[Sigia-l] Accessibility and IA - DRC Report Published

[kalbach at scils.rutgers.edu]

Hello,

The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) in Great Britain just released an
in-depth study on the accessibility of 1000 websites [1]. It is no
surprise that most sites did not even meet the most basic guidelines (like
over 80%).

However, the report makes recommendations to improve the W3C WAI
guidelines on accessibility [2], explicitly citing the current lack of
IA-related guidelines. Appendix 2 of the report begins with:

“The [WAI] Guidelines should provide better coverage of information
architecture and navigation design issues in relation to accessibility by
making recommendations that will:
- reduce the number of links and ensure that genuine and necessary links
are clearly identified as such
- avoid site fragmentation: navigation mechanisms should be consistent (eg
in appearance and behaviour), the relative importance of different
sections (across the site and within pages) should be apparent, mark-up
languages should be used to indicate the structure of pages
- preserve links to the Home page
- improve search design
- eradicate excessively deep site structures; and ensure that page titles
are informative.”

Should these recommendations find their way into formal guidelines, could
it be that having a good IA might be mandated by law with respect to
accessibility in the future?  (If so, there are a few sites I’d like to
sue for having bad search or “excessively deep site structures”. :-)

Ciao,
Jim

[1] http://www.drc-gb.org/publicationsandreports/report.asp
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/