Critical review of the study of the availability of Internet resources Runet
On June 25, 2013, the NP Cultural Center “Without Borders” and a group of independent experts held a press conference dedicated to announcing the results of the first Russian study on ensuring the availability of Internet resources.
Among other things, the conference was attended by representatives of the Russian office of W3C, UN, RAEC, the largest Russian mobile operators, employees of investment organizations and educational institutions. The conference was moderated by the Assistant Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation Dmitry Satin (in Habrahabr: dmitrysatin ).
This study was conducted by a group of independent experts with the support of the Internet Development Foundation “Internet Support Foundation” at the Coordination Center for the Internet’s national domain, with the official support of the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation and RAEC.
The full text of the “Study on the availability of Runet Internet resources for people with disabilities (HVD)” is available in PDF format at the link: http://www.unic.ru/news_inf/Accessibility_of_Runet_2013.pdf (5.87 MB).
')
There is no doubt about the importance of the topic touched, however, familiarization with the results of the research brings more questions than answers. In addition, the fact that the study was conducted with the official support of state bodies shows that it is possible that it is on this basis that the government will make certain decisions in the field of accessibility.
In this regard, it seems necessary to conduct a detailed critical review of this study in order to at least try to prevent the wrong actions of the state and industry representatives, who may possibly rely on its results and conclusions with all inaccuracies, distortions and often gross errors contained therein.
Before turning to a detailed analysis of this study, we once again note the position of the author of this review, namely, that the problem of accessibility of Internet resources for users with disabilities, of course, exists and is definitely worthy of the attention of representatives of the state and the Internet industry. Nevertheless, this topic is quite complex and deserves the most accurate coverage without distortion of the actual data and without creating an unhealthy excitement around it by means of empty catchy statements. At the current stage, the problem of web accessibility is already fully understood and it is required to move from drawing attention to it at any cost to the routine process of improving technical literacy of all members of the IT community, which already requires a much more serious analytical and technical base of research and expert opinions.
The following review is based on the version of the document downloaded from the above link on June 27, 2013 at 16:10:54 Moscow time, and represents the author’s personal value judgment, but based on practical experience and real knowledge in this area.
The main content of the study consists of six chapters; however, already in the preface, Axel Leblois, the founder and executive director of the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict), is quite a controversial statement: “at present, most websites are inaccessible to people persons with disabilities, including websites dedicated to the provision of public services, and the most popular private web resources ”[p. 7].
There is either a not very precise wording, or a distortion of data about the real situation, because to say that more than 50% of all sites on the Internet are completely inaccessible is not to say that accessibility is not a binary category.
According to the law of large numbers, it should mean that the question “How many inaccessible sites you find on the Internet?”, Almost any user with disabilities will answer “More than every second”, but in real life it is completely different if only the limitations of the possibility not to attribute the language barrier, however, in the context of a technical conversation, this would be absurd, because language inaccessibility is mostly immanent and not subject to effective correction.
At first glance, this may not seem very significant inaccuracy, but any exaggerations and misinformations that distort the essence, albeit well-intentioned, are still unacceptable in a study claiming objectivity and positioned as a product of expert work. Not to mention the fact that outside of the expert community, from such studies usually leak, in the first place, it is such flashy shocking statements, and not dry factual information.
The first chapter is devoted to general issues and the formulation of the main problems. It sets the general tone of the study, quoting a number of quotes from various actors in favor of the relevance of accessibility issues, as well as explaining the general concept of the research undertaken.
The second chapter is devoted to the issue of accessibility of Internet resources for people with disabilities and international experience in this area. In general, it is of an abstract nature, and, first of all, it will either be of purely academic interest or serve as a basis for reflection by representatives of legislative bodies. There are very few technical aspects in it.
The third chapter is a logical continuation of the previous one, but it is already devoted to the Russian experience of ensuring the availability of resources. She, like the second, is not intended to present technical data, but gives an overview of the evolution of the development of regulatory documents on web accessibility in the Russian Federation.
It is worth noting here that when reading the second and third chapters, the overestimated level of reverence, with which the authors of the study relate to the experience of providing web accessibility in developed Western countries, is striking.
