[w3c-wai-ig] <none>

Greetings,

The Quebec Foundation for the Blind (www.aveugles.org/), in collaboration
with the W3Québec (http://www.cybercodeur.net/w3qc/) and the Nazareth &
Louis-Braille Institute (http://www.inlb.qc.ca/), has released the results
of a web accessibility survey of 200 French language web sites. The study,
led by Jean-Marie D'Amour, evaluated 4 significant pages of each site (i.e.
home page, page with principal content, page with forms, page with data
table) for compliance with Priority 1 and Priority 2 levels of WCAG 1.0.

Among the sites surveyed, Québec goverment (50), Canadian government (25),
public or corporate sites (100), disability sector (25).
T
he study reveals that 84% of Web sites have poor to very poor performance.
Sub-categories with the best results were, by order of rank : disability
services, rehabilitation centres and organisations for persons with
disabilities. The Canadian government sub-group ranked 4rth while the
Québec government ranked 10th out of 17. The three least accessible
sub-groups : sports and leisure, arts and culture, careers and employment.

Globally, out of the 20 most frequent types of errors, the top 3 were, by
order of incidence : HTML or CSS programming errors (95%), no alt text
for graphics, buttons and maps (77%), headers absent or used in an unlogic 
order (77%).

The study also proposes recommendations for web site owners and designers as
well as for the federal and provincial goverments. Specifically, the study
stakeholders call on the Québec government to amend its disability
legislation compelling all provincial ministries and agencies and public
organisations to adopt and implement the use of web accessibility standards.

The complete study, as well as press releases, reactions from evaluated web
sites and web accessibility resources can be found at :
www.accessibiliteweb.org/accessibiliteweb.htm (in French only)

Comments and questions are welcomed.


Jean-Marie D'Amour
Chargé de dossier
Adaptation des technologies
Fondation des aveugles du Québec
et <http://www.accessibiliteweb.org/>AccessibilitéWeb
et Agent de réadaptation en déficience visuelle
Institut Nazareth et Louis-Braille

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2003 17:57:43 UTC