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Re: Grousing about Web survey forms

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Mar 21, 2024 10:45AM

I think some of it comes from survey platforms, others are authoring
mistakes.
Sadly I think some of the big survey creators have been trying to jazz up
the look and feel of their surveys, and accessibility is often the primary
victim of that since they move away from standard HTML.
I struggle with many surveys created in Google Forms, for instance, that's
all ARIA stuff, sometimes badly applied.
I've done quite a bit of work with Qualtrics in the past. They've generally
been good about accessibility, but not all question types are accessible
but people use them anyway. Either that's because Qualtrics does not
provide sufficient guidance to survey authors or, and this sounds far
fetched I know but, sometimes people just don't read the documentation. ;)


On Thu, Mar 21, 2024 at 12:33 PM < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> We all know that the competition is fierce to develop the least accessible
> Web forms. I want to give the trophy to the general category of Web-based
> surveys. I think the Webaim survey was almost the only accessible survey I
> have ever seen.
>
> I struggled with one on Monday that really was a laugher. The pages had
> many headings that were just one or two words that often made little sense.
> They had a dozen places where they wanted me to rank things on a scale of
> 1-5 but provided no legend or label to clarify what they wanted. I tried
> switching into JAWS mode to navigate around the pages to find some text
> without luck. The so-called radio buttons were announced by JAWS as "toggle
> button" but were scripted to allow only one choice Many of the pages had
> an
> unlabeled text box where I provided an earful about the issues.
>
>
>
> Later, I got to thinking that many of these surveys are provided by vendors
> that might be targeted with some educational material. It might be valuable
> to compare the Webaim survey this year to the industry practices.
>
> I suppose my rant amounts to "tilting at windmills." I just think about how
> half a dozen of the major business sites I use have gotten much better in
> recent years, but there has been no similar improvement in most surveys.
>
>
>
> Jeff Gutsell
>
>
>
> > > > >


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