#SOAR 2nd Annual State of Accessibility Report May 21st, 2020 There are 2.2 Billion People Worldwide with a Visual Impairment According to the World Health Organization 1 Foreword By Joe Devon, Co-Founder of Diamond and Global Accessibility Awareness Day Much has happened since we launched our 1st State of Accessibility Report. At Diamond, we had our frst full year with an accessibility practice area. We’ve learned the pain organizations & accessibility professionals face when a project revolves around compliance issues. CTOs hate losing velocity on their roadmap and increased costs as the pressure mounts on the whole organization. Happily, our DNA is a company built by software developers for software developers. We have tai- lored our oferings to how CTOs think. Rather than focus on audits that slow down development, we actually fx the bugs and help with velocity. The results of this year’s report show that the state of accessibility on the web hasn’t changed con- siderably. Diamond has again performed a manual analysis of registration, login and logout of the top Alexa websites and found improvements. By contrast, Jared Smith updates us on his seminal WebAIM Million study, which shows worse results than last year. Sharron Rush, accessibility pioneer at Knowbility, has a somewhat somber update on accessibility in the K-12 space. Lastly, it is long overdue that we fatten the curve of inequality for People with Disabilities (“PwD”). It needs to start with the developer community. We will share our plans here to move the needle with the Diamond #GAADPledge, an initiative geared at infuencing developer culture. In the Age of the Coronavirus, the world has gone digital. This is our moment to shine! Joe Devon Joe Devon Co-Founder of Diamond 2 Table of Contents Foreword pg 2 The State of Accessibility in 2020 pg 4 Accessibility of the Registration, Login and Logout of the Alexa Top 100 pg 4 Web Technology Accessibility - What We Learn from the WebAIM Million pg 5 The State of Accessibility in EdTech for K-12 pg 8 In Conclusion pg 12 It is Time to Flatten the Curve of Digital Inequality for People with Disabilities pg 12 How to Improve the State of Accessibility pg 12 What is the #GAADPledge? pg 13 Diamond Launches the GAAD Pledge pg 13 Facebook Takes the GAAD Pledge pg 13 Diamond Invites You to Take the GAAD Pledge pg 13 Until Next Year pg 13 Appendix A pg 14 Annotated Bibliography pg 14 Contributors pg 17 About Diamond pg 17 About WebAIM pg 17 About Knowbility pg 17 #SOAR & Contact Info pg 18 3 State of Accessibility in 2020 Accessibility of the Registration, Login or form element trees made available by the and Logout of the Alexa Top 100 software. by Richard Nesbitt & Joe Devon, Diamond The AXE plugin for Chrome was used to identify If registration, login and logout sections of a lang, contrast, label and ARIA errors; this was run website are inaccessible, by defnition the entire on the frst screen of the registration process for site is inaccessible. To assess the state of the top the site. websites with respect to these three features, we Registration have manually tested the Alexa Top 100 web- sites. The process of registering on most sites can be broken down into the following four phases (not Technology Methodology all sites required #4): Technology used: • Find a link or button to start the registration • VoiceOver on Safari, macOS Mojave • Fill out the form • NVDA on Firefox, Windows 10 • Submit the form • JAWS on Internet Explorer 11, Windows 10 • Complete a confrmation process Can the following processes be accessed and Most of the failures recorded for the registration completed using only the keyboard and key process were from phase 1 or 2. If the initial op- combinations made available through the screen tion to begin registration was not available to the reading software? screen reader, the site was given a failing grade. Additionally, if the page contained any forms re- • Register quiring a CAPTCHA that had no audio alternative, • Log In the site was given a failing grade. • Log Out If you can register but you can’t login, that is con- If registration could not be completed, no further sidered a failure. testing was done in most instances. If you can login but you can’t logout, that is con- Login and Logout Upon successful registration, sidered a failure. testing of the login and logout processes was conducted. If the requisite elements (forms and/ The screen reader software listed above was or buttons) could not be accessed via the key- used to navigate through the registration pro- board, the site was given a failing grade in that cess, logging out of the site, and then logging category. back in. If registration could not be achieved, login and logout were not tested. “With Difculty” Any login and logout processes that seemed illogical, but were still completable, On occasions where the links, buttons, or forms were considered accessible “with difculty”. For did not receive focus at appropriate times, or example, triggering a login button or link and were for some reason unavailable by regular then needing to search for form elements/but- means of navigation, a search was done for the tons to proceed because focus was not given to appropriate element by accessing either the link the modal. 