Help is pretty straightforward (I think).

This past weekend, I heard about the CNN re-design. I wondered about its accessibility and found nothing on that topic anywhere. I switched to BBC.co.uk to compare. They have “Accessibility Help”, and as far as I recall, they’ve always had something about accessibility somewhere in a header or footer.

Some sites have “accessibility statements”, and I regard those as PR or political, or whatever you want to call them. No offense meant, but the wording just makes me think it is a declaration of where that site stands. Technical details are there, as well. Perhaps a statement is better placed in a press or PR area, but the “how do I / can I get around this site” info should be readily available.

Not finding anything makes me nervous about CNN. The way the promo video was worded makes me think the re-design only covers “making pretty” and “re-arranging”. Average users may not know what terms like “usability” or “accessibility” mean, but they could have used plain words like “even users who are blind or deaf can enjoy a full experience blablabla” – if that is indeed the case. I have my doubts.

Just a bit of blather from me. :)

Homepage pageviews: 549,496
Accessibility page pageviews: 20,108
Total pageviews for whole site: 9,132,208

Link location: top of page on all pages
Link text: “Site help and accessibility options”

Cheers,
Andrew.

That’s exactly my suspicion – that a combination of the link text being “Accessibility” (or variants thereof) and being at the bottom of the page is meaning that the pages aren’t being visited and the info is going unread.

That said, whether that info is aimed at the end-user or a pile of useless back-covering that’s a waste of everyone’s time is a whole other ball of wax…

I agree that whatever you call it, the link should be prominent in the header of the page, and I suspect that the results of this survey will show how much of a difference the placement makes.

A lot of people who need accessibility help wont necessarily associate themseves with the word “accessibility” so the link is lost to them. Of course, equally, there may be a few that actively look for an “Accessibility” link but arguably they already know what type of content to find there anyway and will get there comfortably via a “Help” link.

I floated this idea at RNIB and we ended up going with “Help” rather than “Accessibility” and this worked well. It drew more users in and felt (to me at least) less prescriptive making no assumptions about who may want to explore content there.

I’ve also done the same thing at Opera so that we have an “Access Opera” section within the “Support” section rather than an “Accessibility” link. Content there is still being developed and we’ll be adding a section on accessibility browsing tips for the browser itself soon.

I don’t necessarily think there’s a right or wrong here except that the link – whatever it is – needs to be high in the tab order and visible. Simples!

I’d be really intrested to hear your final stats and will dig around in Opera to see if I can find any info to share with you.

How many views your accessibility page has had in a given time period.
698 pageviews in one year.

How many views your home page has had in that time period.
The site (not just the homepage) had 339.566 pageviews in that year.

What that time period is.
22/10/2008 – 22/10/2009

Note: because AnySurfer is the Belgian quality mark for accessible websites, our stats may differ from a ‘normal’ site.

Conclusion: for every 500 pageviews, 1 went to the accessibility help page.