Of course, many countries of the world are ahead of the Russian Federation in the development of anti-discrimination legislation in the field of information and communication technologies, and this thesis as such does not cause objections. However, in the process of justification by the authors of the document, a number of inconsistent statements are allowed.
In particular, the study explicitly states: “An example of the most consistent and uncompromising approach to legislatively ensuring the availability of web resources is Germany, Italy, the United States and the Republic of Korea” [p. 15], and separately about the USA it is said: “there is a developed legislation in this country protecting the rights of people with disabilities” [p. sixteen]. At the same time, when it comes to Russian regulatory documents, the authors put the blame on the prescribed requirement for the creation of special versions of websites for people with disabilities: “this practice violates the freedom to choose specific users” [p. 26]. However, in such highly characterized US regulations, such a requirement is also present, particularly in Section 508 (paragraph 1194.22, clause (k)) , and the US government websites have special accessibility versions for users with disabilities.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that the authors are simply not familiar with the standard Section 508, although they mention it in the study: “The Americans with Disabilities Act is a comprehensive and extensive piece of legislation that deserves to be mentioned in the context of this study, despite the fact that does not contain explicit references to Internet access. The fact is that American case law already includes several court decisions on claims about the availability of web resources, on the basis of which it was understood that the provisions of this law prohibiting discrimination in telecommunications may also apply to the accessibility of Internet sites. . ”[P. sixteen]. This statement is absolutely untrue, since section 508 of the above-mentioned document on anti-discrimination measures in the field of electronic and information technologies (Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards) in subsection B has paragraph 1194.22, which is directly called “Web-based intranet and internet information and applications ” (Intranets, Internet information and applications based on web technologies). That is, the authors of the study speak highly of the US legislation on the availability of Internet resources, refer to specific regulatory documents, but as it turns out, they themselves are very poorly familiar with these documents.
The fourth chapter is devoted to the classification of users of sites according to various types of limitations of opportunities and the technologies that allow them to fully or partially compensate for these limitations. An overview of assistive technologies is given (in the text, this term is written in English manners - “assistive technologies” from the English assistive technology), and an attempt is made to extrapolate some statistical data.
Unfortunately, the quality of the information presented in this chapter suffers in some places. And if the phrase in the description of the principles of tactile displays for the blind "With the help of such a font consisting of six points, blind people can read information not only in books, but also on Internet resources." [P. 40] can still be taken as a mistake, because in reality modern braille displays have a cell with not six, but eight points, then the extremely careless, if not more, work with statistics raises many questions.
The authors of the study, speaking of users with impaired color vision, write the following: “Congenital color blindness is more common in men (8%) and much less often in women (0.5%). Given the fact that at the moment the audience of the Runet is 64.4 million people, we can assume that it can be about 8.5% of users, i.e. about 5.5 million people. ”[p. 45].
The authors' calculations are puzzling: the number of Runet users who have problems with distinguishing colors can get 5.5 million only if they are all “hermaphroditic,” that is, both men and women. Calculation using the expression 64.4 * (0.08 + 0.005) = 5.474 is absolutely incorrect.
This elementary mathematical problem is at the level of the youngest (maximum secondary) school). You should first divide the population into two groups by gender, for example, at least on the assumption that there are 50 to 50 men and women on the Internet, and then calculate the total number of users with color vision problems as follows: 64.4 * 0.5 * 0.08 + 64.4 * 0.5 * 0.005 = 2.737.
Thus, the authors of the extrapolation results are about two times overestimated. It is impossible to say for certain whether this is a consequence of individual problems with elementary mathematics, or a deliberate desire to once again stun readers by exaggerating numbers, as was already in the preface. Definitely, one thing can be noted: such flaws in the text of an analytical study significantly reduce the overall level of trust in it.
Against the background of such dubious mathematical calculations, other controversial technical details are somehow lost, for example, the statement that “Capacitive touchscreens (fingertips) and resistive, pressure-sensitive touchscreens are not available to users without fingers or with non-working fingers. (stylus) ”[p. 49]. In principle, this statement is true only in relation to multi touch, and in the case of a simple interface with single points of contact, the problem of accessibility by such people is completely solvable.
