David Sloan

Accessible Web designers and alternative Web design guidelines

Published 21st August 2006.

Note: this is an abridged version of a paper "Two cultures? The disconnect between the web standards movement and research-based web design guidelines for older people" published July 2006 in Gerontechnology journal, vol. 5, issue 2.

Web Standards and accessibility

Most readers will be aware of the benefits the Web can bring disabled and older people in terms of improving quality of life, and the unfortunate situation that lack of awareness in accessible Web design means that web access is most difficult for these groups who stand to gain so much from the potential of the Web.

Moral, legal and economical arguments exist for implementing accessible Web design, promoted by advocacy organisations such as disability related charities and academic organisations. These may be effective to varying extents in influencing a Web developer's work. However, arguably one of the most significant factors in uptake of accessibility, at least at an individual level, has been the adoption of accessibility, and the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a core feature of the The Web standards movement.

The Web Standards project promotes and encourages the design of Web sites that can be used across the widest range of Web browsing technologies and environments, including legacy browsers and assistive technologies, and at the same time promotes the development of Web browsing and assistive technologies that support open standards. Since the WCAG have become a de facto standard for Web site accessibility, used by Web site developers seeking to avoid barriers that may limit or prevent access by people with disabilities, the guidelines were adopted by the Web Standards movement as part of what is widely acknowledged as standards-based Web design.

The attraction and success of the Web Standards movement has been to encourage developers to develop and demonstrate their technical capabilities and professional skills. So, in this respect, accessibility in the form of WCAG-conformance has been successfully sold as a technical skill, and has gained credibility amongst developers where previously it may have been seen as a niche skill that hindered technically and functionally advanced, visually exciting Web development.

While surveys such as that of the Disability Rights Commission show there's still much work to be done in ensuring accessibility and usability for older and disabled people, there are at least encouraging signs that accessibility is becoming more widely adopted as a basic component of Web sites produced by many developers, in many ways down to the work of the Web Standards movement.

Research-based Guidelines for Accessibility

Since age-related decline in sensory, physical and/or cognitive capability that may be experienced by many older people is likely to have increasingly significant implications on their ability to use technology, there appears to be a strong link between WCAG conformance and effective Web site design for older people.

However, other guidelines also exist, focusing on web site design for older people. The shortcomings of WCAG 1.0 have been well-documented, and development of WCAG 2.0 continues, albeit with some controversy. Even so, the fact that alternative design guidelines have been developed indicates that for some people, the WCAG is insufficient as a tool for supporting the design of an accessible and usable Web site for older and disabled people. Several alternative sets of research-based guidelines have been developed and published in recent years, each focusing on supporting designers in creating Web sites that can be accessed and used by disabled and/or older people. These guidelines have most commonly been generated either directly from observations of user evaluations, or from literature reviews of related work.

A list of some of the more prominent research-based guidelines is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Selected Research-based guidelines for accessible Web design

Name	Authors	Scope	Research method	Availability
(A) Beyond ALT Text: Usability for Disabled Users	Coyne & Nielsen	Disabled people	Usability tests with 84 disabled people	Costs US$148 (as at August 2006)
(B) Web Usability for Senior Citizens	Coyne & Nielsen	Older people	Usability tests with 44 people aged 65 and over	Costs US$125 (as at August 2006)
(C) Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines	National Cancer Institute	Non-specific, but does include a section on accessibility	Expert analysis of relevant literature	Online version free, can be purchased as a book
(D) Making your Web site senior-friendly - a checklist	National Institute on Ageing and National Library of Medicine	Older people	Expert analysis of relevant literature	Online version freely available
(E) Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users Who Work With Screen Readers	Theofanos & Redish	Disabled people, specifically people with no functional vision	User evaluation with 16 screen reader users	Online version freely available
(F) Research-derived Web design guidelines for older people	Kurniawan & Zaphiris	Older people	Expert analysis of relevant literature, validated with older Web users	Access to ACM Digital Library required for access to online version

Awareness of alternative guidelines

The usefulness of published design guidelines is, of course, dependent on their prominence and credibility amongst Web developers and content providers. As a measure of awareness of WCAG, a survey in 2003 questioned 175 developers on awareness of Web site accessibility and found 64% (112) were aware of WCAG. I felt that awareness of alternative accessibility guidelines would be significantly lower than this figure, so I conducted a survey in November 2005 to establish the level of awareness Web site developers and accessibility advocates had of a number of other research-based guidelines. The guidelines chosen were those listed in Table 1.

