Somebody recently contacted me with a fundamental question: they were undertaking an accessibility audit, and didn’t know how to structure the process. They knew web accessibility well enough — but from the perspective of setting out to perform an audit, they weren’t sure where to go.

As a result, I’m putting together this article to talk a little about how to structure an accessibility review, in all the practical ways — how you address coming up with a quote or estimate, ways to structure your research and site inspection process, and dealing with long-term follow-up.

• Specify the scope of the audit
• Identify “show-stoppers”
• Estimate or quote the project
• Plan your audit process
• Schedule a follow-up

Figuring out scope

Although the ideal is to perform an accessibility review which identifies every problem on a site and specifies solutions, that’s not always practical. In fact, it’s sometimes utterly pointless — it depends on the ultimate goal of the review. The review process for a site which is considering a redesign is radically different than for a set of templates intended for a web site still in development.

Setting goals at the outset is key. Are we looking to identify key areas for improvement? What are the resources available for fixing problems? If an aspect of the site is rife with major problems, is it best to identify every problem within that area, or simply describe the general issues and recommend finding a new solution?

An initial review does not need to identify every problem. One route I’ve frequently used is to specify a multi-stage review process: an initial review, in which I note major issues and provide guidance on fundamental principles of web accessibility, and a follow-up in which I re-check the site and, if desired, provide further guidance and detail for continuing development.

Identifying “show-stoppers”

What’s a “show-stopper”? Essentially, that’s a function of the site which is so completely inaccessible that there is no value to identifying the problems — instead, you should just describe what would constitute a good solution and recommend replacement.

It’s not uncommon for this to arise at the very earliest stages of the review, when discussing scope. If a site is using a CMS or a framework which is fundamentally rendering it inaccessible, you may want to begin by recommending redesign of the site. However, due to the common usage of external resources to provide video, interactive widgets, or social media (to provide a few examples), it may be that there are elements in use which won’t stand out right from the beginning.

Rather than performing a detailed exhumation of a fundamentally broken aspect of the site, it may be in the best interest of all parties to simply flag it for replacement and discuss that possibility with the client.

Why is this section part of the business structure? Because spending hours reviewing replaceable services is a poor use of your time and your client’s money. You should be looking for ways to improve your client’s site without costing them an arm and a leg!

Coming up with a fair estimate

It’s difficult to provide a good estimate on what a large-scale accessibility review is going to require, in terms of hours or dollars. The larger the project, the harder it is to quote. Keep in mind, however, that what you’re quoting is not generally going to be based on the number of documents on the site — rather, it will be based on the number of unique templates, forms, and navigation structures found on the site.

It is entirely possible that the site you’re reviewing will have 12,000 pages, most with images containing improper alt attributes. However, as an accessibility consultant your time is better spent identifying one or two representative examples and explaining how to properly use the alt attribute than it is painstakingly identifying every single inappropriate attribute throughout the site.

For this reason, you should be looking at the site as a process, not as a collection of pages. The ideal process of the site can be described, greatly simplified, in four steps:

1. The visitor arrives at the web site, which can happen at any place in the site.
2. The visitor will attempt to move to another point on the site, which may be another part of the same document
3. The visitor will begin a goal, which may be a purchase, a form submission, or the acquisition of information
4. The visitor will successfully complete that goal, and be notified of the results.

This general outline describes any visitor to a web site — as a consultant, your job is to identify each barrier they may encounter while completing the process. You don’t need to look at every single page of the site in order to see the shape of the problems — if you can’t navigate using a keyboard on one page, you probably won’t be able to on any other page, either!

With this knowledge, it becomes readily apparent that a web site which has 12,000 pages but uses only one navigation structure, one template, and has only a single form will be much more quickly reviewed than a site with 120 pages which uses 5 templates, provides ecommerce, and has different navigation structures depending on what area of the site is being used.

A 100% complete audit must allow for the possibility that each page may exhibit different problems. After all, if you haven’t looked at a page, you have no way of knowing how different it may be from what you’ve already seen. However, in all probability, pages of a site will be at a fairly consistent level of accessibility. The pragmatic approach — mindful to your client’s budget needs — is going to be a selective audit, not a complete audit.

Plan your Accessibility Audit Process

Now, once you’ve done this a few times, you’ll probably have the basic approach down cold. Every web site is different, however, so that isn’t going to completely free you from doing some planning. You still need to decide what your approach will be. Two example starting approaches could be process-based testing or issue-based testing.

If you’re going with a process-based testing procedure, you’ll start by selecting a process – any process. The path to make a purchase; getting to the Privacy link in the footer; sending a contact message. Follow that process all the way through in painstaking detail, isolating the accessibility issues encountered along the way.

With issues-based testing, you’ll instead pick an issue – such as keyboard accessibility. Work your way through the entire site, noting keyboard-relevant issues as you go. Then move on to the next issue and start your hunt over.

