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Re: Grousing about Web survey forms

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From: Steve Green
Date: Mar 21, 2024 2:09PM

In recent years we have worked on quite a few surveys that were built from the ground up rather than on survey platforms. In all cases the accessibility was terrible at first, but in all but one case the end result was fully WCAG 2.1 AA conformant. The outlier had about 50 question types, most of which had bizarre interaction models that make drag and drop look like a good choice. With that exception, surveys should be among the easiest applications to make accessible.

It struck me that few of the companies were what you would consider to be a "proper" software development organisation or digital agency. They were mostly market research organisations that had some software development capability, but that was very much a secondary activity to their research. That's probably the root of the problem, even when they are using a survey platform.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2024 4:46 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Grousing about Web survey forms

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
>
>
>
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> >


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