Probably because those 3% are homogeneous, while the 9% decompose into lots and lots of categories, all with specific needs, and all much smaller than 9%.
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...although you can do a damn good job addressing most of them with a few simple things:
-Write good, semantic HTML, and use alt tags correctly
-Don't overwrite browser defaults for scrolling, tabbing, etc (even if it's "hot design")
-Don't rely purely on color to convey information
-Use ARIA attributes where you can if you're building an application
Some harder stuff that is really still worth it:
-Send your media out for subtitling/transcription (remarkably inexpensive)
-Actually test your site with some disabled individuals, or at least have a go yourself with the NoCoffee Chrome extension to simulate certain visual difficulties
A terrible example of relying on colour includes the braille at some Melbourne train stations[1]. It appears that someone directly translated the phrase "Press green button" rather than using left or right.
[1] http://wongm.com/2014/06/asking-vision-impaired-to-push-gree...
And it's not just blind people who can't differentiate between red and green. A significant percentage of the population has red-green color blindness.
Yes, but forgetting that is a less glaring (and therefore less amusing) error than writing "press the green button" in braille...
Good you mention application and ARIA ... I've just come out of a project where the initial brief completely disregarded anything in terms of accessibility.
Full on angular app, no native forms or form elements (because they "look ugly" apparently).
Then the ultimate end client wants to go live but forgot to mention they had a mandatory accessibility audit.
So I've spent quite a bit of time working out how to make things work for screen readers using the ARIA specs. And it really worked quite well. My takeaway from this is to make sure everything is working with the keyboard correctly, spend some time thinking about tabindex, labels etc, and where I can push back requests to get rid of native browser elements.
Out of interest, did you do any user testing for this site? I've worked on sites that have required a legal accessibility audit and in my experience a lot of screen readers don't even know what ARIA is, let alone use it. Like users that stick with older browsers a number of users use old screen reading tools.
Unfortunately there wasn't much budget for anything beyond the build. But the accessibility audit was lead by visually impaired people, and they did suggest what the benchmark was I had to meet and we iterated over that by me making changes and them flagging up what else needed to be done.
I also have the impression that there are quite a few people with older browsers out there because of the screen reader setup, and I don't think that's a good thing, but maybe it's a matter of doing what we're doing to older browsers in general: phase out support.
Don't rely purely on color to convey information
And, conversely, don't submit to the current fad of low-contrast grayscale.
Don't worry, my non-technical management have turned our in house app into a rainbow colored mess. Its ugly, but it does convey information quickly
Yes. Off the top of my head, I know of at least four different types of color blindness (from red-green all the way down to total monochromatic vision), total blindness, significant visual impairment (listed separately from blindness due to different accommodations), deafness, significant motor impairment making navigation difficult, and dyslexia (which there are ways of accommodating).
Thinking about what it takes to make an IE7 user happy is easy; you just install IE7 and bash on your site until it works. Thinking about all those requirements... it's hard to look at that pile of requirements without recoiling in horror at the size of the task... at least, if you want to do anything else on your site, too. Something as simple as a single drop-down menu colored a bit "cleverly" and you've potentially whacked everyone on that list up there except the deaf. Consequently, I disagree entirely with the idea that it's just a matter of using simple HTML or something... it's actually a matter of choosing to give up on everything fancy, and that's a much harder sell.
Remember these people are cooperating with you. They are living with their disabilities full-time, and they might have found some remarkably clever ways to get along with it. I've seen blind people with iPhones (I have no idea), and a kid who used his wheelchair as a tractor to pull machinery around his parents' farm. You can work with these people, they're smart.
Whether you make your site fully screen-reader compatible is up to you, but enabling some simple hacks (e.g. custom stylesheets, browser zooming) really goes a long way. People are not homogenous anyway, so it's a good idea to not narrow down their path, impairment or not. Some people don't like to read as much, some are confused by complex looking graphics, some like animation while others are easily distracted. You need to provide different access paths anyways, at least in many of the more complex cases.
Personally I love reading large bunches of text, but I usually hate videos where I can't go at my own pace. I'd happily read transcripts if I could, but providing video only would lose you a visitor. Incidentally providing transcripts also helps with accessibility.
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Whether you make your site fully screen-reader compatible is up to you, but enabling some simple hacks (e.g. custom stylesheets, browser zooming) really goes a long way.
Yes! It isn't as if "please don't use horrible fonts; please choose high contrast colours; please allow zooming" is some onerous difficult to follow arcane ruleset.
> I've seen blind people with iPhones (I have no idea)
Video demonstrating how blind people use iOS devices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIQWyp13beE
It should at least be standard for web programmers to develop with the most common disabilities in mind, like different types of hearing and visual impairment. In many cases it would often be trivial for a lot of sites to better accommodate screen readers, maintain usability at larger font sizes, zoom levels, etc. if it was a design consideration from the start. A lot of accommodations also improve the experience for users on different types of devices, in situations in which sound is inappropriate, etc. But because it's not a priority or a standard, things which could easily be accessible are not, and we are making modern life more difficult for others simply through carelessness and a lack of concern.
You don't have to give up on fancy stuff. You just have to ensure that you don't rely on fancy stuff. Which many of us think is a good idea anyway.
For example, it's fine to use color to convey information as long as that information can also be obtained in other ways. This approach not only makes your stuff usable to the colorblind, but makes it easier for regular folk too.
It's also easy to measure that 3% (and, by the way, it's way more than 3% on some of my sites). Hard to fix something that you don't have good metrics on.
That's a good point, but personally I'd rather cater to the people who don't have a choice in their capabilities rather than those purposely remain ignorant.