2. Why should the banks care?
• Business case: money matters to banks!
o Potential loss of 1 in 5 customers
• If they can’t use your website they will go to a bank whose website
works for them
• Your shareholders won’t be impressed
o Reputation
• Banking in Australia is very competitive
• A bad reputation is hard to fix
• Good public relations
o Fixing your website will generate good public sentiment
o Having the website audited costs far less than taking out a 1 page
advertisement in the newspaper
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3. Why should the banks care? (cont’d)
• Risk Management
o Litigation
• You are open to prosecution under the Disabilities Discrimination Act
(administered by Australian Human Rights Commission)
• If you know about the potential risk, then you are responsible to report it
o Risk of loss of business
o Risk of negative publicity
o Risk of not looking after your customers!
3
4. Why should the banks care? (cont’d)
• Additional cost caused by customers needing to come to
branch or phone centre
o It is less costly to you if your customers can conduct their business over the
Internet
4
5. Which banks did we check?
• Commonwealth Bank
• National Australia Bank
• ANZ
• Westpac
• St. George Bank
• Police & Nurses Credit Union
• Members Equity Bank
5
6. How did we review the websites?
• Decided to use a different approach to a straight forward
WCAG 2.0 checklist as we wanted to concentrate on
actual barriers to users rather than WCAG 2.0 compliance
• Selected the “Accessibility Priority Tool”, developed by
Roger Hudson from Web Usability
o Australian
o Respected member of the accessibility community
o Concentrates on actual barriers
o Available free from: http://usability.com.au/2013/01/accessibility-priority-tool/
• Chose 3 pages from each website:
o Home page, Contact Us page, and Login page
6
10. Incidence vs Severity Score
• Incidence Score
o Rated from 0-4 where:
• 0 – There is no incidence or occurrence of a failure to
make the component accessible
• 1 - The use of the page component or element causes
access problems up to 25% of the time
• 2 - The use of the page component or element causes
access problems between 25% and 50% of the time.
• 3 - The use of the page component or element causes
access problems between 50% and 75% of the time.
• 4 means that use of the page component or element
causes access problems more than 75% of the time
10
11. Incidence vs Severity Score (cont’d)
• Severity Score
o Rated from 1-5 where:
• 1 – Very minor inconvenience: not likely to prevent anyone
from accessing content, but could be a minor irritant
• 2 – Minor inconvenience: not likely to prevent anyone from
accessing content, but could affect the ability of some people
to use a page
• 3 – Average inconvenience: could make it difficult for some
people to access content and use a page
• 4 – Major inconvenience: could prevent some people from
accessing or using page content
• 5 – Extreme inconvenience: will prevent access to sections of
the site or the ability to perform required functions
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12. Roger Hudson on the Accessibility Priority Tool
• Tool is not designed to replace WCAG 2.0 compliance checks
• Augments compliance checks as it is designed to prioritize
items enabling you to fix the ‘critical’ issues first
• Uses an algorithm to compute the value of ‘none’ to ‘critical’
based on the incidence, severity and importance ranking that
has been entered
• The organisation ranks the importance (Column H) and this
can be hidden from the assessor if desired.
• The assessor assigns the incidence rate and severity score
and then the Access Barrier advice is computed by the
algorithm
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13. Accessibility Priority Tool (cont’d)
• It is more subjective than a strict compliance tool and
requires the assessor to be knowledgeable about the way
people with disabilities use the Internet
• Adds additional checkpoints relating to other technologies
such as Flash and third-party gateways
• Also adds checkpoints on device usability – screen reader,
smart phone, tablet and the website’s scaling ability
13
14. Drum roll…. The results are…
High, Very High and Critical Issues
16
14
12
10
Critical
8 Very High
High
Total: High to Critical
6
4
2
0
Commonwealth NAB ANZ WESTPAC ST. GEORGE POLICE & ME BANK
NURSES
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15. Interpretation
• First, the lower the score, the better.
