Accessibility Among Web Sites for
Aboriginal People in Canada
Kelvin W. Wong
Brainhum Communications Inc.,
Suite 200, 142 Sylvan Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1M 1K4
+1 (416) 994-2564
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Most web based information and services are not accessible by
people with disabilities. Since Métis, First Nations and Inuit
people (collectively the Aboriginal people of Canada) have a
higher incidence of disability than the Canadian average they are
disproportionately affected by accessibility barriers. Aboriginal
peoples are traditionally marginalized groups already at risk for
digital divide effects. This coincidence of accessibility barriers
and traditional digital divide effects form a double jeopardy
scenario for people indigenous to North America. Therefore, web
sites targeted at traditionally disenfranchised minority groups
must be accessible by those who use assistive technology.
There is little published research on disabled accessibility barriers
and Aboriginal Internet users. This paper begins to quantify this
barrier by evaluating the home pages of web sites, maintained by
national non-government organizations, which provide online
information and services to Aboriginal people, for conformance
with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. This investigation
of a convenience sample of 44 candidates found that 38 web sites
(86%) failed the most basic level of accessibility.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.2 [Computers and Society]: Social Issues - Assistive
technologies for persons with disabilities.
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Design, Human Factors, Theory.
Keywords
Accessibility, Usability, Disability,
Aboriginal, Indians of North America.
Evaluation,
Policy,
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1. INTRODUCTION
For the past eight years, I have worked with non-profit
organizations and departments of the Canadian federal
government to implement online social programs for Aboriginal
people. Recently, I have been working to raise awareness among
my Aboriginal clientele of the needs of Internet users who are
disabled. I often encounter resistance to retrofitting legacy web
sites to conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
(WCAG). This additional work is often viewed as an added
expense rather than a cost of remedying a deficiency. The client
invariably asks: “Why should we make the site accessible?”
Organizations that create web sites for Aboriginal audiences
should ensure that their web sites are accessible for this reason:
Aboriginal people are at greater risk for disability than Canadians
as a whole. This translates into a proportionally greater fraction of
the population affected by disabled accessibility barriers. Since
low socioeconomic status and traditional disenfranchisement
conspire to make Aboriginal people also at risk for traditional
digital divide effects, the net result is a double jeopardy scenario
in which a proportion of the population, after gaining access to
the Internet, cannot use the information found there. The
magnitude of the barrier that renders home pages unusable by
Aboriginal people who use assistive technologies was previously
unknown. This paper begins to quantify the barrier by examining
web sites operated by non-government organizations providing
information or services to Aboriginal people. Web sites that
provide online information and services to Canadian Aboriginals
must have accessibility features that make them usable by people
with disabilities.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Aboriginal People of Canada
The Aboriginal people of Canada, collectively the Métis, First
Nations and Inuit people, are an obvious cohort to study for
digital divide effects. These three ethnically distinct groups,
recognized by the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982, are unique
in their shared history of colonialism and systematic persecution
by the Canadian government [22, 2]. “Status Indians”
(synonymous with “registered Indians”) and “treaty Indians”
make up a subset of Aboriginal people who are distinct due to
recognition under the Canadian Indian Act and possibly due to
additional federal treaty obligations [12]. According to the 2001
Canadian Census, people who self-identify Aboriginal ancestry
make up approximately 3.3% of the population (976,305
individuals) [24].
2.2 The “Digital Divide”
2.4 What is a “Disability”?
Research on socially marginalizing or stratifying effects of
technology, so called “digital divide” effects, is primarily focused
on identifying and ameliorating the effects of social inequity. For
the purposes of this paper, “digital divide” will refer to the gap
that exists between those members of society who have use of
Internet based information or resources and those who do not. The
“divide” discussed herein refers to the differential between
Aboriginal people who do not use assistive technologies to use the
Internet and Aboriginal people who access Internet resources and
information using assistive technologies (see Table 1).
The term “disability” has many connotations and no single
definition [11]. For our discussion, the definition most suitable is
the ecological perspective advocated in the World Health
Organization’s International Classification of Functioning,
Disability and Health (ICF). This model considers “disability as
resulting from the interaction of impairment, activity limitations
and participation restrictions in a specific social or physical
environment” [11]. Under the ICF, “functioning is an umbrella
term encompassing all body functions, activities and
participation; similarly, disability serves as an umbrella term for
impairments, activity limitations or participation restrictions”
[29]. Under this definition, low-vision users who might otherwise
have very good functioning at work and at home, would be
severely affected in an online environment because of their
inability to navigate inaccessible web pages. These web pages as
a factor of the online environment magnify their disability and
cause a concomitant decrease in their functioning.