The presence of such inaccuracies or incorrect calculations, unfortunately, greatly spoils the impression of the chapter, whereas in many other ways the information presented in it on coverage is quite complete and clear.
The fifth chapter is devoted to testing Runet sites for their availability. It outlines the methodology used in the study to evaluate a group of twenty-one sites covering different areas of need.
Without going into a detailed analysis of the methodology, we note that it raises many questions, and the representativeness of the test results obtained with its help is extremely doubtful.
Testing was carried out only on the main pages of sites, moreover, in automatic mode through the Total Validator program, which often cannot provide information about the actual availability of the site. Such a small number of sites could be tested without much time in a more illustrative manual mode, since there are, as stated, the accessibility experts in the group of authors, and if you still use the automatic tool, then the selection of sites could be significantly expand for greater representativeness. In addition, Total Validator, allows for batch testing of all available pages on the site, not just one, but this option is available only in the commercial version, that is, most likely, the authors of the study simply used a limited demo version of the software.
In addition to the methodology, the chapter also contains a rather informative overview of typical development errors and accessibility problems resulting from them. True, in spite of the formal orientation of this part of the document to the developers, the text contains something too trivial data. Still, as an HTML tutorial, this document is still not suitable, therefore, it might not make sense to try to retell known things once again, for example: “In HTML code, headings are marked with tags from h1 to h6. The number indicates the level of importance. The h1 header is used to name the article, news, or portal page. Headings from h2 to h6 allow you to hierarchically describe the structure of the text or page. ”[P. 63-64]. Perhaps, one cannot say unequivocally that this is a drawback, but professional developers, while reading this chapter, should be patient and get ready for a slightly more primitive presentation of the material than they are probably used to, because together with the specialized data on accessibility they will have to re-read once again and the well-known principles of hypertext markup.
In addition, this chapter also contains some categorical statements which, in this peremptory form, do not correspond to reality. For example, after describing the general principles of ensuring the availability of HTML tables, the authors write: “Without access to the visually selected table headings and without seeing its structure, the blind can understand the table only if the above elements are present” [p. 68]. I would like to wish the authors not to be so categorical and not to underestimate the possibilities of blind users. In reality, the contents of the table without a description and explicitly prescribed headings may well be accessible to a user with a missing vision and be quite informative. This largely depends on the user's qualifications, the supporting software he uses, as well as the type of tabular data, so any categorical statements are inappropriate here.
The sixth chapter contains a list of recommendations, following which, according to the authors, it is possible to increase the availability of Runet for users with disabilities. Here we are talking not so much about technical, as about legislative or public recommendations, aimed at government officials and socially active citizens.
Many recommendations are extremely controversial with regard to their immediate and abrupt implementation and raise many questions in both socio-economic and purely technical terms. However, this is a topic for a separate discussion, so this study should rather be taken as a document that simply poses these questions, and not as a kind of manifesto.
Following the chapters immediately comes several information applications for the disclosure of some of the issues raised in the main text of the study.
The first appendix contains information on accessibility aspects cherished in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the second one is the main provisions of the web accessibility standard from the World Wide Web Consortium - WCAG 2.0, the third one contains a list of some publications on the topic of web accessibility, the fourth one is devoted to the review accessibility features in the products of Microsoft and Apple corporations, as well as of the Linux family; the fifth one contains a list of programs for performing automatic testing of site accessibility, the sixth one contains the results of testing The sites (part 1) and the list of accessibility errors (part 2), the seventh one contains the results of the monitoring of state sites of the AIS, the eighth one is devoted to the experience of providing web accessibility in the CIS countries and the former Soviet republics, and the ninth one contains a list of abbreviations used in text.
Unfortunately, this block of research is far from flawless and raises a number of questions.
In Appendix 4, referring to the availability of applications for Apple's operating systems, the authors state the following: “The accessibility of software and utilities, third-party developers, in the overwhelming majority of cases are accessible to users with disabilities, including users with disabilities, because the company Apple has a high level of requirements for developers and uses only programs built into the operating system to provide universal access ”[p. 90]. Even leaving aside the stylistic flaws of the proposal, it is still worth noting that it shows insufficient knowledge of the issue.
