Some questions from CHI-WEB people

Hi,

A couple of people from CHI-WEB and I've been having a!= NULLPT off-list
discussion.  Some questions have come up concerning cost effectiveness,
the recent Jakob Nielsen report and reasoning for a single version of a
web page.  I said I would post the questions on some lists and pass them
by some "lead users" (disabled people who work in technology outside of
the disabled world) and then post some answers to CHI-WEB.

Please let me know if you have any answers to the questions.

Thanks,
Scott


QUESTIONS:

1.  Has any experimentation been done to get a sense about how much longer it
    takes a developer to learn accessibility issues and create a
    web page which can be considered accessible?  For example, one experiment
    could be take two web page designers who are equally skilled in HTML and
    give them each the same assignment.  Then, in addition, give
    one of them the accessibility guidelines with addition direction that
    the web page the person creates must meet the guidelines.  Finally time
    how long it takes each web page designer to complete the assignment
    and track what additional resources were needed to be brought in.

2.  The Jakob Nielsen report brings up the question to what degree
    are the various efforts resulting in improvements in web page
    accessibility.  What is the trade-off between amount of effort being
    used nationally and amount of actual improvement of web page
    accessibility?

3.  Are there estimates of resources being used towards web page
    accessibility, including guidelines, education about guidelines,
    guideline consultants, implementation of guidelines,
    web page accessibility testing, development of special functionality
    in browers, etc?

4.  How are the results of Jakob Nielsen's report being used to
    evaluate the efficacy of the guidelines?  What other research
    is being planned to determine how much improvement in web
    page accessibility will be achieved by the guidelines?

5.  What testing of alternative approaches have been done to find
    the most cost effective approach to web page accessibility?

6.  There is the perception that Braille representation of information
    should be seen as being as equally valuable/important as print
    representation of information.  Could not this be applied
    to multiple versions of the same web page where each is seen
    as equally valuable?

Received on Sunday, 23 December 2001 08:40:26 UTC