Table 1. Table of Key Cohorts
Aboriginal people who do not
use assistive technologies.
People in Canada who do not
use assistive technologies (not
including Aboriginal people).
Aboriginal people who use
assistive technologies to access
the Internet.
People in Canada who use
assistive technologies to access
the Internet (not including
Aboriginal people).
2.5 Aboriginal People and Disability
Although there have been studies done on connectivity,
technology adoption and other typical measures of the digital
divide among Aboriginal communities, very little investigation
has been conducted on Canadian disabled accessibility issues and
Aboriginal people despite the well known correlation between
Aboriginal ancestry and poor general health. The 2000-2001
Canadian Community Health Survey reported that the Aboriginal
disability rate for ages 15 to 64 was 30%, for ages 65 and older
was 53% and overall was 31% [24]. Statistics Canada’s “How
Healthy Are Canadians? Annual report 2002” found that offreserve Aboriginal people were 1.6 times more likely to selfreport a long term activity restriction [25]. This was a decrease
from data extracted from the 1991 Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey
which found the odds to be 2.4 times [19]. In both cases,
Aboriginal people are more likely to experience disability
compared to Canadians; they differ only by degree.
2.3 Aboriginal People and the Internet
Aboriginal people in Canada are at risk for digital divide effects
since they fare poorly when compared with the Canadian
mainstream. The Report of the National Broadband Task Force
released by Industry Canada in 2004 concluded [15]:
“If we use the three main indicators of quality of life wealth, learning and health - to compare the situation of
Canada's Aboriginal peoples to that of other Canadians,
we find gaps so large that they constitute a real divide.”
This conclusion is reinforced by Indian and Northern Affairs
Canada’s Community Well-Being Index report that found “First
Nations, taken as a group, do exist in substandard conditions”
[20]. Do these prognostic indicators then translate into lower
levels of Aboriginal Internet use?
2.6 Web Accessibility Initiative & WCAG
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) “pursues accessibility of
the Web through five primary areas of work: technology,
guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and
development” [28]. WAI is part of the World Wide Web
Consortium which develops technical standards for the Internet.
The answer is “yes”, primarily because Aboriginal community
connectivity to the Internet is lower than that of non-Aboriginals
[1]. Although, the Aboriginal Connectivity in Canada report
concluded that the “Aboriginal/Non-Aboriginal digital divide
seems to be a function of urban vs. rural infrastructure,” the report
only investigated community wide connectivity and not the use of
the Internet by end users [13]. In “From Unequal Access to
Differentiated Use”, the authors said that “if we mean…able to
get online in some fashion at some location, then inequality is
much diminished. If access means using graphically complex
Web sites from one’s home, differences among groups remain
substantial” [9]. In fall of 2004, the National Aboriginal Health
Organization released Preliminary Findings of the First Nations
Regional Longitudinal Health Survey (RHS) 2002-03 in which
they concluded: “There is a ‘digital divide’ — proportionately
fewer First Nations than Canadian homes have telephones,
computers and Internet service” [18]. Appropriate studies must
now be mounted to quantify Internet use by Aboriginal people.
The danger of indolence is that after spending millions of dollars
to get a connection to every Native and Inuit community in
Canada the result will be the Internet equivalent of a dial tone.
WAI oversees the development of the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines (WCAG) which is a “reference document for
accessibility principles and design ideas” [6]. Web developers use
WCAG to help them create web sites that are accessible by people
with disabilities. The guidelines have three groups of checkpoints
of decreasing priority: Priority one checkpoints are required in
order for most affected groups to use the resource. Priority two
checkpoints are guidelines that should be followed or else some
groups may find using the resource difficult. Priority three
checkpoints may be followed to make the resource available to
the widest possible audience. Conformance to the WCAG is
denoted by three conformance levels: Level “A” indicates that all
priority one checkpoints are met. Level “double-A” indicates that
all priority one and priority two checkpoints have been met. Level
“triple-A” indicates that all priority one, two and three
checkpoints have been met.
