An Interview with IBM’s Vicki Hanson

What portion of the Web or computer applications is accessible to users with disabilities?

“Good question. Big companies work a lot to make their applications accessible, it’s the law in most countries and big companies want to comply. Smaller companies are more unlikely to do it.

For the Web, surveys done showed shockingly low numbers. But it depends a lot on what you include in your survey. If you include government sites or large companies sites you could get better numbers. If you focus on social networking sites, you will get worse results.

Developers are often not trained and do not know what to do to make their sites accessible, and individuals put anything on the Web and they might not even aware of the problem and that their pages should be checked for compliance with accessibility guidelines.

E-commerce and medical information on the Web are two typical examples of services and information that disabled users would like to access and they often feel to be kept out by these stores and sites.”

Published on April 13, 2008

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