[CEUD-ICT] WebAIM Screen reader survey results

[Mark Magennis]

Hi Alan,

I fully agree that headings are very important because without them a  
document has no navigable structure. But in terms of just how useful  
they are, or rather how many people use them, consider this:

The survey reports that 76% of respondents always or often navigate by  
headings. When broken down by screen reader proficiency, the numbers  
were 90.7% for expert users down to 55.4% for beginners. So less  
proficient users are much less likely to use headings to navigate.

I asked Paul Traynor, NCBI's main user technical support worker, how  
he thinks proficiency levels break down among Irish screen reader  
users and he gave the following estimates:

Expert 5%
Advanced 10%
Intermediate 20%
Beginner 65%

Combining the two sets of figures, we would estimate that 62% of all  
Irish screen reader users use headings always or often, compared with  
WebAIM's total of 76%. Quite a difference. This doesn't change our  
thinking about the importance of headings much, but it does suggest a  
need to be very careful about the skew in the overall WebAIM results  
caused by respondents being generally more proficient than the  
average. Incidentally, WebAIM's respondents' self-reported proficiency  
levels were:

Expert 17%
Advanced 41%
Intermediate 32%
Beginner 9%

Quite different from Paul's estimations of the Irish population.

Mark



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