2
This finding echoes other investigations on the status of web
accessibility elsewhere in the world. The Disability Rights
Commission’s (DRC) April 2004 report, The Web: Access and
Inclusion for Disabled People found that eighty-one percent
(81%) of websites sampled in the United Kingdom failed
automated testing [10]. However, our data cannot be directly
compared with the DRC study for the following reasons: Firstly,
the DRC report was a large randomized sample of one-thousand
(1000) web sites whereas ours was a convenience sample of fortyfour (44) web sites. Secondly, the DRC study did not supplement
the automated software tool checks with manual checks, so there
may be false positives in their data.
3. METHODOLOGY
A convenience sample of 47 candidate web sites was compiled
from
the
Aboriginal
Canada
Portal
(ACP)
(http://www.aboriginalcanada.gc.ca/acp/site.nsf/en/ao20001.html)
. This resource contains links to web sites which provide online
services or information of interest to Aboriginal people.
Candidates were chosen from ACP primarily because of the broad
support it received from key Aboriginal organizations. The portal
is operated by the Government of Canada in cooperation with the
following Aboriginal government organizations (constituency in
brackets): The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (off-reserve
Aboriginal), Métis National Council (Métis people), Assembly of
First Nations (First Nations), and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (Inuit
people). It was assumed that the links presented would be current
and comprehensive because of Aboriginal participation,
community support and government operation. All the candidates
selected were web sites directed at a national audience and
operated by non-government, non-profit organizations.
Letters providing details on the study, information on the
investigator and instructions on how to opt out of the study were
mailed to the contact address provided on the candidate web sites.
As a result of the mailing, two agencies elected to withdraw from
the study and their web sites were not examined. The English
language home pages of the remaining 45 web sites were
inspected using an automated software tool which tested them for
conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
(WCAG) version 1.0. Web sites that failed any of the tests were
manually inspected to verify the reason for failure and to
eliminate false positive results [16]. During the investigation
phase, conducted in late October 2004, one web site was
unavailable for testing and it was flagged for a follow-up
examination. A visit to the site one week later found it beset by
the same problem which rendered the site unavailable. Since the
candidate could not be analyzed, it was removed from the study.
The results were tabulated and analyzed using a spreadsheet.
Figure 1. Web Sites Tested for Accessibility
4. RESULTS
4.1 Most of the Web Sites Tested Were Not
Accessible
4.2 Sites That Were Accessible Met Only
Basic Levels of Accessibility
The key finding of this study was that most web sites examined
which provide services or information of interest to Aboriginal
people were not accessible to people with disabilities. As shown
in Table 2, eighty-six percent (86%) of the forty-four (44) web
sites tested failed the most basic level of accessibility
(conformance level “A”) as defined by the Web Accessibility
Initiative’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [6]. Figure
1 illustrates the small fraction of candidates that passed.
Most of the tested web sites that did not fail the automated
accessibility testing only met the most basic level of accessibility.
As shown in Table 3, two (2) of the six (6) web sites that passed
all priority one checkpoints subsequently met priority two
checkpoints (level “Double-A”). None of the tested sites met all
checkpoints (level “Triple-A”).
Table 3. Degree of Accessibility
Candidates
Percentage
Pass, level “A”
6
75%
Table 2. Web Sites Which Passed or Failed Testing
Candidates
Percentage
Fail
38
86%
Pass, level “Double-A”
2
25%
Pass, at least level “A”
6
14%
Pass, level “Triple-A”
0
0%
n=44
n=44
3
5.3 A Policy Perspective
Aboriginal non-profit organizations and Aboriginal governments
must begin to tackle the issue of accessibility from a policy level.
In addition to further quantitative study, Aboriginal leadership
must be induced to implement organization wide changes to the
way information is created and disseminated, while ensuring
accessibility. This perspective is supported by Princeton’s Paul Di
Maggio and Northwestern’s Eszter Hargittai’s call for action in
addition to further quantitative study when they advise [8]:
5. DISCUSSION
5.1 The Benefits of Making Web Sites
Accessible
The obvious benefit of making candidate web sites accessible is
that the provided information and services will reach more of
their intended audience. It is likely that those who would use
online services most are in fact people with mobility disabilities
taking advantage of the promised “death of distance” [4]. In
addition to increased participation, the Benton Foundation in their
1999 report Native Networking noted “three basic areas of tribal
participation are readily apparent: community and cultural
development,
economic
development,
and
political
empowerment” [5]. The term political empowerment refers, in
large part, to sovereignty which has been so elusive for
Aboriginal people and is now being tested by creative Native
leaders.
