The research was conducted by Professor Helen Petrie of
accessibility and usability firm Designed for All. Her team studied
500 websites: 250 UK or UK-oriented e-commerce sites and 250
financial sites based in the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New
Zealand and the US.
Of the 500 sites, 40 (8%) had an accessibility statement or
logo. However, when 20 of these sites were inspected further,
only six were found to be accurately stating their
accessibility.
Professor Petrie does not suggest that website owners are
deliberately misleading people; but she highlighted some of the
risks for those who get their statements wrong.
“A company’s accessibility statement is a reflection of its
values towards disabled people," she said. "People’s trust will be
affected if a company makes a public statement that is not
reflected in how it actually behaves.”
Professor Petrie previously led a team that worked with the
Disability Rights Commission (DRC) to produce Britain's most
comprehensive report to date on the state of web accessibility,
published in April 2004.
That report confirmed what accessibility professionals already
knew: most sites display woeful levels of accessibility. Of 1,000
sites tested, 81% failed on automated testing to reach Level A of
the best known guidelines, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative's
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG Version
1.0.
More important than the statistics in the DRC report was the
impact: for the first time it brought the legal, commercial and
ethical arguments for web accessibility to the attention of the
mainstream media and board rooms.
The exaggeration of accessibility statements is a known problem.
In March 2004, one month before the DRC's landmark report, web
testing specialist SciVisum found that 40% of a sample of more than
100 UK sites claiming to be accessible did not meet the WAI
checkpoints for which they claimed compliance.
OUT-LAW put the DRC report and SciVisum's research to Judy
Brewer, the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Domain Leader, in
April 2004. She told OUT-LAW that "over-claiming a site's
accessibility by as much as a-level-and-a-half is not
uncommon."
Reasons for inaccurate claims
Brewer acknowledged a problem with the WCAG checkpoints: the way
WCAG Version 1.0 is written, it can sometimes be difficult to tell
whether various checkpoints are satisfied.
At the time, she was working on WCAG Version 2.0 which promises
to make it easier for web developers to know that they have met the
guidelines. Version 2.0, Brewer explained, should be more precisely
testable. (The final version of Version 2.0 is still awaited.)
But interpreting accessibility guidelines is not the only
problem.
Léonie Watson, chair of the Association of Accessibility
Professionals (the AAP was formerly called the Usability and
Accessibility Working Group) said: "I believe the problem is that
there is a great deal of focus given to attaining accessibility
targets at the time of launch, but that very little is done to try
and sustain those achievements as the site evolves."
Watson continued: "An ongoing quality assurance process is
needed to ensure that the level of accessibility is maintained as
new content is added and the site expands. The fact that such
solutions are rarely implemented makes it very easy for
accessibility statements to fall out of date and become
inaccurate."
Another problem is that some developers think they know more
about accessibility than they really do.
Steve Green, a director with Test Partners Ltd, told OUT-LAW:
"We test a lot of sites before they go live, and although the
developers we work for usually have a good understanding of
accessibility we have never seen a site that claimed to meet WCAG
Level AA or AAA that actually did. A lot of sites met their claim
of Level A, but that's usually because they kept things simple by
avoiding frames, tables, JavaScript, image maps etc."
He added: "In my opinion, the vast majority of website
developers do not understand the reasoning behind most of the WCAG
criteria, don't know how to implement them appropriately and
wouldn't know how to test whether they met them."
Suppliers who exaggerate their skills, even in good faith, make
the commissioning of accessible sites very difficult for
non-experts. To address this, the AAP is developing an
accreditation scheme for suppliers. The scheme will make it easier
for those commissioning sites to identify qualified suppliers who
will have undergone a peer review to carry the accreditation.
