Speaker's information
Barry MCMULLIN is a senior lecturer with the School of Electronic Engineering at Dublin City University, Ireland. He is director of the e-Accessibility lab at RINCE [pronounced RINK-AH], an Irish national Information Technology research center.
Information sur l'auteur
Barry MCMULLIN est maître de conférence à la School of Electronic Engineering de l'Université Dublin City University, Irlande. Il est directeur du laboratoire e-Accessibility du RINCE [prononcer RINK-AH], un centre national de recherche sur les technologies de l'information pour l'Irlande.
Short paper
Design of accessible Web content is codified in standards and guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Conformance with W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG) (and/or similar, derivative, guidelines) is now the subject of considerable activity, both legal and technical, in many different jurisdictions.
The paper presents results of a comparative survey of Web accessibility guidelines and HTML standards conformance for samples of Web sites drawn from Ireland, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. It also gives some recommendations on how to improve the accessibility level of the Web content.
The results of this survey do not represent the "exact" level of Web accessibility on the Irish, UK, French or German Web sites, but they demonstrate a widespread lack of concern with accessibility guidelines and technical inter-operability. This study signals that, despite very laudable goals in documents such as the E-Europe Action Plan (European Commission, 2001), the current commitment to accessibility of the Irish, UK, French and German Web for users with disabilities is, at best, aspirational--and, at worst, cynically inadequate. While it may be argued that the results are still generated based on sample of sites, the fact that samples with such different number of sites generated essentially the same results is suggestive that this situation is probably typical of the Web as a whole in these countries.
A particular conclusion of the study is that the general level of Web accessibility guidelines and HTML standards conformance in all of the samples studied is very poor; and that the pattern of failure is strikingly consistent in the four samples. Although considerable efforts are being made to promote Web accessibility for users with disabilities, this is certainly not yet manifesting itself in improving Web accessibility and HTML validity.
We conjecture that the similarity regarding the HTML technical standard conformance may be largely due to defects in common Web authoring tools or content management systems. However, the poor conformance to Web accessibility guidelines is presumably due to lack of information or misunderstanding of their importance on the part of content designers and authors. It seems that the "write once, read everywhere" concept is still quite far from reality, even though significant efforts in promoting Web accessibility are being invested in the studied countries.
This is disappointing because it decreases considerably the potential that the Web could offer for significant improvement in service and opportunity for users with disabilities. This is doubly unfortunate. It is not just that Web technology is not being applied--as it could be--positively to improve opportunities and capabilities for users with disabilities; but on the contrary, as Web services become more pervasive and essential, to the extent that they remain inaccessible this will actually impose progressively more disadvantage and exclusion on groups with disabilities in our society.
It is hoped that the results of this study will serve to highlight these issues, and to further encourage the many agencies and organizations who are already actively promoting and supporting voluntary improvements in Web accessibility around EU. Ultimately however, there must surely also be a role for compulsion--legislation and regulation--to fully guarantee and vindicate the rights of all citizens to equal treatment in a digital democracy.
Article
A Comparative Assessment of Web Accessibility and Technical Standards Conformance in Four EU StatesThe white paper
