II. Web Accessibility
2.1. Myths and Misunderstandings
2.1.3. Study Conclusions
This study shows that, event if an important part of the Internet population knows about the web accessibility concept, the knowledge they have about it is very incomplete and quite often wrong. Web accessibility is a difficult concept to understand for those who do not have any difficulties to use the Internet, because the way it is, is enough for them; most people do not see the advantage they too could benefits from a more accessible website.
From this survey and from my personal research on the subject, some myths and miscomprehensions can be observed:
Disabled People do not use the Internet
This myth could also be formulated as "Disabled people do not visit my website".
As seen in the previous sections, some respondents do not think possible for some disabled people (here, the Blinds) to use a computer and thus the Internet (See Appendix 1 – Questionnaires 2 and 33).
Nowadays, most website beneficiates from detailed statistics, indicating the provenance of visitors, the browser they use, or their screen resolution. However, these statistics does not give any indication on the visitor themselves such as their age, sex, skill level in computing, or where they have any difficulty or disability toward the Internet. That strengthens the view of some web developers and of the companies that employ them that none of their user is different from the others and would need special care.
Chantal Laplanche uses the following metaphor to explain this miscomprehension: "It is exactly like the second floor office with to elevator whose occupants simply say ‘No one using a wheelchair never comes to this office. Why should we make it accessible to wheelchairs?' Off course, they cannot reach the office, which is the reason why no wheelchair use ever came!" (Laplanche, 2000). It is difficult to determine precisely the percentage of disabled users that visit a website; the only available solution is to offer online questionnaires to be answered by the visitors, but this solution may not prove satisfactory as some, or most, visitors will not be willing to answer it. But we can use national or international statistics to establish how disabled people are likely to use the Internet.
The survey particularly shown that people do not expect users to beneficiate from assistive hardware and software to help them use a computer and the Internet.
Web Accessibility is only about blind people
In the answers to the questionnaires, Blind (or short-sighted) people were often cited as the primary, and sometime only, beneficiaries for more accessible websites.
It is true that most of the work done in the domain of web accessibility has been done toward people having a visual disability (blindness, short-sightedness, colour-blindness...), it is important to understand that they are not the only primary beneficiaries from web accessibility. And accessible website will not only be accessible to people with visual deficiencies, by offering them alternative to visual content; it will also be accessible to people with cognitive deficiencies by presenting them a content and a navigation they can understand; it will also be accessible to people with physical deficiencies by allowing them to navigate with the keyboard only; it will also be accessible to the user who chose to use a different web browser (for example a text-only browser like lynx)...
Roger Johansson wrote on the subject, that "[accessibility] is about respecting different peoples' different needs and personal preferences" (Johansson, 2005).
Accessibility means ugly text-only pages
To the questionnaire, ten persons answered that an accessible website should be plain or text-only, some added that images should not be over-used (understand: used for decorative purpose).
Since the beginning of the "Accessibility Buzz", many of the concepts accessibility advocates have been misunderstood and still are. For example, it is not rare, to still read nowadays web designer or web developers complaining that following the accessibility rules bridle their creativity because they retrains the number of tools available to them. Among other, Benoît Duverneuil, project manager of the International Festival of Web Design that took place in Limoges (France) in February 2006 said in an interview for the web journal Le Journal du Net: "Creative people often feel bridled by the multiplication of W3C standards such as CSS or DOM [...]. Another restraint to creation, more obvious, comes from public authorities that compel websites to be accessible to all" (Benoît Duverneuil, in an interview to Le Journal du Net, 2006).
Such beliefs are generally, and unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding of the guidelines proposed by, among other, the W3C. Indeed, these standards (See 6.3.2. Standards and W3C), especially those concerning web accessibility, are not absolutes rules, they are advices given on the best way to use web technologies that have been proven (or decided) more accessible, more stable or presenting a better interoperability. It is important to note that web standards and accessibility guidelines do not forbid the use of any web technology (such as Javascript, Pop-ups or tables), instead they emphasise on the best way to use them and the case where they should not be use (See 6.4. Page Design).
Roger Johansson wrote "Accessibility does not mean removing all colour and graphics. What it does mean is thinking about how colour is used and providing alternative content for images and other graphical objects that are informational or functional" (Johansson, 2005).
Accessibility is Expensive and Time Consuming
Cost and time are certainly the most used argument against the implementation of web accessibility. Indeed, implementing accessible guideline elements in an existing completely inaccessible website will be expensive and time consuming, as would be its restructuring. However, when accessibility is though of in the early steps of a website's design, if not in the very first one; the costs involved in its application are very minimal, as implementing accessibility is firstly writing proper HTML code. Implementation of more advanced accessibility techniques may be an extra cost in the website's development, but can also bring financial benefits.
