First, sources:

Americans with Disabilities: 2005

The primary source for statistics in the Practical eCommerce article was a report called Americans with Disabilites: 2005, produced by the United States Census Bureau. The data dates to 2005, but the report was released in December of 2008, so it’s not far from the most current information available which is based on truly extensive research.

This report was released from data gathered in the Survey of Income and Program Participation in 2005, updating the information from a 2002 report of the same name. The report is limited to the civilian, non-institutionalized population of the nation, and estimates that the overall percentage of the population demonstrating disabilities would rise to 15.7 percent from 15.1 percent if that population was included, referencing information from the 2006 American Communities Survey.

The American Communities Survey

The ACS is a continuous data collection effort by the U.S. Census Bureau used to produce annual estimates at the national, state and local level on the characteristics of the United States population. In 2005, the ACS collected information from approximately 3 million addresses in the United States and 36,000 addresses in Puerto Rico. In 2006, it will also include 2.5 percent of the population living in group quarters, (U.S. Census Bureau, 2003).

Given the rapid pace of technological development, access to ongoing current statistics is of inordinate value to internet-based businesses, although the data is not currently detailed enough to be fully appreciable in web accessibility.

There is a more recent report, from the 2006 American Communities Survey, but the data collection is organized differently, so I elected not to mix the two to avoid introducing errors caused by relating data sets which are not a definite match. Regardless, both sets of data include valuable information, and are well worth consulting.

The primary flaw in this period of American Communities Survey data is that it does not break out separate types of sensory disabilities; blindness and deafness are collapsed into a single category. Although both of these issues have a bearing on web accessibility, the response to the issues is so radically different that this is a major flaw in the data when it comes to web accessibility analysis.

More recent American Communities Surveys have broken this information down further. As of the 2008 questionnaire (downloadable from the Census website), sensory disabilities are separated between blindness/low vision and deaf/hard of hearing.

Cornell University: Disability Statistics

A third fabulous source for disability statistics (with easily the best interface of the group) is the Disability Statistics project at Cornell University. The data is sourced from the American Communities Surveys and the 2000 United States Census, along with a few additional sources, so the base data is the same, but a greater variety of perspectives are available.

The Cornell database requires an account to access statistics, but they do provide free access using a public “guest” account. The email and password entered for the guest account are both “guest.”

Issues with the Data

It was necessary, of course, to summarize the data used for the report. However, each of those numbers should be viewed in context, as well. All of the data referenced is accessible as a Excel download from the U.S. Census Bureau (linked above).

The data is excellent for gaining an overview of the disabled population of the United States, but is not specific enough to give a clear sense of whether these disabilities will impact your web site. The statistics from the American with Disabilities report clearly state, for example, that 3.4% of individuals over 15 years of age have difficulty seeing; a total nearing 8 million people. However, exactly what is included in the data is hard to specify. The information was gathered by asking a series of questions, gathering whether the person had difficulty reading newsprint, etc. It doesn’t specify anything about the nature of the problem.

In general, my assumption is that the data may include some individuals who struggle with reading due to dyslexia, dependent on the exact phrasing of the questions, but not all, and presumably includes no or very few individuals with color blindness.

Download the reports (all in PDF format):

• Americans with Disabilities: 2005
• Disability Status and the Characteristics of People in Group Quarters
• 2006 ACS Content Test Evaluation Report Covering Disability

United States disability statistics: Measurement and sources.
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Continuing updates: Cli.gs gets a temporary stay of execution. Keep watching for further news — I may end up making these changes after all, but for now I’ll wait and see.

The Cli.gs URL shortening service is due to be closed down on Sunday, October 25th. At this time, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and generating statistics, but will continue to forward visitors at least through the end of November.

What does this mean for WP to Twitter?

Shortly before October 25th, I will release a very important update to WP to Twitter which will encompass the following changes:

1. I will remove support for new Cli.gs shortened URLs.
2. To continue offering choice, I will add support for at least one additional shortener.
3. Users with Cli.gs as their selected shortener will be given a choice what shortener they’d like to switch to.
4. If no choice is made, users will be switched to un-shortened URLs

Additionally, I aim to add support for custom shortened URLs – URLs shortened on your own domain. However, this may not happen by October 25th.

