Survey of attitudes to accessible ICT - Results and conclusions

This survey, carried out by Bloor Research in conjunction with HeadStar and Ability Magazine, looked into current and future attitudes to ICT accessibility and the drivers and barriers to improvement.

There appears to be a significant variation in attitudes with the bottom fifth of organisations having little or no accessibility at present and no plans to improve in the future whilst, at the top end, about 50% of organisations claim that more than 70% of their systems are accessible, and this number increases through the end of 2010. Variation was also found between internal and externally facing systems with external systems, in general, being more accessible.

The survey also compared the public and private sector and found some variation. The public sector external systems were more accessible than the private sector but the opposite was true for internal systems. These differences are probably caused by the e-gov pressure for citizen access on the one side and inaccessible internal legacy systems in the public sector on the other.

When looking at the drivers for accessibility improvements the clear leaders were legal directives and corporate social responsibility. On the other hand, increased revenue or cost savings were not seen as drivers. The biggest single barrier to accessibility was legacy systems; this was particular true of the public sector. This was followed, not surprisingly, by budget constraints. These were followed by lack of management support, inadequate tools and lack of training.

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