• Remember, zero incidences means no problem in that
category whereas 4 means the use of the element/page
component caused access problems more than 75% of the
time
• A score of 1 in severity means it was a very minor
inconvenience whereas 5 means an extreme
inconvenience preventing access to the site or ability to
perform required functions
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16. Rankings using this tool:
• Best
o NAB
o ANZ
o Commonwealth
o ME Bank
o Westpac
o St. George
o Police & Nurses
• Worst
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17. Comparison between this tool and user
analysis by Scott Hollier
Accessibility Priority Tool Scott Hollier’s User Analysis
Best
NAB NAB
ANZ ANZ
Commonwealth St. George
ME Bank ME Bank
Westpac Westpac
St. George Commonwealth
Police & Nurses Police & Nurses
Worst
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18. Scott’s analysis
• Scott looked at each website and made notes about:
o The bad
o The good
o The ugly – including problems on the same individual pages as those on
which the tool was used
• Scott then asked provided a score out of 10 for each
website:
o Commonwealth 4
o NAB 8
o ANZ 7
o Westpac 4
o St. George 6
o Police & Nurses 2 `
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19. Comparisons
• There was no collusion between Vivienne and Scott when
performing their analyses
• The APT results were tabulated by collecting all rankings of
high, very high and critical for each website and
amalgamating them.
• Scores of medium to none were discarded - we were
looking for significant barriers to access
19
20. Let’s look at that graph again…
High, Very High and Critical Issues
16
14
12
10
Critical
8 Very High
High
Total: High to Critical
6
4
2
0
Commonwealth NAB ANZ WESTPAC ST. GEORGE POLICE & NURSES ME BANK
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21. Why was NAB so much better?
• Scott’s comments:
o Overall surprisingly accessible
o Clean layout
o Good contrast
o Easy to navigate
o Limited number of links
o Hard to find any problems – really very easy to use
o Only problem on the log-in page involved the fact that it
was hard to find the login part of the page
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23. What did Police & Nurses do poorly?
• Scott’s comments:
o Browser had problems with the site – kept slowing
down and crashing
o Site was cluttered
o Small fonts
o Alternative text issues
o Labelling issues
o Colour contrast issues
o Hard to find anything
o Site wasn’t professional in appearance
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24. APT’s assessment for P&N
• Alternative text issues – mislabelled buttons, objects with
no alternative, alt text not providing equivalent information
• Colour contrast issues
• Broken skip link
• No heading structure at all on one page
• Use of fixed sizing – use of text size>largest causes
content in news to be cut off and zoom causes images to
become out of focus
• Mislabelled or unlabelled links
• Lack of keyboard accessibility
• Flash use on top menu structure rendered it unusable via
keyboard
• Could not use screen reader for log-in page
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25. Other notable issues for other banks
• Smartphone and Tablet access
o Most websites did a reasonable job of this, however the Commonwealth’s
didn’t re-size as nicely or present a mobile version which resulted in very
small font size
• Login Function
o One of the biggest problems is making the log-in feature keyboard and
screen reader accessible.
• Problems found ranged from a full keyboard which didn’t work at all
(P&N), to a keypad which read for a screen reader but, because
numbers were out of sequence, the whole Access Code could not be
entered as you were re-directed to the top after each entry (ME Bank).
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26. Other notable issues for other banks
• Other problems:
o Westpac – virtually impossible to use password entry system due
to on-screen numbers and letters as the only option. Onerous and
lengthy process with a screen magnifier
• Screen cluttering
o Putting too much information in one place in an attempt to provide access to
everything from the home page
o Results in a cluttered screen and difficulty in searches?
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27. Other issues (cont’d)
• Interactive features
o Calculators for repayments, exchange rates etc. These were not well
implemented for keyboard or screen reader users
• Colour contrast
o Most bank websites had at least some colour contrast issues
• And the usual… Alternative text
o This really shouldn’t still be a problem for developers – provide the
equivalent information as a sighted user would receive. If the image is there
for formatting or decorative purposes, make sure it can be ignored by
screen readers.
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28. What have we discovered
• While banks have made an effort to make sure their
websites can be used on mobile devices, they haven’t
done much thinking about how people with disabilities use
websites
• There is a long way to go to have Corporate Australia
understand the issues and the need for designing for
inclusiveness – ‘design for all’
• Developers need to be informing their clients about the
legal and ethical issues regarding website accessibility
• We need media coverage and education for both
developers and website owners
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29. And so…
• Spread the word, provide sound advice, be active, be
NOISY!
• In doing so you will be helping people both with and
without disabilities have a more positive experience on the
Web
• Remember that from Scott & I, advice is free – don’t be
afraid to ask.
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