Qualtrics: Creating accessible surveys

Overview

Learn how to create accessible surveys in Qualtrics.

Table of contents

• Enable the New Survey Taking Experience
• Use the Check Survey Accessibility Tool
• Question Types
• Provide Accessible Media
• Best Practices

Enable the New Survey Taking Experience

Activating the new survey taking experience for a survey is quick, easy, and improves the accessibility of your survey. Please note this must be done individually for each survey, and you can only do this for one survey at a time. It's recommended to enable this feature as soon as you create your survey as some features (such as custom CSS and custom JavaScript) may not be compatible or would require modification.

To activate this new experience, navigate to the Look and feel section in your survey. You will be presented with a pop-up detailing features of the New Survey Taking Experience, and Selecting the blue Upgrade button on the pop-up will activate it for that survey. 

See Qualtrics Support: Activating the New Experience for more information, as well as a step-by-step guide with images. 

Use the Check Survey Accessibility Tool

Qualtrics has a built-in feature to both review the accessibility of your survey and provide specific recommendations on how to improve it. 

1. In the Survey tab, Select Tools.
2. Select Review.
3. Select Check survey accessibility.
4. An Expert Review pop-up will appear. The Accessibility: WCAG section will detail the potential problems and recommendations for making your survey more accessible. Select Affected questions to see all questions that may not meet the accessibility standards. 
5. Select directly on the suggestion in the list to have the system jump you to the location in your survey that needs to be changed. 
6. Select Close when you have finished reviewing the recommendations. 

See Qualtrics Support: Checking Survey Accessibility for more information, as well as a step-by-step guide with images. 

Question Types

While many question types are accessible in Qualtrics, not all of them work well with assistive technology, such as screen readers.

Accessible Question Types

• Descriptive text
• Multiple choice (all types)
• Net promoter® score (NPS)
• Matrix (only rank order, constant sum, text entry, and profile; also must be set to mobile friendly for compliance)
• Text entry (all types)
• Form field
• Rank order (only text box, graphic, and radio buttons)
• Side by side
• Constant sum (only choices, a.k.a text entry)
• Drill down
• Timing (the auto advance option is not accessible)
• Meta info
• CAPTCHA verification (V2)
• Slider
• File upload

Inaccessible Question Types

• Matrix (Likert, bipolar, Max Diff, and carousel, as well as any matrix table that is drag and drop)
• Rank order (Drag and drop and select box)
• Constant sum (sliders and bars)
• Pick, group, and rank
• Hot spot
• Heat map
• Graphic slider
• Signature
• Highlight
• Video response
• Org hierarchy (EX)

Provide Accessible Media

For more information around making media accessible, please take the UO Digital Content Accessibility Training.

Images

Add alt-text to all images used in your survey. Alt text is a written description of the visual content in an image. 

Video and Audio

Please ensure any video or audio content you add to your survey (whether it's embedded or linked) has captioning or transcription available.

If you embed a video by uploading the file directly to Qualtrics, the captions must be encoded or burned in. If you embed a video via a URL (for example, a YouTube video), and there are captions added where the video is hosted, then the captions should be available in Qualtrics too.

Best Practices

• Follow Accessible Theming Guidelines
• Double-check the contrast, color schemes, and font size in your rich content editor or Look and feel when taking color-blind and other visually impaired respondents into account
• If you are adding validation to a question, including request response and force response, then you should indicate that the question has special requirements in the question text.
• Take care when copying/pasting text from other sources because copied HTML can cause issues with screen readers. If HTML issues arise, try strip formatting.
• Do not include labels in any of your question types, as these will not be visible to screen readers. Labels in NPS questions (Not at all likely and Extremely likely) are not visible to any screen readers so as not to bias respondents.
• Number your survey questions using the auto-number feature and show them to your respondents.
• Change the default survey navigation buttons to something more readable than >>. The default navigation button text is >> and <<, but words like Next and Back are better because screen readers can read them out loud to visually impaired respondents.
• Change the default survey title, which is the text that displays on the browser tab for survey respondents.
• Include information about who respondents can contact if they are unable to complete the survey due to an accessibility barrier. Ideally, options for alternative survey access should be detailed in the introduction text of the survey under the survey title or in the communications distributing the survey. Here is an example statement you can add at the beginning of all surveys:
  • This survey may be inaccessible to assistive technology users due to Qualtrics accessibility issues. If you experience problems with the survey, please contact [insert email address]. 

Need Help?

• Qualtrics Support: Survey Accessibility