Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone

The Scale of the Problem

How big a problem is accessibility on the Web? A report called Beyond ALT Text, published late in 2001 by Kara Pernice Coyne and her colleague, usability expert Jakob Nielsen, gives us a way to begin measuring the dimensions of the accessibility barrier.

The purpose of the Section 508 accessibility standards and the WCAG 1.0 is to establish parity between the experiences that people with and without disabilities have when they use Web-based resources. Beyond ALT Text gives us, for the first time, a measure of how great the disparity between these two groups is.

According to Coyne and Nielsen [2001, p. 3], users with disabilities were about three times less likely to succeed than users without disabilities in carrying ...