4 Results • 33% had either missing or improperly associ- ated feld labels Between last year and this year’s tests, we saw a • 15% had invalid ARIA usage signifcant improvement in sites that were acces- sible on all three screen reader platforms tested. Last year, 29% of sites tested were accessible 52 Had 15 Had without error. This year, that number jumped to Constant Invalid 40% of sites accessible without error. Errors ARIA Usage Alexa Top 100 33 Had 13 Were Missing or Missing a Incorrect Lang Field Attribute Labels 40% Accessible Causes of Failure There were varied reasons for 39% Inaccessible failure. In 3 cases, inaccessible “Terms of Ser- 21% Accessible vice” (“ToS”) caused the failures. There were 6 with Difficulties inaccessible captchas, 12 problems with ele- ment focus, 8 form element problems, and 18 We saw a decrease in sites that failed the tests. problems with :focus states. Last year, 43% of sites failed. This year, 39% Web Technology Accessibility - What failed. While not a huge improvement, at least it is better than last year. We Learn from the WebAIM Million By Jared Smith, WebAIM Last year, 28% of sites tested were accessible The WebAIM Million is an annual accessibili- “with difculty” as defned above. This year, that ty analysis of the home pages for the top one number dropped to 21% of sites accessible “with million web sites. It provides great insight into difculty”. We consider this to be an improve- the current state and trends of web accessibility. ment only because the 7% diference went to In February 2019 and February 2020, nearly 200 sites that have improved from the “with difculty” accessibility and technology characteristics of category to the completely accessible category. the one million home pages were collected. In Drilling Down Of the phases tested are registra- 2020, accessibility data for over 100,000 interi- tion, login, logout. or pages for the top 1,300 web sites were also collected. These data points provide a deep For Logins: perspective on the accessibility of home pages • 23% failed on all three screen readers across the web. This article focuses on trends • 25% failed on at least one screen reader from 2019 to 2020, and how the data from the WebAIM Million research can inform web acces- Other Accessibility Metrics Tested Of the top sibility improvements for users with disabilities. 100 Alexa websites: • 13% are missing a lang attribute Overview • 52% have contrast errors WebAIM conducted these analyses using the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool. While 5 no automated tool can detect all accessibility 3. Empty links and buttons - 66% of home pag- issues, the detectable issues are often among es, 8.4 instances per page the most impactful for users with disabilities. 4. Missing form input labels - 54% of home pag- es, 1.9 instances per page 5. Missing document language - 28% of home Average Number of Errors pages Per Home Page 60.9 Cause of Most Common Accessibility Failures In February 2020, an average of 60.9 errors were detected per home page. Each introduc- Percentage of Average Failures es a barrier to users with certain disabilities and Home Pages Per Page refects non-conformance with the Web Content L Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This is up from Contrast 36 Text 86% 59.6 errors in February 2019. 98.1% of home pag- es had at least one detectable WCAG 2 failure, Missing up from 97.8% in 2019. Image At 66% 12 Tex Interior pages within the most popular websites Empty had 53 errors on average. 97.8% of these interior Links and 8.4 Buttons 66% pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures. Missing These data suggest that accessibility for users Form Input 1.9 54% with disabilities is slowly getting worse over Labels time. This pervasive inaccessibility is a crisis for Missing the web design and development feld. Owners Doument 28% - Language of inaccessible web sites are subject to lawsuits and formal complaints under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Inaccessible web sites are All of these issues are readily preventable and less usable, more difcult to maintain, and less fxable. They refect a fundamental failure in use search engine compatible than those that have case development and an inattention to design been built with accessibility in mind.