This week, I tried to find statistics showing the state of web accessibility in the world – how accessible are websites right now, and if they aren’t, why not? I initially had trouble finding good data on this subject, and when I did finally find a sufficiently recent article, it acknowledged that “There still is a lack of WA awareness and a paucity of scholarly research to discover the factors that might hinder WA.”
The first article I found was called “A Delphi Study of Factors Hindering Web Accessibility For Persons With Disabilities”, published in The Journal of Computer Information Systems in 2015. It surveyed 30 professional website developers with knowledge of accessibility, and asked them to name the things that most hindered the field of web accessibility. Here are the top five factors they listed, with Factor 1 being the biggest, and Factor 5 being the smallest:
- Lack of publicity and awareness
- Management/administration’s lack of interest
- Lack of institutional or financial support from the government
- Absence of objective evaluations of accessibility compliance
- Lack of accessibility experts
I also found a 2015 article in EContent Magazine (a publication of Information Today) which quotes a web accessibility consultant named Karl Groves. Rove states that he finds an average of 72 accessibility issues per-page on the web using automated software that discovers these kinds of problems. The article acknowledges that the software Rove uses can’t detect every single accessibility issue, so that number could be even higher in reality.
The final statistic I was able to find came from law firm Seyfarth Shaw. They found an increase in federal web-accessibility lawsuits from 2017 to 2018, with 814 lawsuits filed in 2017, and 2258 lawsuits in 2018. Much like with Rove’s “72” statistic, these numbers were found using automated means – searching certain keywords within data from the Courthouse News Services. The authors acknowledge that some lawsuits may not have shown up due to their descriptions not containing the proper keywords.
These three statistics seem to paint a bleak picture on the state of web accessibility, and definitely explain why the subject is often treated as something unfairly ignored by people. I will definitely cite statistics like these in the first video I make for this series, which will explain what web accessibility is and why it is important.