Articles
Survey: professional services firms and website accessibility
30 May 2008
Between September 2007 and April 2008 we conducted research into the accessibility of just over 1,500 professional services firms across the UK. Our findings were as follows.
Summary of findings
There were a few isolated pockets of excellence: a handful of firms now boast beautifully designed, standards-compliant and highly accessible websites. However, the vast majority failed to meet even the lowest levels of accessibility. Some were near misses which could, without a great deal of effort, be brought up to the mark. Most were not well built and/or maintained. A small number were so poor that they were completely inaccessible. You might possibly expect this from very old websites, but astonishingly one was launched whilst the survey was in progress.
Measuring accessibility
Each firm was assessed against the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the internationally recognised standard for web accessibility. WCAG defines three levels of compliance:
- Level 1 includes criteria that sites must satisfy
- Level 2 includes criteria that sites should satisfy
- Level 3 includes criteria that sites may satisfy
… and assessing it
Compliance at level 2 is a good standard of accessibility. Level 1 is certainly of practical value, even though some people will experience difficulty accessing some content. Level 3 can provide useful additional features but in reality is almost impossible to achieve. We have yet to see a fully level 3 compliant site, during the course of the survey or anywhere else.
PDF accessibility
Given that a high proportion of professional services firms make extensive use of PDFs on their websites, we also assessed each firm for the accessibility of any PDF content it may have published.
The main survey findings
We found that 13.1 per cent of the sites surveyed complied with WCAG to level 1, but only 2.6 per cent complied to level 2. The remainder, 84.3 per cent, failed to meet any level of accessibility. The details, broken down by sub-sector, are given below.
| Non compliance | Compliance with WCAG level 1 | Compliance with WCAG level 2 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barristers | 89.65 | 6.89 | 3.45 |
| Law firms | 82.03 | 15.55 | 2.41 |
| Accountants | 95.00 | 3.30 | 1.60 |
Missing "alt text"
By far the most common fault causing failure at level 1 was the absence of text equivalents for images ("alt text"). This was the result of both poor site design and/or poor content maintenance.
JavaScript
The second most common fault was bad JavaScript coding. In the worst cases poor coding caused entire navigation systems to vanish when JavaScript was disabled. Estimates vary as to how many site visitors will have JavaScript disabled or otherwise unavailable, but the lowest is usually around 5 per cent. We uncovered many other JavaScript problems which caused accessibility problems to varying degrees.
Inaccessible PDFs
We also found that 29.6 per cent of the sites surveyed contained inaccessible PDFs. These days it is relatively straightforward to make most PDF content fully accessible. Nevertheless, fewer than 1 per cent of the sites surveyed had added any accessibility features to their PDFs.
Framesets
Surprisingly, we found that 4.2 per cent of the surveyed sites were built using frameset technology (which was well past its sell by date by the turn of the century). In addition to poor accessibility, frameset-based sites rank poorly in search engines and cannot be viewed at all in devices such as a Blackberry.
Other common problems
Other common problems included inaccessible forms and data tables, poor typography – tiny fonts and "justified" (actually, pseudo-justified) text, poor colour contrast, lack of properly formatted headings, and tables used for layout purposes.
… and finally, the completely inaccessible
Finally, we came across three sites that were 100 per cent accessibility lock-outs. Two of these were built entirely with Flash technology. In recent years Adobe (manufacturer of Flash) has made great advances in making Flash potentially accessible. However, if done badly, as it was in these two cases, it can be terminal. The third site was a Barristers' Chambers' website which was constructed entirely from pictures of text, thereby locking out all non-sighted visitors (including Google).
Conclusions
The proportion of inaccessible websites identified in this survey may seem high. However, the results are similar to the findings of a 2004 survey by the former Disability Rights Commission (DRC). The DRC commissioned a survey of the websites of 1,000 organisations in the UK. It found that over 80 per cent failed to meet even the lowest levels of accessibility. Just 2 sites complied with WCAG to level 2.
How we can help
PWS is currently assisting a number of professional services firms to address various web content accessibility problems.
Ted Page Director PWS
PWS web accessibility services
For further information on any issue raised in this article or on any aspect of website accessibility please contact us on 01932 355 222 or 07918 952 874.
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