WP to Twitter update: Cli.gs to be shut down
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Granted, I was on vacation for a big chunk of the last four weeks, so we’ll call that an excuse.

The new column is Accessibility and the Checkout Process, summarizing a few of the key issues to be aware of when you’re trying to make sure that people with disabilities can get through your store — and succeed with your ultimate ecommerce goal.

New Column at Practical eCommerce: Checkout Process
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

President Barack Obama’s approach to information transparency is admirable. His connection to the public through the major media channels of the digital age: the White House web site, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media methods is impressive. It’s a great way for the public to keep up to date on the activities of their government.

Unfortunately, the accessibility level of these web resources is — all in all — not really up to the levels one would hope for.

Obviously, the government has no control over the accessibility of the external resources they’re using to help promote their agenda and communicate with the public. These social media sharing sites are what they are, and regardless of their independent accessibility levels, I agree with the administrations choice to use them — to connect with their strong user bases — rather than attempt to build an expensive and potentially abandoned project to imitate the functionality.

However, the government does have direct and complete control over their own web presences, and would truly have wished to see a more thorough approach to web accessibility from the extensive network of new information-bearing web sites created by the Obama administration.

Obama’s network of web sites includes The White House and Recovery.gov as of May 2009. These sites exhibit a common set of problems; indicating a fairly straightforward set of issues which have been overlooked by the development team.

What’s Right?

In many respects, the accessibility of the Obama web resources is actually quite strong — the basics are well covered:

• Headings use appropriate HTML markup, providing strong navigation cues for visual and screen reader navigation.
• Most images provide appropriate and useful alternate text.
• Videos are captioned and transcribed.
• Parts of the web site are available in Spanish. (Only a very small part, however — this is definitely not equivalency.)

In other respects, however, the site is wretched.

What’s Wrong?

The principle offender — hands down — is keyboard accessibility. (Yes, that was an intentional pun. Sorry.)

According to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which covers the accessibility of government web properties, keyboard accessibility is a requirement, and one which neither of these web sites actually pass successfully.

In my accessibility consulting business, I rarely address Section 508, since these rules are relatively feeble compared to their more modern standards covered in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but in the case of a government entity, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act applies specifically and is legally binding, unlike other accessibility standards. As such, it’s critical to address the specific points of Section 508 when considering government web sites.

Subpart B — Technical Standards

§ 1194.21 Software applications and operating systems.

(a) When software is designed to run on a system that has a keyboard, product functions shall be executable from a keyboard where the function itself or the result of performing a function can be discerned textually.

(c) A well-defined on-screen indication of the current focus shall be provided that moves among interactive interface elements as the input focus changes. The focus shall be programmatically exposed so that assistive technology can track focus and focus changes.

Official Section 508 web site (emphasis added)

The White House and Recovery web sites are particularly offending in the area of keyboard focus. When navigating either of these sites, there is no indication outside of the browser default available at any point; and in some areas, not even this indicator is present.

In addition, the drop down navigation menus throughout both sites are unavailable to a keyboard operator. Although these navigation elements have been duplicated in an area in the footer, that footer is not readily available to a keyboard navigator — a skip link has been provided to skip from the top of the page to the main content, but not to jump to the navigation, requiring keyboard users to manually tab all the way through the main content.

With no keyboard focus, this is a very difficult task, requiring you to observe very, very carefully to attempt to identify where you are on the page — let alone distinguish which link you’re activating when you finally do reach this footer area.

On the home page of WhiteHouse.gov, there is a set of featured items; usually in a video format. Using a keyboard, it is only possible to trigger the initially featured video, since the links to trigger other features are completely inaccessible to a keyboard user.

