What words would you measure useability in 3 levels for WCAG Accesibility, keeping it short, simple and easy to understand

Question

So i'm making this WCAG 2.0 tool that needs to indicate to the user how well their sites and pages are doing in terms of Accessibility. I have called it 'Accessibility Usability' which indicates in 3 levels.

I was just curious as to what others would expect to call it.

So far I am using:

Difficult ---- Formidable ---- Easy

So say an analyst or webmaster could look good in saying, "Oh deary dear, We can see that the accessibility of xyz site to our users is not doing so well, it's leaning towards being difficult to use"

For those that don't know WCAG, there is guideline criteria that must be met to conform to the W3C WCAG Standard so that your website/s content is accessible to people with disabilities.

Any help or ideas would help immensely :)

Cheerio, Steve

Answer 1

There are already a decent number of tools that do this, and even show offending code with the rule(s) that it's violating. Some code can "may or may not be" violating a rule, and they allow you to flag the particular snippet as "passing" or "not passing".

Using

Difficult ---- Formidable ---- Easy

Is fine, but not terribly descriptive. Current WCAG rules are split into different tiers of importance. The levels are A, AA, and AAA; with AAA being very, very hard to achieve. In recent legal cases, most judges are requiring AA standards for the offender.

It may be easier to understand for your test users if you identify:

• The WCAG rules violated
• The number of times each rule is violated
• The type of users most likely to face difficulty with those violations

For example: We see that all of your img tags are missing alt text. This will make it hard for blind users using screen readers to understand vital information on the page.

In reality, there are a lot of ways to play with how to give this kind of feedback. If you provide some options, it will be easier for us to offer feedback on your approaches.

Answer 2

I don’t know how much your users know about accessibility, but since you want it easy to understand I guess not too much. To me it appears not so easy to understand the meaning of difficult or easy to use. The following questions might pop up:

• Why is it difficult? I have no issues with it!
• Who does have issues?
• Should I worry about it?

My advice is to be more informative and uses phrases like:

• "Some won’t be able to use the site"

• “All people are able to use the site but some will have issues”

• “All people are able to use the site without any issues”

Let the user click for more information or show the results directly like:

• who will have issues
• why these issues exist

And from there you can go to even more information like where the issues occur on the site. Key is to provide not too much information at a time.

To be even more informative:
If you know which percentages of the population have certain disabilities and which techniques make a site accessible to them, you can show much more useful information to your users by showing the exact percentage.

Instead of your idea using difficult/easy:

0% --- 10% --------- 100%

Or in phrases like above:

“1% won’t be able to use the site"

“6% will have issues with the colors/contrast used”