Alas, but the integration of the functions of universal access to OS X and iOS does not imply any guarantee of availability of third-party applications, and they may also be unavailable, which in practice happens quite often. In addition, Apple’s high requirements for developers do not at all extend to support in their accessibility products, and this functionality remains only recommended, as elsewhere.
Annex 7, which contains a list of software solutions for automatic availability testing, looks extremely formal. It is particularly striking that the authors did not even add to this list the software solution that they themselves used to test the sites simply by rewriting the list of solutions from the corresponding article from the Habrahabr resource, on which is given a footnote at the bottom of page 91.
In conclusion, in order to give a general assessment of this study, let us turn to the goals and objectives that were set before it.
According to the text of the document, “The study set itself the goal of analyzing the existing situation and made an attempt to offer specific recommendations for changing it” [p. 12].
As mentioned above, the methodology for assessing the availability of Runet on just twenty-one sites, moreover, using automated software testing of only their main pages, is extremely ineffective and the results of research based on it are absolutely unrepresentative. Therefore, in our opinion, this goal cannot be considered at least to some extent fulfilled. Therefore, any references to the results of this assessment of the availability of Runet are incorrect.
In turn, the authors did, indeed, quite a serious work on the review of the main problems of users with disabilities and offered very specific recommendations, although in many ways of a debatable nature. Nevertheless, specific recommendations have been proposed, and they are fully reasoned, therefore, on this side, the authors achieved their goal.
In addition, the document states: “This study
• summarizes the international legislative experience and practice of achieving web accessibility in different countries of the world;
• describes the legislative documents and the practice of ensuring the availability of Runet;
• gives an attempt to statistics of people with disabilities present in the Runet;
• describes the types of disabilities, the difficulties that users face when working on the network, as well as the assistive technologies they need;
• provides test results for 22 two web resources of the Runet from different areas most demanded by users: government, financial services, websites of mobile operators and domain registrars, social networks, websites of specialized organizations of disabled people, and the website of the 2014 Paralympic Games in Sochi;
• offers recommendations for the development of Runet in the direction of accessibility for ALL users. ”[P. 12-13]
(The quoted quote has not been edited and its text is copied as is, a typo with the number of sites analyzed is only one of many in this document.)
As a result: the analysis of Western legislation, as noted above, has not been fully implemented in places and there are clear gaps in the analysis of US regulatory documents, although this country is one of the flagships of accessibility initiatives; The analysis of the Russian regulatory framework as a whole is full, but there is some prejudice to its individual points, although in Western countries the authors did not complain about them; an attempt at statistical analysis of the audience of the RuNet with disabilities, as was demonstrated on a specific mathematical example, the authors clearly failed; An overview of the difficulties of users with disabilities and assistive technologies is generally complete, although in some places it contains technical inaccuracies and an understatement of the real capabilities of people in this category;test results of several sites of the Runet, as it was repeatedly noted, are absolutely non-indicative; The proposed recommendations are quite reasoned and worthy of a more detailed discussion.
Summing up, it can be noted that, in our opinion, the research was, at best, by half. The abstract part, which represents a general overview of the legislation (with the exception of the above remarks), assistive technologies used by users with certain restrictions, as well as recommendations of both technical and socio-economic nature, deserves consideration and further use. As for the analytical and expert parts, it seems to us to be rather weak, and frankly erroneous in places, which was justified in detail above.
As already noted, the position of the author of this review is such that now it is time for technical and analytical work in the area of web accessibility, and the time of shocking attention-getting speeches to the problem has already passed. Popularization of accessibility should not be shocking in nature, but should be a reasoned calm conviction of industry representatives and instilling in them a healthy interest in this topic.
In the final, I would like to advise government and Internet industry representatives not to use weak analytical materials in the field of web accessibility, and the authors of this study wish good luck in their future activities and pay more attention to technical and methodological issues in the future.
UPD: Since the review was published, the Internet address of the UN Information Center in Moscow has changed, for this reason the address of the research document has changed. The file is now available at http://www.unic.ru/sites/default/files/Accessibility_of_Runet_2013.pdf (10.16 MB). This is definitely a different version of the document, since even the file size is significantly different, but a cursory review did not reveal any meaningful changes.
