Study into Accessibility in Web Projects

One of our number is Lyndsey Pearce, a student at the University of Bolton. She is very interested in researching developer issues/constraints and would really appreciate your response to some questions attached in the following questions. You can contact her via lyndsey.pearce@ntlworld.com

The responses to the questions below are to be used as part of ongoing research for a University final year project that is concerned with accessibility on the web.

The questions are aimed at finding out about issues involved when building for accessibility such as time and cost incurred, and also to discover technologies and tools typically used and in what environments.

This questionnaire is to be filled in by willing participants who have developed or designed accessible web projects in the past, in particular, database driven web pages, where the future content is to be managed by a person in the client company via a content management system. A content management system is defined here as a system which allows users with administration rights to add, edit, delete text, graphics etc on the web pages.

There are 8 questions.

Please give as much detail as you can, and fill in your answers in the space below:-

Many of the questions are open so you can express your feelings or individual experiences.

Premise:

• In your organisation, imagine a project comes along that you would class as a typical small - medium sized project.
• You must build security measures in place so that a section of the site is secure for administrators.
• You must build features into the project so that an administrator can add, edit and delete text, add and delete graphics; as well as add and delete audio files and video clips to all the pages.
• You must also build in style sheets for formatting the front end.

Question 1

How often to you build accessibility into your web projects?

Question 2

Do you often build accessibility for all disabled groups such as those with Visual/Hearing/Cognitive/Motor disabilities? Explain what groups you design and develop for and why.

Question 3

Do you follow any standards to help guide your application of accessibility into web projects? What standards do you follow, how are they relevant for the groups you design and develop for, and why do you follow them?

Question 4

What tools do you use for projects dealing with accessibility? i.e. What server technologies do you use? What markup languages do you use? What software do you use? What environments are these used in? i.e. What platforms do you develop with etc? What limitations and/or advantages are there when using these tools and environments?

Question 5

What is the average time of an accessible project (using the premise as a rough guideline) and how much extra time does it take, if any, over a non-accessible project? Please explain why extra time might be incurred and what cost issues are considered

Question 6

What is your view of UK legislation for accessibility in web sites? i.e. Is is too vague, offers good guidance etc?

Question 7

Do you build for maximum/minimum accessibility in web projects? How do you go about achieving this? How do you define goals for accessible web projects?

Question 8:

What are the disadvantages/advantages to building accessibility into a project?