“Go beyond documenting inequality to developing and
testing models of the processes that engender or
ameliorate inequality by mediating the relationship
between individuals’ social identities and their access to
and use of new technologies”
In order to increase accessibility, appropriate resources must be
made available to service providers and Aboriginal organizations
so that they can integrate accessibility heuristics into their online
service and communications activities. It remains to be seen if
there exists the “political will…to enable integration of
technology throughout society” [3].
Exercises in sovereignty and self-determination are being
conducted by technology savvy Aboriginal communities. The
Mohawk of Kahnawake aggressively exploited the evolution of
Internet gambling by doing two things: First they opened
Mohawk Internet Technologies, a collocation Internet Service
Provider located on the Kahnawake reserve. Second, they
established the Kahnawake Gaming Commission to oversee the
regulation of online gambling operations. Taken together, this
bold initiative is a perfect example of how technology can
facilitate digital expressions of sovereignty [17].
5.4 Economic Development Aspects
Digital divide effects and economic development are closely
related. In Access to What? First Mile Issues for Rural
Broadband, the authors argue persuasively that the “best current
investment strategy for accelerating deployment of rural
broadband should be aimed at creating the conditions for initial
community economic development outcomes in the new economy
that stimulate effective usage, rather than emphasizing
development of physical infrastructure and access” [7]. For
Aboriginal communities this means a push not only for
connectivity, but also for capacity building in order to fully
exploit the Internet connection. Leaders within Aboriginal
communities must recognize the importance of identifying and
ameliorating all barriers that make up the digital divide, not just
the access component.
5.2 Protection of Culture
One of the pitfalls of research of this kind is a normative implicit
assumption that all Aboriginal people must go online. While
many stand to benefit from Internet communication, this may not
be the case for all people and all communities. The decision to go
online must be made by the community and by the individual in
consultation with trusted experts, leaders and elders. The
historical policy of the Canadian government has been one of
assimilation, where Aboriginal languages and culture were
deemed inferior to Anglo-Saxon ethos. This policy was
manifested in such things as the denying Aboriginal people the
right to vote until 1960, the legacy of residential schools, the theft
of Métis land by “scrip” and the loss of Indian Status by women
who married non-Indian men [14, 2]. It follows that Aboriginal
people should be wary of new technologies that could potentially
cause the further loss of culture or theft of intellectual property
and traditional knowledge [27]:
5.5 Mandating Accessibility
Providing incentives for making online information accessible is
one strategy that should be investigated. Government agencies
which provide public money to non-profit organizations to
complete online projects should require that the sites meet some
standard of accessibility as a condition of the contribution. In
Canada, the federal government provides funds to non-profit
agencies in two ways. A “grant” refers to an “unconditional
transfer of funds” from the government to the recipient whereas a
“contribution is a conditional transfer of funds to an individual,
organization or other level of government” [21]. A simple method
of ensuring accessibility is to make it a condition of the
contribution funding agreement. The additional burden on nonprofit agencies should not be onerous. The public would expect
that information projects completed with public funds be held to
similar standards of accessibility as those produced by the
government. All Government of Canada web sites are already
required to conform to WCAG “Double-A” [26]. Sufficient funds
must be made available to ensure that the recipient will not only
produce an accessible product but also provide for ongoing
accessibility policy development, staff training and maintenance.
“And not only their land is being coveted and taken so is
their knowledge. Multinational corporations have
discovered its commercial potential, and the race is on to
patent, privatize and appropriate.”
This caveat from the UN’s Human Development Report 2004
should be duly considered. These risks are not only theoretical.
The Internet brings encyclopaedias and pornography with equal
ease; the network is indifferent to the payload it carries. The
remote Aboriginal community considering getting connected to
the Internet would be well advised to consider the risks as well as
the rewards.
4
5.6 Use Accessible Technology
8. REFERENCES
In this investigation, it was discovered that many of the web sites
that passed the basic level of WCAG conformance were
implemented using off-the-shelf content management system
software. These systems greatly simplify the procedure for adding
and changing online content. When mated with communications
policies and procedures which enforce accessibility, the result is a
web site that is accessible and easy to maintain.
[1] Aboriginal Canada Portal. 2003 Report on Aboriginal
Community Connectivity Infrastructure. Government of
Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, May 2004. Available at:
http://www.aboriginalcanada.gc.ca/acp/site.nsf/enframes/ao27020.html
[2] Boldt, M. Surviving as Indians: The challenge of selfgovernment. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada, 1993.