It may seem like I’m describing a very pedantic way to thinking about conducting an audit — you know that you will ultimately do both of these in their entirety. However, the reason for having a plan is simple: you need to avoid the trap of the scatter-plot approach. If you don’t have a system, you’re far more likely to end up missing problems – either because you failed to consider keyboard accessibility over here; or because you forgot to check the contact form when you were reviewing contrast. Having a plan and a process will help you avoid these gaffs.

Schedule a Follow-up

It would be nice to believe that when you’ve written and sent your painstakingly thorough accessibility audit to the client you are done with the project. Sadly, we don’t always live in that pleasant fantasy world. (Although, to be honest, in my fantasy world an accessibility audit would consist of nothing more than a smiley sticker and the phrase “Good Job!”)

Unfortunately, no matter how detailed you made your report — the report doesn’t fix the web site. The client’s developers need to do that. Or, as is sometimes the case, the client’s developers will fail to absorb the principles of the document…and while fixing the problems you described, will create new accessibility issues. Or, they’ll implement a fix which shunts the problem somewhere else, rather than resolving it entirely.

This isn’t a guarantee – there are developers working out there who don’t know accessibility, but immediately catch on to the concept once the issues are presented to them. But there are also developers who…don’t.

Planning at least one follow-up review is important. You’ll also need to make yourself available to answer questions from the development team while they work through your suggestions.

The follow-up review should be a quicker task than the initial review. You can spot-check to see how the developers worked with your suggestions. If you like what you see, you can probably be fairly satisfied. If you see problems, you may need to keep going. If you see a lot of problems, you may need to give the client a call before continuing.

In Summary

Performing an accessibility audit requires many skills: an eye for detail, a strong sense for when an accessibility issue requires fixing, and when it requires replacement, and the ability to describe accessibility concepts in language developers can respond to. Join those skills with sound business planning and a personal investment in your clients’ success, and you’re ready to go!

Section 508 web accessibility standards were written as an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act in 1998. In web development terms, this isn’t short of an eternity — and in all practical sense defines an era. The web programming methods and styles of 1998 were radically different to what you see in normal use today. The Section 508 rules have been under revision recently, and were available for public comment until June 21, 2010. Unfortunately, my time didn’t allow me to take a look at these prior to the expiration of the public comment period — but that doesn’t lessen the importance of examining the revisions.

To help explain these changes in Federal web accessibility standards, I’m going to look at three specific questions. These questions will hopefully answer some of the questions concerning what’s coming up:

1. Has this changed anything about who must follow Section 508 guidelines?
2. What has been the primary reference for changes to Section 508 rules?
3. What are the specific changes to the Section 508 documents?

Has this changed anything about who must follow Section 508 guidelines?

No. The section 508 rules still exist under the same body of law — this is not a revision of the application of the law, it’s only a revision of the methods which are acceptable in following the law. Section 508 continues to apply only to Federal departments or agencies or entities providing services or products to Federal agencies. Further, it only applies to the specific services or products provided by those contracted entities, not to any external presence or non-Federally funded projects.

What has been the primary reference for changes to Section 508 rules?

Based on the document guidelines and on references made in the updated document, it seems that the primary reference was the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0, as created by the World Wide Web Consortium. In fact, there is a specific section referring to WCAG harmonization, which indicates that web pages as defined under WCAG 2.0 which are conformant to Level AA will be considered to be in conformance with Section 508 (with a few elaborations on additional requirements.)

This is an excellent change, since it explicitly states a subset of requirements which need to be reviewed in addition to WCAG 2.0, Level AA requirements. From a consulting perspective, this simplifies the process: you can review WCAG 2.0 requirements, then check the additional requirements under Section 508.

The additional requirements are fairly straightforward. A significant percentage of them relate explicitly to video accessibility — an area which WCAG 2.0 frequently describes as Level AAA requirements. It seems clear that the Section 508 review group was concerned about the use of video in government communications, and wanted to be sure to avoid a situation where creating a video would allow Federal agencies to ignore Section 508 requirements — which is certainly a wise concern.

What are the specific changes to the Section 508 documents?

To work through all of the specific changes would be a Herculean labor — and I’m not prepared to undertake it right this moment. I’m not sure an article is the right place to do this, in fact. A permanent document demonstrating the changes may be more valuable, in the long run. Suffice it to say that the basic fundamentals of Section 508 have been updated to reflect the changes between versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The requirements which are beyond the specific conformance expectations of WCAG 2.0, Level AA are worth elaborating on, however!

Chapter 4, section 409: User Preferences. This section explicitly requires that applications allow users to set preferences for color, contrast, font type, size, and focus cursor. Thankfully, the rule is clearly written when it comes to development which is operated within a web browser: web browsers, as platforms which take some settings from an underlying platform, are expected to allow the underlying platform’s settings for these issues to take precedence.

To clarify this in simple terms: web browsers, or applications running within web browsers should not over-ride settings from the operating system.

