- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 11:45:33 -0800
- To: Nigel Bevan <nbevan@usability.serco.com>
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
The questions you ask aren't the same things, and in general there's no easy way to answer these questions due to the nature of the web. "Accessible to people with special needs" doesn't equate to "sites that follow the guidelines"; a site can follow the guidelines and be inaccessible, and a site can break the guidelines and still be useful to some folks. Accessibility itself is not a boolean value, a yes-no switch for "accessible" or "not accessible". A site that may be highly accessible to a blind person might not work at all for a deaf person; different needs can affect personal access to a site. Thus if you were to try to quantify the sites on the net as "accessible" or "not", would you disqualify a site if one type of people/browser/situation couldn't get at it, but the majority could? You never really reach a point where you can declare, definitively, "this site IS accessible", except for perhaps the most basic of pages. It's always a concern of "have I done the MOST I could do to provide accessibility", not "did I do it?" Especially as the demographics of users continues to change and we encounter more and special needs and barriers to accessibility, we will always need to reconsider what is useful and what is not for making our sites usable by everyone. If you wanted to determine an arbitrary number, you can either use this one, which I'm about to generate: 95% of websites have accessibility problems, and more than 50% have serious problems which prevent them from being used by people with disabilities. Of course, I just made those numbers up. :) Otherwise, you could somehow take a random sample of websites and conduct accessibility studies on them, and then claim they're representative of the greater whole of the web, and slap the results over everything, through the magic of statistics. More to the point, though -- why do you want a number to place on it? I can state with some certainty that the majority of the sites out there do not consider accessibility as an integral part of the design process, and thus most sites that are produced are not nearly as useful as they could be. This is a serious problem. Would giving the problem a number make it more important? It's possible; I don't know, because I don't think in those terms myself. At 06:24 p.m. 03/29/99 +0100, Nigel Bevan wrote: >Does anyone have any estimates of the percentage of web sites that are >accessible to people with special needs? There are plenty of guidelines >for accessibility, but does anyone know what percentage of sites follow >the guidelines? > >Please reply to me personally, as I do not subscribe to this mailing list. > >Many thanks .. Nigel Bevan > > > -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org> President, Governing Board Member HTML Writers Guild <URL:http://www.hwg.org>
Received on Monday, 29 March 1999 19:03:28 UTC