Are Quebec Web sites accessible?

Summary of the evaluation

The evaluation of 200 Web sites carried out during the summer of 2007 did not show significant improvements in the level of accessibility for persons with disabilities compared with the 2003 evaluation. In fact, only 15 % of all sites evaluated offer an acceptable level of accessibility (good, very good, or excellent).

Encouraging signs :

• In 2007, new categories made it to the top. The Public Administration category ranked first, followed by the Education and Employment and Social Networking categories.
• Overall, development techniques have improved. A greater number of sites are using style sheets for presentation, making it easier to adapt the presentation to the needs of certain users.
• Certain organizations stood out for having invested a lot of effort in adapting their Web site to meet accessibility guidelines and improving the visual presentation and navigation experience for most of their users.

Concerning trends :

• Due to an increase in the number of mainstream Web sites that rely on multimedia and interactivity, we need to work with adaptive technology developers and proponents of these new Web development techniques to find new solutions.
• The amount of Web content is steadily increasing from mainly text-based documents to video files. Since a significant portion of the population has visual or hearing disabilities, Web developers must take this into consideration and integrate subtitles and audio descriptions (like on television) into Web content.

Some current initiatives give us reason to believe, however, that the situation could improve quite rapidly. For example :

• The government of Quebec is currently developing its own mandatory Web site accessibility standards scheduled for implementation at the end of 2008 or in early 2009.
• Many Web agencies have already developed an expertise in accessibility and have included it in their service offer.

We have come to the conclusion that the Web is still not taking account of people with disabilities. We encourage businesses, designers, and content developers to take initiative to help change this situation. The first to comply with accessibility guidelines have an excellent opportunity to stand out from the rest, before Web accessibility becomes a mandatory quality standard.

We invite you to come back in 2010 to find out how much progress has been made between now and then.

Findings and recommendations

Like the 2003 evaluation, the 2007 study allowed us once again to identify the most common accessibility issues that people with disabilities face on the Internet. The following seven issues were selected for the ease of implementation and major impact they could have on the user experience :

For more information on these issues and to obtain a few tips on how to improve your own Web site’s accessibility, go to the following section : Seven main recommendations.

You can also view a list of available resources that can help you design or correct an accessible Web site. (Note: this link leads to a French only site.)