meaning: The Macer View/9

	The Macer View
	Comment and analysis from Tim Macer Number 9, December 2004

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The Macer View

Accessing ability: The Disability Discrimination Act could be costly for online researchers

No-one has been sued for denying a respondent the right to take a web survey yet, but from 1 October, this became another peril of online research. The part of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act that upholds the principal of equal access to services now applies to public websites too. This new law gives teeth to individuals who wish to sue if they consider the site works in such a way that prevents them from using it because of the nature of their disability. In other countries where such legislation exists, actions are usually settled out of court. However, this can result in sites being shut down for days or weeks while they are re-engineered.

Whether surveys count a service to the respondent is not clear - yet disabled surfers who fill out website pop-up surveys, are surveyed as customers or employees, or even as members of an online panel, could have strong grounds for a case if they are prevented from participating. The risk to reputation and the consequences of being forced offline should make equal access a pillar of good research .

The problem is, it is not easy to be sure that your web survey is accessible, as there is no set of standards referred to in the statute. The favoured yardstick is the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C) three-tier grading of accessibility: from a grade A site, which is a minimum standard of compliance, to AA and AAA, the most onerous grade. Even plain A sites must not just make sense to blind users using a text reader, but be fully navigable without a mouse too. Texts must be fully scalable and backgrounds not distracting to those with lesser visual impairments. W3C effectively banishes JavaScript, and requires complete use of “cascading stylesheets”, a design technique which is virtually impossible to retro-fit to any existing site and usually means a large and costly re-write even to reach grade A.

Some cynical observers view the W3C standards as a web programmers’ charter, invented to keep programmers busy, like the Millennium Bug. However, the disability rights movement see the DDA as not going far enough, as it only requires providers to make reasonable efforts to provide accessibility.

Nevertheless, there are many things one can do to improve access. These include labelling all images appropriately using the “alt tag”; ensuring that tab keys move sensibly through forms; that text sizes are scalable; that, when using tables, each cell makes sense and is captioned properly. If effectively means shunning new styles of question that rely on JavaScript or Java.

But, rather worryingly for professional researchers, the mainstream web survey tools have been heading in an entirely different direction. JavaScript abounds, tab keys work unpredictably, keyboard shortcuts are often non-existent and texts stubbornly refuse to re-scale.

You may like to check out what your supplier is doing to meet the DDA and what its position is on W3C accessibility. If you don’t, someone who finds they are locked out of expressing a strongly held opinion may reach the view that you have discriminated against them.

Tim Macer thanks Pete Comley of Virtual Surveys, for his guidance on this article.