Accessibility Guidelines Only Part of the Picture

City University (London) recently completed its accessibility survey of 1,000 British Web sites on behalf of the UK's Disability Rights Commission. It is probably the largest of its kind ever undertaken, but sadly the results are no surprise - certainly not to anyone who has ever tried to navigate a Web site without a mouse. However, some of the findings are quite interesting and have even managed to spark a minor conflict with the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, which may increase interest in the topic, if nothing else.

First, the predictable information:
All 1,000 sites were tested against the WAI’s Web Content Accessibility guidelines with an automatic testing tool. The results are as follows:

Fewer than 19 percent of home pages were Level A compliant (assuming that some would also fail the manual tests required by the guidelines).

Only six of the 1,000 home pages passed the automatic testing for Level AA, with four of those failing the manual tests. That left only two sites as AA compliant (0.2 percent).

No home page was Level AAA compliant.

The usability tests found 585 issues. The majority of these (425) were attributed to just 10 problems as shown in the table below.

Problem Count %
1 Unclear and confusing layout of pages (Count 101: 17.3%)
2 Confusing and disorienting navigation mechanisms (Count 96: 16.4%)
3 Inappropriate use of colours and poor contrast between content and background (Count 59: 10.1%)
4 Incompatibility between accessibility software and web pages (Count 45: 7.7%)
5 Graphics and text size too small (Count 44: 7.5%)
6 Incorrect or non-existent labelling of links, form elements and frames (Count 24: 4.1%)
7 Cluttered and complex page structures (Count 23: 3.9%)
8 ALT tags on images non-existent or unhelpful (Count 16: 2.7%)
9 Lack of alternative for audio media and complex terms/language (Count 10: 1.7%)
10 Complicated language or terminology (Count 7: 1.2%)
Other (Count 160: 27.4%)
Total (Count 585: 100.0%)