User's Manual

Smart Survey Design
Page 28
in accessibility whose efforts have helped create many of the 508 standards in use today.
You can get more information about Jim Thatcher by clicking here
(http://www.jimthatcher.com/index.htm). With their help in design, consultation and
implementation of the latest web accessibility standards, we have created user-friendly
survey formats accessible with a broad range of disability software.
B. Creating Screen Reader – friendly surveys:
While all of our standard survey designs are 508 accessible, there are steps you can
take as a Survey Designer to make your surveys user-friendly with screen readers and
other visual technologies. These tips are especially important if this demographic is your
primary response group.
-Screen readers are applications that work by „reading‟ the behind-the –scenes coding on a
web page. Surveys created by SurveyMonkey include the necessary labeling for screen
readers to easily relay page content to users.
-The screen reader will read through each question by first reading the question text, and
then listing off the possible answer options. Remember that all of this text is being
converted to audio by the program.
-You can test your survey design by reading each question and the corresponding answer
options out loud. Questions that can be easily understood when verbalized will be the most
comprehensible by screen readers.
2. Web Accessibility Survey Design tips:
a.) Make Questions as concise as possible.
- Excessively long questions with unnecessary information in them can become tedious to
listen to. The respondent might even forget the question or previous answer options as they
reach the end of the list of possible answers. So keep questions to the point.
b.) Limit the use of Matrix question types and other complex question types.
-The more complex the question structure, the longer the screen-reader will take to move
through the question. This also makes it harder for respondents to navigate backward
within the question and remember what it is they are being asked. In this case, it is
preferable to create longer surveys with a lot of simple questions rather than creating
shorter surveys with a few complex questions.