- From: Jean-Marie D'Amour <jmdamour@videotron.ca>
- Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 17:57:42 -0500
- To: WAI-IG <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
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