Stanford Online Accessibility Program

Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users with Disabilities

Design Guidelines for Websites and Intranets Based on Usability Studies with People Using Assistive Technology

By: Kara Pernice and Jakob Nielsen

Introduction from the report:

The Internet opens up many opportunities for people with disabilities. Most fundamentally, the Internet is liberating. For example, people with visual impairments can read the daily newspaper the minute it is published, rather than wait for a taped transcription. The participants in our study embrace the Web, and most said that they would never want to give up their Internet connection. Every user mentioned at least one thing that they can do using the Web that they could not do before. As in our previous Web user studies, participants’ Web use varied greatly: Everyone has different interests and needs. The beauty of the Web is the diversity of specialized things it lets users do.

While the opportunity is certainly there, the Web is unfortunately very far from fulfilling its potential to serve users with disabilities. Inaccessible and unusable sites abound. Even sites that are theoretically accessible often have low usability for people with disabilities. Our studies indicate that Web usability is about three times better for sighted users than for users with visual impairments.

Most of the usability problems are not quite as severe for users with motor skill challenges. However, these users would be much better served if sites were designed with accessibility in mind and followed usability guidelines for users with disabilities.

USABILITY STUDY WITH USERS WITH DISABILITIES

To derive the usability guidelines in this report, we conducted a series of usability tests of several different websites. In total, 104 people participated in the evaluations, including 84 users with disabilities and 20 users without disabilities who served as a control group.

We conducted a qualitative study with 44 users, including 31 in the United States and 13 in Japan. Of these users, 35 had visual impairments and 9 had motor skill impairments. Because the Web’s use of audio is currently limited, we did not include users with auditory impairments. In the qualitative study, we observed participants using ten U.S. sites and six Japanese sites. The various targets included corporate, high-tech, government, e-commerce, and nonprofit sites. We also conducted a quantitative study in the U.S. to measure the magnitude of usability problems for users with disabilities compared to non-disabled users. The quantitative study had 60 participants, including 20 users with low vision, 20 users with no vision, and a control group of 20 sighted users.

READ THE ENTIRE REPORT

Download the entire PDF report: Beyond ALT Text - Jakob Neilson ( 7868 KB)

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