RE: These are accessible? I'm not sure they are

Robert Pedlow wrote:

> I'm am interested in the figure you cite 
> 
> "(for example, the 13% of people who disable scripts even 
> though the browser
> is capable of running scripts)"
> 
> Do you have a reference for this? This has recently been an issue in a
> project I have been advising on accessibility issues in my 
> organisation.

Well, treat all statistics with a bit of caution, but the numbers I am
quoting are from:

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2002/March/javas.php

The caveat is that they come from people who surf sites with stats provided
by thecounter.com (part of the internet.com network, I think) so may not be
100% representative of the "average" user, whatever that means :-)

These numbers have been hovering around the 10 - 15 % mark for a long time,
despite the same site reporting that JavaScript aware browsers (IE4 +,
Netscape 4+ etc) have essentially > 99% of their web traffic. This suggests
to me that users with modern GUI browsers, with no apparent accessibility
problem, are deliberately disabling JavaScript. Since in a browser like IE
this is not especially easy to do, my assumption is that the 13% are
possibly experienced web users wanting to disable a specific feature
implemented using JavaScript: my guess is pop-up adverts and their ilk. The
other possibility is that after getting lots of script errors from sites
with badly written sites, you get fed up and disable scripting. Either way
it is something web designers whould be aware of.

	Tom

Dr Tom James
Senior Consultant

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Received on Friday, 22 March 2002 04:41:56 UTC