Website Accessibility Project & Questionnaire

[iq938]

Hi,

My name is Imran. I am a 4th year undergraduate Computing Student at the University of Glamorgan. My research project at University is to look at web accessibility for Disabled users.

This questionnaire is being carried out to find how web designers are coping with the issue of accessibility and to what extent are they taking it into consideration as an aspect of designing their web sites.
I have designed guidelines to help curb this problem. Please go to [a href=\"http://access-enabled.co.uk\" target=\"_blank\"]http://access-enabled.co.uk[/a] and then onto the guidelines page to download them.

If you are a web designer, I would be grateful if you could take a few minutes of your time to complete the brief questionnaire at the following link asap:
[a href=\"http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/students/02005786/project/feedback.html\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/students/020057...t/feedback.html[/a]

Please try to answer all questions as accurately and as honestly as possible. All responses to the questions are completely anonymous.

Please get in touch if you have any queries.

[AndyB]

A few thoughts.

It's always nice to tell people in advance how big a download is. Not everyone has a high speed connection. If I were really picky, I'd suggest using the title attribute on all your links as an accessibility improvement.

I completed the form and unfortunately a couple of warnings were thrown (would be an easy fix at your end).
[!--quoteo--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--]Notice: Undefined variable: SERVER_NAME in E:\Students\02005786\project\phpform\use\accessform\process.php on line 17

Notice: Undefined variable: PHP_SELF in E:\Students\02005786\project\phpform\use\accessform\process.php on line 17[/quote]

The guidelines are a reasonable overview of 'a good start'. One thing that designers generally are not able to do is state categorically which accessibility tools can be used with the site since very few designers have the wherewithal to actually test using those tools. Sure accesskey and skip nav are easy enough, but the best most of us can do is use the automated tools like the W3C validators and Bobby or its clones.

One point I'd take issue with is the suggestion that acronyms and abbreviations be avoided as screen readers cannot handle them. I thought that the acronym and abbrev tags were specifically designed to allow and encourage accessibility.

Finally, you might want to provide a link to [a href=\"http://www.nils.org.au/ais/\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.nils.org.au/ais/[/a] where there is a free and very good accessibility toolbar addition that works with IE and allows all developers to conduct all manner of accessibility tests as they design - saves lots of time and there's no excuse for not providing accessibility as far as I'm concerned.

[ober]

Your form is not laid out very well and the last few questions are pretty pointless if the user didn't look at the download yet (like me). You might want to provide a "N/A" option for the last few.

[iq938]

Hi,
thanks alot for all the pointers i will take them into account.