t take an expert to find areas where the Winter Olympics site needs improvement. Even for alternative text, one of the most basic and important guidelines for web accessibility, the site is lacking. This includes inadequate alternative text for Flash content and the fact that many images do not have alternate text.
In addition, the following points are for navigation only!
- Dropdown menus require JavaScript.
- Redundant title attributes
- No skip-to links
- No focus state on links (only mouse-over)
- No ARIA
- No menu heading
My suggestion for those who need more accessibility? Try Yahoo’s Vancouver Winter Olympics coverage.
Here are highlights of the many great links relating to web accessibility going around Twitter this past month:
One may plainly say that Apple’s new iPad is an assistive technology device. Like the iPhone, it includes many accessibility features such as:
- VoiceOver
- screen zoom
- white-on-black display
- mono audio
- closed-captioned content
But as pointed out in the article Accessibility and the iPad: First Impressions, it additionally has the following helpful features:
- Large size (for visually impairments)
- External Keyboard (for mobile impairments)
- Speakers (for visually impairments)
- Simple Interface (for cognitive impairments)
Although I feel that the iPad is certainly better than Amazons’ Kindle, I believe that the iPad will not “kill” the Kindle, mostly because of the price difference. The iPad is much more expensive ranging from $499 to $699 while the Kindle is $259. For more on this, check out Apple Tablet Could Be A Kindle Killer.
More Related Articles
The author and main host of Web Axe, Dennis Lembree, is interviewed in a podcast on the BBC! It’s in the show entitled Haiti, BIL and accessibility on the BBC Pods & Blogs section. The BBC podcast can be found here, but is only available for seven days as it is then replaced by the following week’s program. (The interview starts at about 14 minutes 30 seconds into the podcast.)
The show notes state:
New and social media should not be left out of the equation of course. Dennis Lembree makes the Web Axe podcast about accessibility and has also created a Twitter reader that he says is 100% accessible.
Much of the phone interviewed was edited down, but it’s still another win for awareness of web accessibility. In addition to Web Axe, Dennis mentions AccessibleTwitter.com and the Detroit Podcasters Network.
Addendum
Just before Dennis, accessibility expert and evangelist for Yahoo, Artur Ortega is interviewed.
You can download the BBC podcast here! (It’s no longer available on the BBC page.)
