Accessibility Show number eight was a fun one. For most shows, I’ve searched out specific sites that demonstrate particular problems so that we can demonstrate different ways that problem shows up in real sites.
For this one, however, I wanted to show something else, as well: how ubiquitous keyboard accessibility problems really are. So instead of carefully pre-selecting sites, I just grabbed the first ones in the list as I saw it at the time.
It would have been nice if I’d also been worried that I might not come up with examples…. But, in all honesty, I didn’t worry about that.
What did I find?
About what I expected. Among the six sites, four of them had severe and obvious keyboard accessibility problems. These are issues that will have a significant impact on users and are easy to identify.
One site had mixed results – mostly pretty good, but with a few gaps.
One site was really very good.
So we’ll call that something like 4.5 out of 6, or 75% of sites had easily identifiable keyboard accessibility problems.
These are the kinds of problems that aren’t even represented in most automated accessibility tests. Automated testing doesn’t tell you anything about keyboard accessibility. If you look at the WebAIM Million accessibility study, you’ll notice that the word “keyboard” doesn’t even appear on the page.
But based on this small sample, keyboard accessibility would fall between ‘Low contrast text’ and ‘Missing alternative text for images’. (Disclaimer: a sample size of six is in no way comparable to a sample size of one million.)
But as a general indicator, it’s intriguing.
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