[3] Bridges.org. Spanning the Digital Divide: Understanding
and Tackling the Issues. Bridges.org, Washington, DC. May
2001. Available at:
http://www.bridges.org/spanning/index.html
6. CONCLUSION
There is a need within Aboriginal communities for online
services, especially health and government services, yet much of
the online development to date is inaccessible to members of our
community who are disabled. Over time these services will
become increasingly crucial. Every effort must be made to
develop and internalize accessibility heuristics within the
organization. However, this goal is potentially enjoined by the
fact that many talented web developers with years of development
experience are ignorant of the techniques used to create accessible
web sites. Entrenching accessibility goals within policy provides
clarity for staff when negotiating with potential web development
service providers.
[4] Cairncross, F. The Death of Distance: How the
communications revolution will change our lives. Harvard
Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1997.
[5] Casey, J., Ross, R. and Warren, M. Native Networking:
Telecommunications and Information Technology in Indian
Country. Benton Foundation, Washington, DC, 1999.
Available at:
http://www.benton.org/publibrary/native/indexnew.html
[6] Chisholm, W., Jacobs, I., and Vanderheiden, G. Eds. Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. World Wide Web
Consortium, 5 May 1999. Available at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/
For smaller organizations, it is frustrating to create a web site and
later discover that it requires further work and resources in order
to meet the needs of a perceived minority. As philanthropy trends
have shifted to project based funding and core funding has been
harder to secure, activities such as web site design and
maintenance have been deemed low priority tasks. For chronically
under funded Aboriginal organizations this behaviour has
unintended consequences that undermine the execution of an
organization’s mission and their capability to deliver services to
their constituents. Since the incidence of disability among
Aboriginal people is higher than among the general Canadian
population, Aboriginal people are more likely to need assistive
technology to access web sites. While all organizations risk
creating externalities if their web sites are not accessible to people
with disabilities, this problem is proportionally greater for
organizations that serve Aboriginal clients. As demonstrated in
this study, the barrier to use is large, although not insurmountable.
Therefore, it is essential that web sites providing online
information or services to Aboriginal people conform to Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines.
[7] Civille, R., Gurstein, M. and Pigg, K. Access to What? First
Mile Issues for Rural Broadband. Industry Canada, Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada, January 2001. Available at:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://broadband.gc.ca/english/r
esources/access_to_what.pdf
[8] Di Maggio, P., and Hargittai, E. From the 'Digital Divide' to
`Digital Inequality': Studying Internet Use As Penetration
Increases. Working Paper #15, Summer 2001. Princeton
University, Princeton, NJ. Available at:
http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap15.html
[9] Di Maggio, P., Celeste, C., Hargittai, E., and Shafer, S. From
Unequal Access to Differentiated Use: A literature review
and agenda for research on digital inequality. In Social
Inequality, K. Neckerman, Eds. Russell Sage Foundation,
New York, NY, 2004, 355-400. Available at:
http://www.eszter.com/research/c05-digitalinequality.html
[10] Disability Rights Commission. The Web: Access and
inclusion for disabled people. The Stationary Office,
London, England, April 2004. Available at: http://www.drcgb.org/publicationsandreports/report.asp
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Meegwich to the Canadian Council on Aboriginal Business
(CCAB) and the National Aboriginal Health Organization
(NAHO) for their helpful comments during the design phase of
this study.
[11] Human Resources Development Canada. Defining
Disability: A complex issue. Government of Canada, Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada, 2003. Available at:
http://www.sdc.gc.ca/asp/gateway.asp?hr=en/hip/odi/docum
ents/Definitions/Definitions000.shtml&hs=pyp
Thank you to all 47 organizations that developed the web pages I
examined. Your efforts to create online content for Aboriginal
people is pioneering work and much needed.
[12] Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Words First: An
evolving terminology relating to Aboriginal people in
Canada. Government of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada,
2002. Available at: http://www.aincinac.gc.ca/pr/pub/wf/index_e.html
Many thanks to Colleen Carpenter, Department of English,
University of Victoria, for her expert guidance in preparing this
paper.
5
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En.pdf
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http://www.kahnawake.com/gamingcommission/
[27] United Nations Development Programme. Human
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http://www.naho.ca/firstnations/english/regional_health.php
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6