Chapter 4, section 413: Authoring Tools. Essentially, this is an extension of the web authoring tool accessibility guidelines applied within Section 508. What it requires is that any tool which is used to author content or create documents — such as Microsoft Word, as a desktop application, or as WordPress, as a web-based content authoring tool — must allow the creation of accessible documents (such as by allowing the creation of alt attributes for images) and must not by default remove any accessibility feature — such as a video editing tool which would remove captions if editing a captioned video.

The section seems very reasonably written — it requires prompts for creating conforming documents, but also specifies that not every element should be prompted, as this can decrease usability.

Chapter 6, section 604, part 4: Real-Time Video. Live, streaming video must include real-time video description, with certain exceptions. This seems pretty explicit, and definitely is a valuable addition for people with disabilities. The exception provides for an exclusion for primarily visual and unattended situations. The example provided is a web camera overlooking a national park — it is purely visual, and there is little to no significant information to be gained from live video description.

Chapter 6, section 604, part 5: Multiple Visual Areas of Focus. When a video contains multiple areas of focus — such as a news program which also includes scrolling event notices beneath the main program — video description must be provided for all areas of focus. The provision suggests a couple of methods for accomplishing this, including divided audio tracks between left and right channels. It’s an interesting area to address. I can certainly see that this requirement can open up new areas of information availability to people with disabilities, but I can also see a number of potential problems in implementation. However, that is a question for another time!

Chapter 6, section 607: User Controls for Captions and Video Description. User controls must meet certain standards for accessibility functionality: in addition to the requirement that controls for closed captions or video description need to be present, they must also be present in the same context as other controls. It is not an acceptable option to hide controls for closed captions or video description in a corner — they should appear in contexts which have a similar prominence to other controls such as channel selection or volume adjustment.

Chapter 6, section 608: Audio Track and Volume Control. Essentially, media players must provide users an ability to isolate speech tracks and background sounds. This is obviously dependent on video production in order to function; as such, this section indicates that any videos produced must be produced with separate speech and background audio tracks, in addition to requiring that players must offer controls to separately adjust these tracks.

This clause seems to have some flaws to me — specifically, in the gross generality of “background audio” versus “speech.” Stating “speech” is very explicit, as it only refers to spoken text. However, in practical terms, there are actually three important bands of audio in synchonized media: background audio which is non-referential (music and some background sound effects), audio which is referential (some background sound effects: a knock at the door or other sound which is reacted to by the video), and speech. It can create a great deal of confusion to exclude those key sound effects from the speech track. The issue is closely related to issues with captioning and video description: it’s important to note certain sound events, since some conversations or events will lose meaning if the viewer is unaware of relevant background sounds.

On the whole, in my relatively brief examination of the updates to Section 508 standards, I’m happy with the results. Obviously, there’s always room for improvement — there’s still room for improvement in WCAG 2.0, which Section 508 could have changed — but I’d rather have a single set of base standards to reference than requirements which contradict each other! Working with standards isn’t the answer to every accessibility quandary, but you should never just ignore standards out of ignorance — instead, ignore them out of an educated disagreement.

On Wednesday of last week, I published an article on disability statistics in Practical eCommerce magazine. Although there’s nothing particularly wrong with the article, I find myself wanting to publish a follow up article with more detail on the statistics. Statistics are complicated beasts, and I feel that detailed explication of sources and statistical problems is well worth while.

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

The second in my monthly column of Practical eCommerce accessibility reviews is available today! This review follows a different pattern than the previous, setting up a persona-based walkthrough of the reviewed site.

Read my review of of Pets Contained at Practical eCommerce.

It’s always interesting to see what I’ve written after the editors have had their way with it…

Launching today, I’m beginning a new series at Practical eCommerce. This is a series of practical accessibility reviews — web sites can submit themselves to be reviewed, and I’ll take some time to review the site and write up my comments in an article format.

The goal of this article isn’t to tear down the hard work web site owners have done, so I’m not as harsh as I might be in another context — it’s also not a paid consulting review, so I’m not as thorough as I could be.

The purpose of these reviews is to provide an overview of some accessibility problems on every site reviewed; it’s superficial, but it will hopefully help make ecommerce web site owners more conscious of the issues they face with users with disabilities.

The first review is available today: Accessibility Review: Lori’s Wigsite.

I know perfectly well that this review, and the ones to come, will be leaving issues out. This is unavoidable. However, I’m interested in comments concerning these missing issues — if you are passionately concerned about elements left out, covered too superficially, or dismissed too quickly, let me know about it! I can’t cover everything, but I do want to know your thoughts.

Somehow, I’m never fully satisfied when I’m posting notification about a new column elsewhere and see that my last post was also a notification about a column elsewhere. It becomes clearly evident to me that my posting frequently here at Accessible Web Design has gone down a bit.

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.

The latest in my monthly column on accessibility at Practical eCommerce magazine is now available: Web Accessibility and the Law.

Although I’m not a lawyer, I do pay some attention to the nature of legal issues surrounding web accessibility. They’re murky, but this article attempts to shed some light on how the law covers accessibility issues on the internet.

Hope you’re able to get some value out of the article!