This post is a part of my degree project “An analysis of knowledge and usage of web accessibility guidelines, among web agencies and clients” written during the last course of a system developer education. All information from the thesis is not included and some text is changed. Since it is written in early 2020, all information might not be accurate for today´s date. The original document is available as a pdf Here
Definition of disabilities
The Swedish government is at the time of writing doing an investigation (Regeringen, pressmeddelande, 2019) to find a better way to research statistics over people with disabilities. In this investigation it is also included to develop indicators that may form the definition of disability. The reason for this is that currently there is no official criteria for determining who is included in the category of people with disabilities.
On WHO´s website they have the definition for disabilities “Disabilities is an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. An impairment is a problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a difficulty encountered by an
individual in executing a task or action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced by an individual in involvement in life situations.” (WHO, 2017) And they also highlight the fact that disabilities are more than just something that is caused by problems with body and health. “Disability is thus not just a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives. Overcoming the difficulties faced by people with disabilities requires interventions to remove environmental and social barriers.” (WHO,2017)
Some examples from the site of Swedish Digital administration, where conditions needing accessibility doesn’t depend on persons own disability. “
• Time pressure, irritation, threats, conflicts and other stress can cause significant difficulties when using digital systems.
• Those who are in motion in a vehicle or who carry thick mittens due to cold often have in practice a limited motor precision.
• Those who have children in their arms or running around them may have both limited motor skills and the ability to hear and to focus.
• Those who have another mother tongue sometimes have the same texting needs as a person with, for example, hearing impairment, like the one whose speakers do not work.
• Relatives and other assistants to persons with disabilities are also indirectly affected by lack of accessibility. “(DIGG, 2020)
This could be an indicator of the width of people that in some ways are affected if the Web Accessibility guidelines are implemented in an information system or application or not.
What is Web Usability?
Usability is about the user experience when using an information system, website, application. Usability can be measured against five criteria’s, usually called MEELS, Memorability, Efficiency, Errors, Learnability and Satisfaction. According to Usability.gov usability is a combination of factors. They mention six different factors on their site: “Intuitive design, Ease of learning, Efficiency to use, Memorability, Error frequency,
Subjective satisfaction” (usability.gov, 2020)
Many of the categories in usability and accessibility do overlap, but when testing for usability many features in accessibility rates is not included. This means that a product can have perfect rates in usability measures but fail badly in accessibility.
What is Web Accessibility
Simply explained web accessibility is to make your application, system, site available to as many users as possible. To remove barriers that can make the usage of the application difficult or even impossible. Many of the features most developers are already familiar with since they overlap with the implementation for usability.
This degree project is focused on the knowledge and usage of web accessibility in Sweden, not on why and how. There is plenty of websites who has information about that, and it is a large and complex subject that would need a report on its own. Developers who works with the coding will know or knows how to find the specifics needed when implementing the features for their specific area of profession.
This short summary should be viewed as an indicator of subjects to search more information from.
The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) is using these sections of categories as a starting point when researching statistics over people with disabilities (PTS, Rev C, 2016-11-08):
• Movement & motor skills
• Read & write
• Understand
• See
• Hear
• Speak
• Concentration & memory
• Social interaction
These categories can very well be used when categorizing the sections of work for web accessibility.
It is also worth mentioning that implementing web accessibility is beneficial for people without disabilities in several ways, if a person uses older technologies, operating systems, have difficulties with the web content language, slower internet access.
W3C, World Wide Web Consortium
World Wide Web Consortium. Written as W3C is an international community. It was founded in 1994, today it includes industry experts, fulltime staff, several member organizations. The group develops international Web standards. All W3C standards are reviewed to make sure they have accessibility support. The testing’s is made by Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group. On their site the definition of their work is defined as “The mission of the Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group (APA WG) is to ensure W3C specifications provide support for accessibility to people with disabilities. The group advances this mission through review of W3C specifications, development of technical support materials, collaboration with other Working Groups, and coordination of harmonized accessibility strategies within W3C.” (APA, 2020) W3C has made their guidelines into three different categories. Below is a short explanation of the different ones:
WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
This is the one this degree project mainly focusses on. These guidelines are a set of requirements that is seen as the international system of coding standards. The guidelines are being used for web content on web pages and applications. This includes mobile, multimedia, dynamic content and non-web information and communication technologies. As for the time
of writing the version 2.1 is the current one being used.
Each guideline has three conformance levels: A, AA, AAA.
• Level A is the lowest level of ambition, that means that they are the requirements that has the highest importance priority. It has some impact on how to design.
• Level AA is the level the web directive Swedish Guidance for web development and the Web Accessibility Directive is recommending following (which indirectly includes level A), it is classified as the basic start level for accessibility in public sector. It has a medium level impact on design.
• Level AAA is the highest level of ambition. This level will have a high impact on design. About this level W3C has made a comment stating following “It is not recommended that Level AAA conformance be required as a general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy all Level AAA Success Criteria for some content.” (W3, conformance-reqs, 2008)
ATAG, Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines is the guidelines to follow when developing tools
being used to produce web content. To make the authoring tools accessible to the user.
UAAG, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines is the guidelines to follow when creating applications that renders web content. This includes applications like media players, e-readers, browsers and so on.