Among other things, the conference was attended by representatives of the Russian office of W3C, UN, RAEC, the largest Russian mobile operators, employees of investment organizations and educational institutions. The conference was moderated by the Assistant Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation Dmitry Satin (in Habrahabr: dmitrysatin ).
This study was conducted by a group of independent experts with the support of the Internet Development Foundation “Internet Support Foundation” at the Coordination Center for the Internet’s national domain, with the official support of the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation and RAEC.
The full text of the “Study on the availability of Runet Internet resources for people with disabilities (HVD)” is available in PDF format at the link: http://www.unic.ru/news_inf/Accessibility_of_Runet_2013.pdf (5.87 MB).
')
There is no doubt about the importance of the topic touched, however, familiarization with the results of the research brings more questions than answers. In addition, the fact that the study was conducted with the official support of state bodies shows that it is possible that it is on this basis that the government will make certain decisions in the field of accessibility.
In this regard, it seems necessary to conduct a detailed critical review of this study in order to at least try to prevent the wrong actions of the state and industry representatives, who may possibly rely on its results and conclusions with all inaccuracies, distortions and often gross errors contained therein.
Before turning to a detailed analysis of this study, we once again note the position of the author of this review, namely, that the problem of accessibility of Internet resources for users with disabilities, of course, exists and is definitely worthy of the attention of representatives of the state and the Internet industry. Nevertheless, this topic is quite complex and deserves the most accurate coverage without distortion of the actual data and without creating an unhealthy excitement around it by means of empty catchy statements. At the current stage, the problem of web accessibility is already fully understood and it is required to move from drawing attention to it at any cost to the routine process of improving technical literacy of all members of the IT community, which already requires a much more serious analytical and technical base of research and expert opinions.
The following review is based on the version of the document downloaded from the above link on June 27, 2013 at 16:10:54 Moscow time, and represents the author’s personal value judgment, but based on practical experience and real knowledge in this area.
The main content of the study consists of six chapters; however, already in the preface, Axel Leblois, the founder and executive director of the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict), is quite a controversial statement: “at present, most websites are inaccessible to people persons with disabilities, including websites dedicated to the provision of public services, and the most popular private web resources ”[p. 7].
There is either a not very precise wording, or a distortion of data about the real situation, because to say that more than 50% of all sites on the Internet are completely inaccessible is not to say that accessibility is not a binary category.
According to the law of large numbers, it should mean that the question “How many inaccessible sites you find on the Internet?”, Almost any user with disabilities will answer “More than every second”, but in real life it is completely different if only the limitations of the possibility not to attribute the language barrier, however, in the context of a technical conversation, this would be absurd, because language inaccessibility is mostly immanent and not subject to effective correction.
At first glance, this may not seem very significant inaccuracy, but any exaggerations and misinformations that distort the essence, albeit well-intentioned, are still unacceptable in a study claiming objectivity and positioned as a product of expert work. Not to mention the fact that outside of the expert community, from such studies usually leak, in the first place, it is such flashy shocking statements, and not dry factual information.
The first chapter is devoted to general issues and the formulation of the main problems. It sets the general tone of the study, quoting a number of quotes from various actors in favor of the relevance of accessibility issues, as well as explaining the general concept of the research undertaken.
The second chapter is devoted to the issue of accessibility of Internet resources for people with disabilities and international experience in this area. In general, it is of an abstract nature, and, first of all, it will either be of purely academic interest or serve as a basis for reflection by representatives of legislative bodies. There are very few technical aspects in it.
The third chapter is a logical continuation of the previous one, but it is already devoted to the Russian experience of ensuring the availability of resources. She, like the second, is not intended to present technical data, but gives an overview of the evolution of the development of regulatory documents on web accessibility in the Russian Federation.
It is worth noting here that when reading the second and third chapters, the overestimated level of reverence, with which the authors of the study relate to the experience of providing web accessibility in developed Western countries, is striking.
Of course, many countries of the world are ahead of the Russian Federation in the development of anti-discrimination legislation in the field of information and communication technologies, and this thesis as such does not cause objections. However, in the process of justification by the authors of the document, a number of inconsistent statements are allowed.
