Attitudes to Web Accessibility

From Usability News:

During the summer of 2003, we ran an online questionnaire, conducted interviews and carried out a literature review on Web accessibility. One hundred and seventeen respondents participated and they included designers, information officers and accessibility advocates. This initial set of results are intended to encourage debate on the subject.

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What seems to be our concern as developers is this:

1. Overcoming obstacles

The obstacles faced by developers are less often discussed than their responsibilities. The survey found that 86% of respondents agreed that 'Developers do not have adequate training' in Web accessibility. Indeed, a 'lack of expertise' was given as 'the main barrier to developing accessible Web sites'. On a more positive note, 48% disagreed that 'most development lifecycles are too short to incorporate accessibility'. That it 'takes too long' was the lowest ranking barrier to accessibility. The EC's Diffuse project (www.diffuse.org) presents a balanced perspective on the difficulties faced by accessibility advocates. It states that 'many of the problems and possible solutions (to accessibility) are technically difficult'. The recent debates about Cascading Style Sheets and Tables are testimony to the obstacles faced by developers; neither solution seeming to be optimal. Alan Herrell, on alistapart, describes the situation as 'browser hell' where 'there are three major visual browsers' none of which allows 'you to use the entire range of accessibility tags'. As Diffuse suggests, this means that a technique that avoids a problem in one browser may cause other, perhaps more serious problems, on other browsers.

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