Once a video has actually been reached, the keyboard user will be unable to play the video without downloading it (although these options are available, fortunately.) The video player used has a very common accessibility problem: although the player itself can be navigated using a keyboard, this is only true if you can successfully navigate focus into the player, which is not actually possible using standard keyboard navigation — it requires mouse activation to move focus to the video player.

All in all, a disappointing experience for the keyboard-only internet visitor.

Other Problems

Although I haven’t conducted a complete accessibility survey of these sites, there are a few other issues which stand out immediately. I’m just going to mention these in passing, but this doesn’t make them any less important:

• Links in some contexts are not highlighted (no differentiation by color or by decoration.) ^Figure 1
• Because some links aren’t highlighted, anything placed in a position which seems like a link might be; this causes some difficulty with breadcrumbs, since there is an area towards the top of each document which looks like breadcrumbs ^{Figure 2}, although the actual breadcrumbs are found below the content area. ^Figure 3
• Footer links have insufficient contrast (2.73 according to the WCAG 2 luminosity contrast ratio.) These links include key references not represented elsewhere, including the link to the Spanish language version of the site and, ironically, the link to accessibility information. ^Figure 4
• Comment forms are woefully inadequate — there are no label, legend, or fieldset elements. Although some fields are required, the only indication of this requirement is shown using a background image, and that information is therefore not available to anybody except a normal visual user. ^Figure 5
• With images disabled, some additional color contrast problems are shown. The contrast level in some text-bearing images (including the header graphic) is well below acceptable accessibility levels.

How much work is this to solve?

None of these problems are really challenging to solve; there are web video players which offer much stronger accessibility than the default YouTube player currently in use (Easy YouTube by Christiann Heilmann or Accessible JW Player for self-hosted video, for example.)

Solving the keyboard accessibility issue is easy, as well. Including some basic CSS to provide a strong indicator for keyboard focus will immediately render keyboard navigation significantly easier. Something like the following will provide all that’s really needed:

<code>
a:focus {
outline: 2px solid #58b; 
background: #9cf!important;
color: #000!important;
}
</code>

Though the drop down navigation isn’t keyboard accessible, the web sites have already included all the links within the drop down set up at the bottom of the page. Adding a simple skip link which links to the bottom of the page (“Skip to keyboard-accessible navigation,” or something to that effect,) would quickly remove the bulk of that challenge.

This is the core of the accessibility problem on both web sites: a few very simple changes could eliminate a significant array of accessibility problems. Taking into consideration the change process in a government entity, it’s probably not a one hour solution; but it’s certainly not something that will cost taxpayers a significant sum.

Supplementary Figures

Obama’s Web Transparency: not for everybody.
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

What does this change mean?

Essentially, this means that the working group decided that color combinations with lower contrast (more similar colors) were acceptable for general use on the web. This is certainly good news for designers, since it will provide for a greater variety design voices than previously.

The contrast ratio of 4.5:1 was chosen for level AA because it compensated for the loss in contrast sensitivity usually experienced by users with vision loss equivalent to approximately 20/40 vision. (20/40 calculates to approximately 4.5:1.) 20/40 is commonly reported as typical visual acuity of elders at roughly age 80.

Understanding WCAG 2.0; Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.3

While the previous higher ratio requirement may have accommodated for an even larger audience, the decision of the committee appears to have been that it had crossed a line of diminishing returns, and that the lower requirement is sufficient for most common use.

This effects the minimum ratio to accommodate at Level AA, and the minimum ratio to accommodate at Level AAA for large print.

Still — don’t get carried away!

Minimum Color Contrast Ratio Changed in WCAG 2
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

A W3C recommendation is the most final state a document can reach in the W3C standards system, and should now be considered the standard document for accessibility, superceding WCAG 1.

A W3C Recommendation is a specification or set of guidelines that, after extensive consensus-building, has received the endorsement of W3C Members and the Director. W3C recommends the wide deployment of its Recommendations. Note: W3C Recommendations are similar to the standards published by other organizations.