In particular, the study explicitly states: “An example of the most consistent and uncompromising approach to legislatively ensuring the availability of web resources is Germany, Italy, the United States and the Republic of Korea” [p. 15], and separately about the USA it is said: “there is a developed legislation in this country protecting the rights of people with disabilities” [p. sixteen]. At the same time, when it comes to Russian regulatory documents, the authors put the blame on the prescribed requirement for the creation of special versions of websites for people with disabilities: “this practice violates the freedom to choose specific users” [p. 26]. However, in such highly characterized US regulations, such a requirement is also present, particularly in Section 508 (paragraph 1194.22, clause (k)) , and the US government websites have special accessibility versions for users with disabilities.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that the authors are simply not familiar with the standard Section 508, although they mention it in the study: “The Americans with Disabilities Act is a comprehensive and extensive piece of legislation that deserves to be mentioned in the context of this study, despite the fact that does not contain explicit references to Internet access. The fact is that American case law already includes several court decisions on claims about the availability of web resources, on the basis of which it was understood that the provisions of this law prohibiting discrimination in telecommunications may also apply to the accessibility of Internet sites. . ”[P. sixteen]. This statement is absolutely untrue, since section 508 of the above-mentioned document on anti-discrimination measures in the field of electronic and information technologies (Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards) in subsection B has paragraph 1194.22, which is directly called “Web-based intranet and internet information and applications ” (Intranets, Internet information and applications based on web technologies). That is, the authors of the study speak highly of the US legislation on the availability of Internet resources, refer to specific regulatory documents, but as it turns out, they themselves are very poorly familiar with these documents.
The fourth chapter is devoted to the classification of users of sites according to various types of limitations of opportunities and the technologies that allow them to fully or partially compensate for these limitations. An overview of assistive technologies is given (in the text, this term is written in English manners - “assistive technologies” from the English assistive technology), and an attempt is made to extrapolate some statistical data.
Unfortunately, the quality of the information presented in this chapter suffers in some places. And if the phrase in the description of the principles of tactile displays for the blind "With the help of such a font consisting of six points, blind people can read information not only in books, but also on Internet resources." [P. 40] can still be taken as a mistake, because in reality modern braille displays have a cell with not six, but eight points, then the extremely careless, if not more, work with statistics raises many questions.
The authors of the study, speaking of users with impaired color vision, write the following: “Congenital color blindness is more common in men (8%) and much less often in women (0.5%). Given the fact that at the moment the audience of the Runet is 64.4 million people, we can assume that it can be about 8.5% of users, i.e. about 5.5 million people. ”[p. 45].
The authors' calculations are puzzling: the number of Runet users who have problems with distinguishing colors can get 5.5 million only if they are all “hermaphroditic,” that is, both men and women. Calculation using the expression 64.4 * (0.08 + 0.005) = 5.474 is absolutely incorrect.
This elementary mathematical problem is at the level of the youngest (maximum secondary) school). You should first divide the population into two groups by gender, for example, at least on the assumption that there are 50 to 50 men and women on the Internet, and then calculate the total number of users with color vision problems as follows: 64.4 * 0.5 * 0.08 + 64.4 * 0.5 * 0.005 = 2.737.
Thus, the authors of the extrapolation results are about two times overestimated. It is impossible to say for certain whether this is a consequence of individual problems with elementary mathematics, or a deliberate desire to once again stun readers by exaggerating numbers, as was already in the preface. Definitely, one thing can be noted: such flaws in the text of an analytical study significantly reduce the overall level of trust in it.
Against the background of such dubious mathematical calculations, other controversial technical details are somehow lost, for example, the statement that “Capacitive touchscreens (fingertips) and resistive, pressure-sensitive touchscreens are not available to users without fingers or with non-working fingers. (stylus) ”[p. 49]. In principle, this statement is true only in relation to multi touch, and in the case of a simple interface with single points of contact, the problem of accessibility by such people is completely solvable.
The presence of such inaccuracies or incorrect calculations, unfortunately, greatly spoils the impression of the chapter, whereas in many other ways the information presented in it on coverage is quite complete and clear.
