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Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to websites, by people with disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users have equal access to information and functionality.
A very important question to ask is, how accessible is your website to those with disabilities and other difficulties? For example, is it easy is it to navigate your site, to read content, to perform a task? Does the site work with a screen reader, does it require the use of a mouse, was the look and feel designed for partially slighted users, etc.
Authoring offers an accessibility functionality (the “Accessible Mode”) to help achieve this. However conforming to accessibility regulations or meeting your organization’s accessibility requirements is not something Forsta can guarantee. When this functionality is turned on, the core survey functionality has been designed to meet W3C recommendations. Nevertheless, whether or not your survey is “accessible” really depends on how you design and build your survey. If you have added custom content such as images, videos, scripting, HTML markup and styling into your survey, the accessibility functionality will not evaluate this content.
That being said, if you have a specific set of accessibility rules and regulations to ensure your survey meets the requirements, you will need to enable the Authoring accessibility functionality, design the survey with accessibility in mind, and then take the survey to test and assess where changes might be needed.
By careful use of question types, Professional Authoring can create surveys which are WCAG-conformant. WCAG conformance signifies that content is accessible to a wide range of people with disabilities. To improve WCAG conformance, it is important to consider things such as:
Using one of the provided responsive survey layouts as your base layout
Avoid including certain respondent experience (question types) that cannot meet the guidelines (for example, the drag and drop Card Sort question type)
Avoid including client side customization to questions or the survey layout which may break the conformance (same also applies for custom questions)
Ensuring good use of color contrast, fonts, etc
For the best experience in working with responsive layouts and the latest respondent experiences, it is highly recommended to build surveys using Survey Designer over Professional Authoring. Most question types in Survey Designer support accessibility functionality and come with an added benefit of having undergone extensive accessibility testing. Survey Designer also has a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) conformance report applicable when surveys have been created with responsive layouts. For more information on Survey Designer's accessibility functionality, refer to the product's Accessibility Support Knowledge Base page, or view the Knowledge Base homepage and follow the links to Forsta Plus > Survey Designer.
A survey is a web page. This article contains some tips for creating a survey with accessibility in mind.
Keyboard Shortcuts
You can use keyboard shortcuts to copy (Ctrl+C), cut (Ctrl+X) and paste (Ctrl+V), and use the arrow keys (up, down, left, and right) to move around within the Survey tree in Survey Designer. The Right and Left keys expand and collapse folders, loops, conditions etc. respectively.
Unsupported Features
A number of "standard" Authoring features are not supported in the Accessible mode.
In the event some features that are not supported in the Accessible mode have been used in the survey, if one or more of the themes in the survey are set to Accessible, then warnings will be displayed when the survey is launched. This is to bring to your attention the fact that the survey will not function correctly if the Accessible mode is used. If all themes are Accessible and some non-supported features have been used, then the launch will abort with errors instead of warnings.
The following features are not supported in the Accessible mode:
- Answer groups
- Bottom headers
- Dynamic questions
- Repeating headers
- Right-texts for grids
- Scale groups
- Show scale bars
- 3d grids
508 Conformance
As with any other regulation and standard, Accessibility is open for interpretation. In the context of Surveys, it is what the standard says regarding forms on web pages that is most relevant.
Any Authoring survey will consist of a system-generated part and a user-generated part. The system-generated part is the HTML, scripts and styles (CSS) that Authoring generates; the user-generated part is the question texts and labels, and also any custom HTML, scripts and styles users insert into their surveys.
We have ensured that surveys adhere to the Web Accessibility guidelines from WAI (the Web Accessibility Initiative) level 3 (triple A), which means the survey is 508-conformant for system generated code when accessibility rendering is used.
Important
It is up to users - you - to ensure that user generated content is in conformance. Forsta provides some advice according to best practice, such as for example keeping form labels short, but the guidelines are not specific on length. And Forsta are not accessibility experts, so we cannot make such assessments for our clients. Forsta has relied on external expertise to advise us in this area to ensure conformance of the system-generated code, and we recommend that our clients do the same as necessary for the user-generated items if you do not have in-house expertise or defined standards.