Although there has been a great deal of controversy over the past few years concerning the validity of the WCAG 2 revision, the final document has managed to deal with the greater proportion of problems. Not everything, certainly — but expecting perfection in such a vast area of concern is, frankly, an unrealistic concern.

Jared Smith recommends reviewing the original draft from January 2001 to make comparison — could be entertaining! However, if you’ve got limited time to spend, now is definitely the time to make certain you’re thoroughly familiar with the new standard for web accessibility. It’s actually final.

• WCAG 2 Recommendation Document
• Press Release

WCAG 2 Reaches Recommendation Status
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

“Organizing our Marvellous Neighbours” is now available for purchase!

So, Joe Clark — web accessibility guru, now retired from the field — is publishing a new book. The new book is on what could be considered an obscure field, except for the minor detail that approximately 33,383,245 people deal with the subject every day.

The name of the book is Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English, and the subject is the peculiarities of English spelling in (you guessed it) Canada.

The number referenced above was modified down for the French speaking population who don’t know English (3 people) and modifed up for the number of non-Canadians concerned with Canadian spelling (3).

I’m sure that there are people out there who will buy the book because they are truly concerned with the intricacies of spelling in Canadian; for myself, I’m going to buy it because it sounds entertaining.

The book isn’t available yet, but I’m sure it will be before I publish a new post (September 25th, according to certain sources), so I’ll update this post with an appropriate link at that time.

Joe Clark’s New Book
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Read more at the WebAIM blog: “Target Lawsuit Settled.”

No legal definitions established today, I’m afraid to say. Although this is a victory on behalf of the claimants, who were awarded substantive damages on their claim, there was no establishment of any kind of legal precedent.

This is primarily due to one singular item in the settlement:

2. No Admission of Liability. By agreeing to and voluntarily entering into this Agreement, there is no admission or concession by Target, direct or indirect, express or implied, that Target.com is in any way inaccessible or that Target has violated the Unruh Civil Rights Act, California Civil Code §§ 51 et seq., the Disabled Persons Act, California Civil Code §§ 54 et seq., the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 12181 et seq., or any other federal, state, or local law, regulation, order, or rule.

National Federation of the Blind vs. Target Corporation, Final Settlement

This statement clearly delineates a complete denial that there were any contradictions of law involved in the Target.com suit.

Ah, well. It is still a victory!

Target Lawsuit: Settlement Reached
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

This is (obviously) a Windows-specific release, and even further, it’s just an Internet Explorer release. However, it’s definitely a step in the right direction! I was particularly glad to see the comment:

Version 5 comes as a part of our ongoing efforts to enhance accessibility in our client-side and web applications, which is a matter I hardly need to mention is very important. Jonas Klink, Software Engineer, Accessibility

(Emphasis added.)

Now, as many have commented, the accessibility level of much of Google’s code is atrocious. I like the idea that Google is actively invested in improving the accessibility of their products; but I have yet to see any serious evidence of this effort!

Still, in the holiday spirit, I will raise a glass to Google to encourage their accessibility efforts. (And if, as a side effect, I end up a little bit drunker, I will accept that.)

Google Toolbar ties to the Windows Accessibility API
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

In fact, I found it difficult to find anything about it at all, at first — I only became aware of it because I was talking to a web development manager from Target. (Articles are now easy to find via Google News.)

At any rate, the major news is that the lawsuit has been granted federal class-action status.

Granting class-action status allows blind people throughout the country who have tried to access Target.com to become plaintiffs in the suit, which alleges violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Associated Press

Further, the Judge (Marilyn Patel) ruled that changes in Target’s web site since the date of filing do not provide grounds for dismissal of the suit.

Judge Patel’s order Friday noted that Target has modified its Web site some since the suit’s filing to make the site more accessible to the blind. Target claimed the suit should therefore be dismissed, but Judge Patel ruled against that argument. Associated Press

Turning the suit into a class action may place additional pressure on businesses to start considering web accessibility a priority. One can hope, at any rate!

See also: Update: Target ruling may force retailers to adjust Web sites (Computer World)

More News on the Target Accessibility Lawsuit
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design