Even if it is difficult to demonstrate benefits from web accessibility improvement, such as an increase in web traffic and sale; some indirect benefits can be more easily linked to it, such as maintenance cost. The example of Legal and General a British insurance company released, in 2007, a study showing that improving their website's accessibility in 2006 had them save £200 000 per annum on site maintenance. This same study was also predicting a 100% return on investment in the redesign project in significantly less than twelve months (Lawson, 2006).
Everyone on the Internet uses the latest version of Internet Explorer
Please be advised, this website is optimized for Internet Explorer 7, therefore we recommend using this browser. Otherwise, your experience may be affected by use of another browser (Countrywide Bank, 2008).
Who has never been confronted to this kind of warning? Many website declare being "optimized" for a special kind a web browser. The reasons for these optimizations are multiple. The most common ones being the belief that 99.99% of Internet users use the latest version of Internet Explorer and some kind of anti Internet Explorer war in favour of Firefox or Opera. But the facts are that only 41% of Internet users are indeed using the last version of Internet Explorer; that more than a third of Internet users are still using Internet explorer 6 and that 16% of them uses Firefox. And some users even still use very old web browser.
An alternative to this myth is that “everybody use a 1024x768 pixels screen resolution”. Based on TheCounter’s statistics, only 46% of Internet users do, and around 7% use an 800x600 pixels screen resolution, users that use even smaller resolutions (via mobile technologies) are not counted (or may be part of the 10% of unknown resolutions) (TheCounter, 2008b). The accessibility implication of this alternative myth is that many developers that are not aware of this statistics (or that deliberately choose to ignore them) choose to develop website for a certain screen resolution, with no consideration for smaller (and even wider) ones, and especially for mobile users. This problem can results in pages that do not fit in the screen of the user, impeding his or her experience of the website.
| Web Browser | Visitors | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| IE 7.x | 10890145 | 41% |
| IE 6.x | 9952228 | 37% |
| Firefox | 4319438 | 16% |
| Safari | 900832 | 3% |
| Opera | 215230 | 1% |
| Others | 460121 | 2% |
Note: Those statistics were calculated from the visitors to TheCounter.com over the period from the first of February to the thirtieth of June. Among the "Other" Browser, we can found: IE 3.x to 5.x, Netscape 2.x to 7.x and Konqueror.
Optimizing or developing for a single web browser is imposing the developer's vision of the Internet to the website's visitors. No Internet user should be told what software or hardware to use.
I followed web standards, thus my website is accessible
Web standards is a broad terms embracing many standards, mostly, published by the W3C. Generally when speaking about following web standards, it the ones referring to (X)HTML and CSS that are concerned.
Web standards are a good start to web accessibility as they ensure, among other, a better interoperability of the website and minimize the problems inherent to the use of different web browsers. However, if following web standards will increase the access of people using standards complaints web browser, some browsers may not be able to interpret properly HTML and CSS and may not be able to display a standard compliant website properly (Internet Explorer has been particularly criticised for its non compliance to CSS standards). Moreover, following web standards will not ensure that the content of a website is accessible. Indeed, standards are only about the semantic use of a particular language, not about a website's ease of use.
If I follow the WCAG, my website will be accessible to everybody
To the question “In you opinion, what are the characteristics of an accessible website?”, one of the respondent answered: “An accessible websites follows the rules of the WAI (WCAG)” (See Appendix 1 – Questionnaire 22).
Firstly, it must be understood that, unfortunately, making a website fully accessible is also, in some way, a myth. Indeed, web accessibility being about making the content of a website accessible to every Internet user, whatever their deficiencies and difficulties may be; it implies to be aware of each of these deficiencies and difficulties, to understand them and to find a solution to overcome them.
Put aside the fact that some solutions may not be possible to implement –because, for example, they contradict with another solution to another difficulty– we will be confronted to Murphy's Law: "for N solutions founded to N identified problems, there will always be an N+1 problem to arise". Indeed, each Internet user is different, and each disability is different; studying each user and identifying what their difficulties are is, unfortunately, impossible. Even is the primary concept of the Internet and web accessibility is to bring information to each and every one, there will always be some users that will be excluded, because their difficulties are not understood or because the technical solution to implement is to complex or incompatible with the existing application.
Then it is important to understand that web accessibility is not an easy concept to implement in a website, neither in any king of application. There are guidelines that have been created to help developers to understand the techniques they can use to improve their website and there are online checkers that can help underline existing problem. But neither can guarantee that a website is accessible. Indeed, guidelines are only, as they are named guidelines, they are giving some indication but accessibility will also depends on the website, its ergonomics, its usability; and online automated checkers can only check code elements (the presence of alternative content for images and videos for example) but they cannot tell if the navigation is easy to understand, only a human tester can tell so.