The fifth chapter is devoted to testing Runet sites for their availability. It outlines the methodology used in the study to evaluate a group of twenty-one sites covering different areas of need.
Without going into a detailed analysis of the methodology, we note that it raises many questions, and the representativeness of the test results obtained with its help is extremely doubtful.
Testing was carried out only on the main pages of sites, moreover, in automatic mode through the Total Validator program, which often cannot provide information about the actual availability of the site. Such a small number of sites could be tested without much time in a more illustrative manual mode, since there are, as stated, the accessibility experts in the group of authors, and if you still use the automatic tool, then the selection of sites could be significantly expand for greater representativeness. In addition, Total Validator, allows for batch testing of all available pages on the site, not just one, but this option is available only in the commercial version, that is, most likely, the authors of the study simply used a limited demo version of the software.
In addition to the methodology, the chapter also contains a rather informative overview of typical development errors and accessibility problems resulting from them. True, in spite of the formal orientation of this part of the document to the developers, the text contains something too trivial data. Still, as an HTML tutorial, this document is still not suitable, therefore, it might not make sense to try to retell known things once again, for example: “In HTML code, headings are marked with tags from h1 to h6. The number indicates the level of importance. The h1 header is used to name the article, news, or portal page. Headings from h2 to h6 allow you to hierarchically describe the structure of the text or page. ”[P. 63-64]. Perhaps, one cannot say unequivocally that this is a drawback, but professional developers, while reading this chapter, should be patient and get ready for a slightly more primitive presentation of the material than they are probably used to, because together with the specialized data on accessibility they will have to re-read once again and the well-known principles of hypertext markup.
In addition, this chapter also contains some categorical statements which, in this peremptory form, do not correspond to reality. For example, after describing the general principles of ensuring the availability of HTML tables, the authors write: “Without access to the visually selected table headings and without seeing its structure, the blind can understand the table only if the above elements are present” [p. 68]. I would like to wish the authors not to be so categorical and not to underestimate the possibilities of blind users. In reality, the contents of the table without a description and explicitly prescribed headings may well be accessible to a user with a missing vision and be quite informative. This largely depends on the user's qualifications, the supporting software he uses, as well as the type of tabular data, so any categorical statements are inappropriate here.
The sixth chapter contains a list of recommendations, following which, according to the authors, it is possible to increase the availability of Runet for users with disabilities. Here we are talking not so much about technical, as about legislative or public recommendations, aimed at government officials and socially active citizens.
Many recommendations are extremely controversial with regard to their immediate and abrupt implementation and raise many questions in both socio-economic and purely technical terms. However, this is a topic for a separate discussion, so this study should rather be taken as a document that simply poses these questions, and not as a kind of manifesto.
Following the chapters immediately comes several information applications for the disclosure of some of the issues raised in the main text of the study.
The first appendix contains information on accessibility aspects cherished in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the second one is the main provisions of the web accessibility standard from the World Wide Web Consortium - WCAG 2.0, the third one contains a list of some publications on the topic of web accessibility, the fourth one is devoted to the review accessibility features in the products of Microsoft and Apple corporations, as well as of the Linux family; the fifth one contains a list of programs for performing automatic testing of site accessibility, the sixth one contains the results of testing The sites (part 1) and the list of accessibility errors (part 2), the seventh one contains the results of the monitoring of state sites of the AIS, the eighth one is devoted to the experience of providing web accessibility in the CIS countries and the former Soviet republics, and the ninth one contains a list of abbreviations used in text.
Unfortunately, this block of research is far from flawless and raises a number of questions.
In Appendix 4, referring to the availability of applications for Apple's operating systems, the authors state the following: “The accessibility of software and utilities, third-party developers, in the overwhelming majority of cases are accessible to users with disabilities, including users with disabilities, because the company Apple has a high level of requirements for developers and uses only programs built into the operating system to provide universal access ”[p. 90]. Even leaving aside the stylistic flaws of the proposal, it is still worth noting that it shows insufficient knowledge of the issue.