The aim was to target responses only from those who had a clear interest in Web accessibility and web standards. So three email discussion groups were contacted - each either directly focussing on Web site accessibility or in which discussion of web standards and accessibility plays a strong part:

1. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group (WAI-IG) email discussion list;
2. Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) email discussion list;
3. UK Web Support email discussion list, run for Web developers based at UK Higher education institutions.

Potential survey respondents were asked to reply to the author rating their level of awareness of each of the six sets of guidelines, using the following scale:

1. I've never heard of them.
2. I've heard of them but never read them.
3. I've read them but never used them in my work.
4. I've used them occasionally to inform my work.
5. I use them regularly.

No additional information was sought from respondents, but several replied with explanatory text supporting their ratings.

Over a period of 5 days, 58 replies were received, including some from prominent figures in the Web accessibility advocacy movement. Replies were predominantly from the UK and US, but replies were also received from respondents in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Turkey (Table 2).

Table 2: Awareness of Guidelines

Guidelines	Level of Awareness (n=58)
	1	2	3	4	5
(A) Beyond ALT Text: Usability for Disabled Users	15	20	7	13	3
(B) Web Usability for Senior Citizens	36	14	2	6	0
(C) Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines	46	6	1	5	0
(D) Making your Web site senior-friendly: a checklist	53	3	1	1	0
(E) Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users Who Work With Screen Readers	42	4	5	6	1
(F) Research-derived Web design guidelines for older people	50	3	5	0	0

Survey findings: a brief discussion

Overall awareness of the six guidelines in question was surprisingly low, given my assumption of the high awareness of web accessibility of the population sampled. Some key findings:

• Guidelines A (Nielsen Norman's Beyond ALT Text) were by far the most well-known. 75% (43) of respondents had heard of them, 40% (23) had read them and 28% (16) had used them in their work.
• Respondents were much less aware of any of the other guidelines sets included in the survey – 91% (53) of respondents stated they had never heard of Guidelines D (Making your Web site senior-friendly – a checklist).
• Only 6 (10%) had read Guidelines C, the National Cancer Institute's Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines, perhaps the most comprehensive set of web site usability guidelines currently freely available online.
• Only four respondents replied saying that that they used the guidelines regularly in their work, three of those citing Guidelines A as the influence.
• However, for all but Guidelines F, at least 50% of respondents who read the guidelines indicated their work was influenced by the guidelines. For Guidelines C, this figure was 83%.

If these results are a true reflection of the current situation, and awareness of these guidelines is so low amongst accessibility and standards-aware web developers, then it must be asked – how many less-informed developers are aware of them?

Of course this was a small, informal survey, and any analysis of the results should bear in mind the following:

• Availability of guidelines was identified as an issue by some respondents. Guidelines A and B are available only at a cost. Guidelines F are not freely available either – they were presented in an academic paper, access to which at the time of the survey required registration with a digital library, again at a cost.
• Guidelines F had only been published for a month or so before the survey, another likely factor in their low visibility. However, a review of these guidelines was very quickly published by Joe Clark soon after their publication.
• It's also quite possible that the results are not truly representative of Web developers. Perhaps others who are more aware of the guidelines decided not to reply, or were not aware of the survey. But I argue that because of the nature of the population targeted, the level of awareness reported above might actually be too high. For example, I appreciate that some people would be reluctant to report to me - a complete stranger - their lack of awareness of certain guidelines!

Explaining the results

What are the reasons for the lack of awareness shown by the survey results? I think the two key factors are insufficient visibility and insufficient credibility.

Visibility

This is pretty obvious – if someone doesn't know about a set of guidelines, how can they follow them? These guidelines are very relevant to accessible web design, but they're rarely mentioned in printed literature or in the many web sites devoted to accessibility. So their presence is likely be missed by developers looking to develop their awareness and skills in web accessibility.

