II. Web Accessibility
2.1. Myths and Misunderstandings
2.1.2. Study Results
Forty-seven people answered to the questionnaire, among them, 29 (62%) stated that they have previously heard of web accessibility, of these 29, 55% work in the computing field (web put aside), 21% work in web development and 24% do not work in a field related to computing. Of the 18 (38%) respondents who stated that they had never hear about web accessibility in the past, 32% work in the computing field and 68% do not work in a field related to computing.
| Activity | Knowledge (number) | Knowledge (percentage) | No Knowledge (number) | No Knowledge (percentage) | Total (percentage) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Related to Computing | 15 | 58% | 5 | 29% | 47% |
| Related to Web | 5 | 19% | 0 | 0% | 11% |
| Non Related to Computing | 6 | 23% | 12 | 71% | 42% |
| Total | 24 | 100% | 16 | 100% | 100% |
The circumstance in which the people who knew about web accessibility heard about it are mostly related to their work or studies (69%) and to a personal interest in the subject (59%) (See Table 2.2).
| Circumstances | Number of Respondents | Percentage of Respondents |
|---|---|---|
| At work / school | 18 | 69% |
| By personal interest | 14 | 54% |
| At random | 1 | 4% |
| Other | 4 | 15% |
| Total | 26 | 100% |
When asked to give a definition of web accessibility, most people (26 – 55%) were able to give a coherent definition, while 10 persons (21%) were only able to give a limited definition, generally referring to blind or short-sighted people only. 8 other persons (17%) were not able to produce a coherent definition, generally referring to hardware and broadband availability, especially from people who answered knowing about web accessibility, and referring to links and referencing of web pages, from people who answered having never heard about web accessibility.
When asked to give the characteristics of an accessible website, only 7 persons (15%) were able to give a satisfying list of characteristics an accessible website should have (Among others: W3C valid HTML code; interoperability; alternative content to audio, video, or image content; plain language...). 20 persons (43%) were only able to give a very short list of characteristics, most of the time limited to adding alternative text to images or audio content, or to the respect of HTML standards, or an easy navigation menu. Some also talked about the absolute no-use of Flash content (See 6.4.5. Flash) or of the necessity to integrating an option allowing the user to change the size of the text in the interface (See 7.4. Too Much Accessibility Kills the Accessibility). Finally 18 persons (38%) were not able to give a satisfying list of characteristics. The characteristics listed by those who knew about web accessibility were: the ability for the user to access the source code (which is more a principle of open source than accessibility); that the content of the website should be available for free and within three mouse clicks; that the interface should be minimalist (See: Accessibility means ugly text-only pages). The characteristics listed by those who did not know about web accessibility were: a good search engine optimisation; the ability for the website to generalize information; and a satisfying loading time.
Finally, the last questions of the questionnaire was about who could benefit from web accessibility: 28 persons (58%) agreed that everybody should benefit in some way of an accessible website; 14 persons (29%), of which 9 that knew about web accessibility and were able to give a coherent definition for web accessibility and a satisfying list of characteristics of an accessible website only considered disabled people as being able to benefits from web accessibility. Among those 14 people, someone answered: “short-sighted and disable people, because they certainly have a lot of difficulties using the Internet (but when I talk about short-sighted, I don’t mean blind people, because I don’t expect Braille screen to be invented soon)” (See Appendix 1 – Questionnaire 33).