Web Accessibility is Broken.
It’s time to fix it!

AccessU 2022
Eric Eggert

Eric Eggert (he/him/his)

  • 🇩🇪 Co-founder & Co-owner of outline Consulting (2011)
  • 🇸🇪 Web Accessibility Specialist at Axess Lab (2022)
  • 🇦🇹 Lecturer at FH Joanneum (2015)
  • 🇺🇸 Director of Accessibility Services at Knowbility (’16–’22)
  • 🌏 Web Accessibility Specialist at W3C/WAI (’13–’20)

📍 Wissen, Germany 🇩🇪

What is the Problem?

🎉
W3C WAI is 25 years old!

😭
96.8% of home pages had
detected WCAG 2 failures!

96.8% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures! This improved very slightly from 97.4% in February 2021 and 97.8% in 2019.

The WebAIM Million: WCAG Conformance

Because automatic testing cannot detect all possible WCAG failure types, this means that the actual WCAG 2 A/AA conformance level was certainly lower.

The WebAIM Million: WCAG Conformance

WCAG Conformance is not everything!

Minimal issues that do not consist a web accessibility barrier can cause conformance failures.

While the rate of pages with no detectable errors was very low, 21.6% of pages had 5 or fewer detected errors and 31.3% had 10 or fewer.

The WebAIM Million

I think we can safely assume that many of these low issue pages are fairly usable.

96.5% of all errors detected fall into these six categories. These most common errors have been the same for the last 4 years. Addressing just these few types of issues would significantly improve accessibility across the web.

The WebAIM Million

Most common errors

  • 83.9% ↘️ Low contrast text
  • 55.4% ⬇️ Missing alternative text for images
  • 50.1% ↘️ Empty links
  • 46.1% ⬇️ Missing form input labels
  • 27.2% ↗️ Empty buttons
  • 22.3% ⬇️ Missing document language

Summary

2019: 322%

2022: 285%

(I’m aware that this is not how percentages technically work!)

Most common errors are simple, one-line fixes.

  • Empty links & buttons
  • Missing form input labels
  • Missing document language

Why is there not more progress?

  • Website owners don’t know about accessibility.
  • Web professionals have often no formal training and are supposed to learn on the job.
  • It’s hard to find reliable, actionable information.

Accessibility as a Mystery

Try to get a yes/no answer out of an accessibility professional!

1.4.1 Use of Color (Level A): Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.

TPGi Blog Post header “does it fail 1.4.1 use of color?” Well Color Us Surprised—This SC Can Be a Tricky Customer

Is lightness difference a color difference?

✨ Maybe? ✨

WCAG won’t say.

Understanding doc and a technique …

… clarify this aspect, but those are non-normative documents.

Where’s the information?
Which resource to trust?

And it’s even worse with ARIA!

Is it in …?

It’s extremely complicated
for practitioners searching
for actionable advice.

WCAG 2 is an extremely successful standard.

WCAG 2 is …

  • 14 years old, with revisions in 2018 and 2020, 2021, 2022?
  • Adapted in or basis of legislation all around the world.
  • The basis for any accessibility practice with 4 principles and 13 guidelines.
  • Not without its flaws.
  • Not a bad standard at all.

Of course, experts will poke holes in it.

That happens to every standard.
Still a pretty darn good standard.

WCAG 3

Is supposed to replace WCAG 2 with a whole new standard with a new name (W3C Accessibility Guidelines 3), new approaches (outcomes), and a lot more additional guidance.

W3CAG…

  • … is a revolution instead of an evolution. Testers, developers, everyone needs to learn new wording and a whole new standard for how to approach accessibility.
  • … will be used in parallel with WCAG 2 for some time. Which means a lot of context switching and potential for confusion.
  • … relies heavily on non-normative supporting material. W3C has not been successful keeping such material up to date in the past.

W3CAG also…

  • … alters testing to be more precise. That means, for example, (in the first draft) counting images and then deriving a score from the percentage of the conforming images.
  • … has individual conformance. A website conforming to “silver” might not caption all their videos, something you could rely on a WCAG 2 AA conforming website.

I find this scary.

Accessibility is an afterthought

Even with web standards.

ARIA

  • Initially a background and bridging technology.
  • Capability to be integrated in HTML, eventually.
  • Now: Web developers are expected to know it even for simple websites.

Limited user agent integration

So much assistive technology does not or insufficiently support ARIA. Harmonization is paramount. But there is no reliability for developers.

Limited HTML integration

But we finally got <dialog>!

ARIA and HTML are developed in different worlds.

By different people. In different orgs.

No strategy

Other standards are more productive.

OHAI CSS!

So, what do we do?

1. Leadership

  • We need someone with a vision for reducing web accessibility barriers.
  • We need clear plans and goals to achieve a significant number of barrier reductions.
  • We need big-picture thinking to build back trust in the guidance.

2. Align what’s right with what’s easy

  • In accessibility, doing something right is often difficult.
  • Humans shy away from difficulty.
  • Integrating accessibility into tools, standards, and technologies will make the accessible way the easy way to do it.
  • Make accessibility interoperable and predictable.

3. Clarify documentation

W3C’s WAI needs to get rid of projects that cannot be sustained and focus on sustainable advice.

W3C’s WAI needs to promote best practices instead of vague suggestions.

4. Reform WCAG gently

  • Get rid of Techniques.
  • Change Understanding documents to be 1-page tutorials for individual SCs.
    • If an Understanding doc gets too long: time to split up the SC.
  • Every SC must be reasonably understandable from the normative text alone.

4. Reform WCAG gently

  • Split SCs or related SCs into modules, CSS-style.
    • Give individual sub-groups the authority and trust to shepherd these SCs.
    • Frequently publish updates to these SCs and their associated Understanding docs.
    • No change can happen to an SC without updating/aligning the Understanding.
  • Modules can be combined into snapshots for policy makers every year.

4. Reform WCAG gently

  • Add more principles and guidelines.
  • Allow for SCs that need reasonable interpretation, for example “clear language”.
  • Combine levels A and AA.
  • Promote feasible AAA criteria into the standard (making them de-facto A/AA).

4. Reform WCAG gently

  • Update and clarify SCs over time.
  • Provide technology-specific, actionable guidance in the Understanding.
  • Provide testing steps for each SC in the Understanding.

5. Fix interoperability

  • Adopt useful ARIA features to HTML.
  • Make sure there is consistency between different assistive technologies.

6. Improve User Agents

Browsers should be doing so much more.

  • Correcting contrast
  • Providing backplates
  • Control CSS animation

7. Improve design and developer tooling

  • Design tools should have buit-in accessibility hints.
  • Accessibility errors should show up in the browser’s console.

8. Awareness & Training

  • Raise awareness by running big public marketing campaigns.
  • Work with schools and universities to require accessibility training for everyone.

Summary

  1. Leadership
  2. Align what’s right with what’s easy
  3. Clarify documentation
  4. Reform WCAG
  5. Fix interoperability
  6. Improve User Agents
  7. Improve design and developer tooling
  8. Awareness & Training

Any ideas/questions?

Q&A Session: May 12, 2022

  • Austin 9:45AM
  • London 3:45PM
  • Berlin 4:45PM
  • Tokyo 11:45PM

Thank you!

Eric Eggert