Cabinet Office
It is vital to understand where the reasons for failure lie in order to propose actions for improvement. We show in Chart 3 below the most common reasons for failure at Level A, identified by automated evaluation. This identifies a high incidence of failure across the full sample of sites for three of the five fully automated checks.
Chart 3 Reasons for non-conformance (Level A)
Of the sites that were found to fail these specific checks, over a fifth were considered to have failed marginally, the failures being limited in variety and/or scope across the site. These sites were classified as Marginal Fail A. If these sites were able to have this core set of accessibility defects corrected, then they would be converted into the Limited Pass A category; and, as a result, 30% of sites would achieve this level. This would be a significant short-term step in improving web accessibility for potentially little effort.
We show in Chart 4 below the most common reasons for failure at Level Double-A. Results are from a number of tests relating to WCAG 1.0 Priority 2 checkpoints. Most of these checks relate to issues where results depend critically on improvements in content management systems or authoring tools. These issues are of long-term importance to improving web accessibility.
Chart 4 Reasons for non-conformance (Level Double A)
From our analysis of the common reasons for failure at Level A and Level Double-A, a set of recommendations for action has been developed to bring as many websites up to Level A as possible in the shortest amount of time. By following this plan, public administrations across Europe will rapidly achieve significantly higher levels of eAccessibility.