Inclusive design: accessibility guidelines only part of the picture

largest of its kind ever undertaken, but sadly the results are no sur-prise—certainly not to anyone who has ever tried to navigate a Web site without a mouse. However, some of the findings are quite interesting and have even managed to spark a minor conflict with the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, which may increase interest in the topic, if nothing else. First, the predictable information: All 1,000 sites were tested against the WAI's Web Content Accessibility guidelines with an automatic testing tool. The results are as follows: • Fewer than 19 percent of home pages were Level A compliant (assuming that some would also fail the manual tests required by the guidelines). • Only six of the 1,000 home pages passed the automatic testing for Level AA, with four of those failing the manual tests. That left only two sites as AA compliant (0.2 percent). • No home page was Level AAA compliant. Of the 1,000 sites originally chosen , 100 were tested by a panel of disabled users and a further 20 underwent expert inspection. The results of these further studies were compared with the automated tests, with some slightly more interesting outcomes: • There was no correlation between the number of WAI checkpoint violations and the results of the user tests. • 69 percent of the warnings raised by automated testing needed to be manually checked, but only five percent of those resulted in violations (so 95 percent of the warnings that required manual checking were false positives). These are pretty discouraging results, though automated testing does have some compensating strong points: : / 55 i n t e r a c t i o n s / j u l y + a u g u s t 2 0 0 4 hci and the web hci and the web