Credibility

Less apparent from the survey, but suggested by some informal feedback and other comments, it seems that these research based guidelines may be seen as partly repetitive of the WCAG, and partly over-prescriptive. I think one selling point of the WCAG to many developers and designers has been the promotion of a philosophy of "design how you like, so long as you've considered accessibility and made sure users can make the necessary changes to suit their own needs." This philosophy is based on the WAI Model of accessibility which relies on conformant Web resources being accessed by conformant browsers.

Yet here are some guidelines that collectively specify a minimum text size, forbid certain typefaces, command the use of a specific colour for links, and present other highly prescriptive design requirements:

• "For links, use blue, bold underlined text." (Guidelines B)
• "Use black text on plain, high-contrast backgrounds." (Guidelines C)
• "Use sans-serif type font i.e. Helvetica, Arial of 12-14 point size. Avoid other fancy font types." (Guidelines F)

With these very prescriptive requirements, it's easy to see how a tension arises where a designer, having adopted an approach that allows for and assumes users will customise the site to suit their needs, then discovers evidence-based guidelines that specify appearance characteristics such as those listed above. To the designer, this may be an unacceptable restriction on the look and feel of a site. This frustration is likely to be in part due to the perception that some of these design guidelines are attempting to shift responsibility for compensating for user agent (and user) shortcomings onto the Web designer.

However, it has been demonstrated (for example by the Disability Rights Formal Investigation into UK Web Accessibility) that adherence to the WCAG is not enough to guarantee that a person with a disability can access and use a Web site. The assumption that all people with accessibility needs should have the appropriate awareness and technology to take advantage of a Web site's design is arguably an idealistic approach that has little chance of success in the short term.

The advice provided in these alternative guidelines has come directly or indirectly from observation of disabled and elderly people struggling to use Web sites, many of whom will be unaware that there is an accessibility problem manifesting itself, let alone know of the steps they might be able to take to improve things. The guidelines produced from this work attempt to accommodate for a lack of user capability of capitalising on accessible Web design, something that frequently causes frustration amongst the Web Standards community, but is a real problem that won't go away any time soon.

Interestingly, the survey indicated that the guidelines did have an influence on most of the people who read them. This could be a reflection on the nature of these research based guidelines, which - unlike more technical documents - try (or should try!) to illustrate each guideline with evidence supporting the guideline. (I'm not suggesting that each WCAG checkpoint is not based on good evidence, just that it's not so obvious to find.) So perhaps the challenge is really to encourage design teams to at least read these other guidelines and the supporting evidence, and consider their implications in relation to their impact on a specific site and its target audience.

So many of the problems older and disabled people face can be attributed not to page design problems but user agent design problems, and therefore not the fault of the diligent Web designer. It still leaves us with a problem - a problem that in the long term will be solved by good browsers universally available, but in the short term can be addressed at least to some extent by careful provision of additional accessibility features, such as a style sheet switcher, an audio version of at least the key information provided by the site - and an accessibility 'help' page.

Conclusions

This was a short, simple survey, and should be treated as such. However, I suggest it points to some clear action points.

• For the research community: For people working in the field of older people and technology, tell Web developers and designers about your guidelines! Let them be discussed in open forums, to stimulate debate the validity and universality of each guideline. Engage with WAI so that best practice is incorporated into WCAG. And understand that telling a designer - who is quite aware of the ways a user can adjust a web page's appearance - what their pages must look like, without explaining why, is unlikely to result in an enthusiastic response.
• For the Web standards community and Web developers in general: Read these guidelines! Find out more about the problems that specific user groups faced when using the Web, problems that may exist at such a fundamental conceptual level that they arise even when a web site has been designed with accessibility in mind. Keep on designing with accessibility in mind, but realise that wishing for increased user awareness of the most appropriate browsing solutions to them, particularly amongst older people, is not a short term solution for accessibility.
• For everyone: Encourage, support and publicise development and use of tools like the Accessibar for Firefox and IBM's Web Adaptation Technology - tools that make accessibility options much more apparent to users, tools that take advantage of and work best with standards-compliant design.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey!

Discuss

There's a thread on this article on accessifyforum.com - feel free to provide feedback there!

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David Sloan, Digital Media Access Group, School of Computing, University of Dundee, Dundee, DD1 4HN, Scotland.
phone: +44 (0)1382 385598 or email: dsloan at computing dot dundee dot ac dot uk