[CEUD-ICT] WebAIM Screen reader survey results

[Tim Culhane]

Hi Mark,

Just to chip in,   how  does:

1.  an individual rank  their proficiency  in a particular skill?  Surely
it's the most subjective measure ,  and thus  the biggest failing  in the
survey.   Its hardly   scientific?

2.  How  does an individual,  no matter how knowledgeable, make an accurate
break down of the proficiency percentages among irish screen readers?
Again,  its purely  guess work.

So,  While tending to agree with    the survey,  that headings are used more
by more proficient screen readers and that the survey is skewed in favour of
more advanced users,   it doesn't invalidate the point  that headings  are
extremely  important  and necessary in speeding up  the navigation of
websites.

Indeed,  surely  it  is logical  that more advanced users are likely to use
the more advanced features in a particular technology?

Just because  the majority of people do not use headings, that is not an
excuse not to implement them in  websites.  Rather, it is a major hint that
screen reader users  need to be educated more  on the existing features in
websites and in their screen readers, which can vastly improve their
interaction with the Internet.

Cheers,

Tim


-----Original Message-----
From: ceud-ict-bounces at list.universaldesign.ie
[mailto:ceud-ict-bounces at list.universaldesign.ie] On Behalf Of Mark Magennis
Sent: 02 February 2009 17:19
To: Centre for Excellence in Universal Design ICT mailing list
Subject: Re: [CEUD-ICT] WebAIM Screen reader survey results


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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