Alas, but the integration of the functions of universal access to OS X and iOS does not imply any guarantee of availability of third-party applications, and they may also be unavailable, which in practice happens quite often. In addition, Apple’s high requirements for developers do not at all extend to support in their accessibility products, and this functionality remains only recommended, as elsewhere.
Annex 7, which contains a list of software solutions for automatic availability testing, looks extremely formal. It is particularly striking that the authors did not even add to this list the software solution that they themselves used to test the sites simply by rewriting the list of solutions from the corresponding article from the Habrahabr resource, on which is given a footnote at the bottom of page 91.
In conclusion, in order to give a general assessment of this study, let us turn to the goals and objectives that were set before it.
According to the text of the document, “The study set itself the goal of analyzing the existing situation and made an attempt to offer specific recommendations for changing it” [p. 12].
As mentioned above, the methodology for assessing the availability of Runet on just twenty-one sites, moreover, using automated software testing of only their main pages, is extremely ineffective and the results of research based on it are absolutely unrepresentative. Therefore, in our opinion, this goal cannot be considered at least to some extent fulfilled. Therefore, any references to the results of this assessment of the availability of Runet are incorrect.
In turn, the authors did, indeed, quite a serious work on the review of the main problems of users with disabilities and offered very specific recommendations, although in many ways of a debatable nature. Nevertheless, specific recommendations have been proposed, and they are fully reasoned, therefore, on this side, the authors achieved their goal.
In addition, the document states: “This study
• summarizes the international legislative experience and practice of achieving web accessibility in different countries of the world;
• describes the legislative documents and the practice of ensuring the availability of Runet;
• gives an attempt to statistics of people with disabilities present in the Runet;
• describes the types of disabilities, the difficulties that users face when working on the network, as well as the assistive technologies they need;
• provides test results for 22 two web resources of the Runet from different areas most demanded by users: government, financial services, websites of mobile operators and domain registrars, social networks, websites of specialized organizations of disabled people, and the website of the 2014 Paralympic Games in Sochi;
• offers recommendations for the development of Runet in the direction of accessibility for ALL users. ”[P. 12-13]
(The quoted quote has not been edited and its text is copied as is, a typo with the number of sites analyzed is only one of many in this document.)
As a result: the analysis of Western legislation, as noted above, has not been fully implemented in places and there are clear gaps in the analysis of US regulatory documents, although this country is one of the flagships of accessibility initiatives; The analysis of the Russian regulatory framework as a whole is full, but there is some prejudice to its individual points, although in Western countries the authors did not complain about them; an attempt at statistical analysis of the audience of the RuNet with disabilities, as was demonstrated on a specific mathematical example, the authors clearly failed; An overview of the difficulties of users with disabilities and assistive technologies is generally complete, although in some places it contains technical inaccuracies and an understatement of the real capabilities of people in this category;test results of several sites of the Runet, as it was repeatedly noted, are absolutely non-indicative; The proposed recommendations are quite reasoned and worthy of a more detailed discussion.
Summing up, it can be noted that, in our opinion, the research was, at best, by half. The abstract part, which represents a general overview of the legislation (with the exception of the above remarks), assistive technologies used by users with certain restrictions, as well as recommendations of both technical and socio-economic nature, deserves consideration and further use. As for the analytical and expert parts, it seems to us to be rather weak, and frankly erroneous in places, which was justified in detail above.
As already noted, the position of the author of this review is such that now it is time for technical and analytical work in the area of web accessibility, and the time of shocking attention-getting speeches to the problem has already passed. Popularization of accessibility should not be shocking in nature, but should be a reasoned calm conviction of industry representatives and instilling in them a healthy interest in this topic.
In the final, I would like to advise government and Internet industry representatives not to use weak analytical materials in the field of web accessibility, and the authors of this study wish good luck in their future activities and pay more attention to technical and methodological issues in the future.
UPD: Since the review was published, the Internet address of the UN Information Center in Moscow has changed, for this reason the address of the research document has changed. The file is now available at http://www.unic.ru/sites/default/files/Accessibility_of_Runet_2013.pdf (10.16 MB). This is definitely a different version of the document, since even the file size is significantly different, but a cursory review did not reveal any meaningful changes.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/185032/
All Articles