Monkey see, monkey….

Does any­body know any­thing about the acces­si­bil­ity of online sur­vey prod­ucts like Surveymonkey.com and Zoomerang.com? I’ve looked at a sam­ple sur­vey on Sur­vey­mon­key and could not even tell if it was a true HTML form, let alone if it was acces­si­ble. For gig­gles, I sent it to a visu­ally impaired friend and asked her what she thougt of it. To my surpise she liked it alot. So dispite not being stan­dards based, it still seems acces­si­ble. Would you use it for a small audi­ence that may include some peo­ple with disabilities?

  1. Derek Featherstone says:
    October 14, 2004 at 9:52 pm

    I’ve looked at both of them before (admit­tedly quite some time ago) and found them to be an abom­i­na­tion in terms of the code. I mean, they went to incred­i­ble lengths to sim­u­late check­boxes and radio but­tons with JavaScript and cus­tom images, when they could have eas­ily just used plain old HTML radio but­tons and check boxes.

    Hav­ing said that, per­haps those cus­tom check and radio images was their “dif­fer­en­tia­tor”? In any case, I’m sur­prised to hear that your visu­ally impaired friend was ok with it — was she using a screen reader?

  2. Jeff says:
    October 15, 2004 at 11:29 am

    Yes, she was using JAWS. She said she didn’t have to go into “forms mode” to use the sur­vey. I’m torn about using Sur­vey­mon­key; it seems to work, but it defies any sort of stan­dards. I’m hop­ing some oth­ers will write in with their expe­ri­ences. Thanks for your input!

  3. Joann Starks says:
    November 4, 2004 at 4:21 pm

    I sent email to sup­port @ surveymonkey.com on Oct. 20: “Won­der­ing how acces­si­ble Sur­vey Mon­key is for peo­ple with disabilities.…can you tell me? Thanks, Joann Starks, NCDDR.” Response received later that day: “Joann, We cur­rently aren’t 100% acces­si­ble. We are work­ing towards this, but I don’t have an ETA yet. Thanks, Chris Finley”

  4. Joann Starks says:
    November 4, 2004 at 4:31 pm

    (09/29/2003) Sub­ject: Is Zoomerang Sec. 508 com­pli­ant? “I am con­sid­er­ing using Zoomerang for a sur­vey activ­ity, and I won­dered if it is acces­si­ble to peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. Has it been reviewed for acces­si­bil­ity accord­ing to the Guide­lines of the W3C’s Web Acces­si­bilty Ini­tia­tive? (http://www.w3.org/WAI) Or, with the Guide­lines of Sec­tion 508? (http://www.section508.gov/

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