Your survey designs are now Section 508 compliant!

SurveyMonkey.com is now the only online survey application whose surveys are Section 508 Certified.

We ensure that by using our standard survey designs, your survey will meet all current US Federal Section 508 certification guidelines. You can read about exactly what those guidelines are at the Section 508 government web site. Our developers have updated our survey design system across the board in all accounts so all standard survey designs are accessible for respondents with disabilities without changing the appealing look or function of your survey. You do not need to add any special settings or change anything within your survey design. If you are using a standard survey theme in your survey design, it is automatically 508 compliant.

Surveys are available to anyone using screen reader software, limited to keyboards to enter responses, and anyone with vision impairments that require high-contrast themes.

For more information on what Section 508 entails or details on our certification please click here to view our FAQ page.

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.How Screen Readers work:

• 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.

 For information on how to navigate through the survey using your keyboard please click here .

Web Accessibility Survey Design tips:

1)  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 brief and to the point.

2)  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.

3)  Clearly outline instructions in your Question text field for questions that have specific response requirements.

Clearly state how many answer choices the respondent will need to select when creating multiple answer question types.  For example, “Please select all options that apply to you” or “Please select no more than 3 options”.  This helps clarify what respondents should do while they listen to the list of answer options.  It is also helpful to note if the question is required.

If your account is HTML enabled, we do not recommend that you use HTML coding in the design of your survey. While screen readers are set up to ignore certain types of basic HTML coding, it is not uncommon for a program to interpret pieces of code as part of the label. Adding HTML coding may cause the users software to read aloud the HTML codes that you are entering into your survey.

For example, "<b>Welcome</b>" might be read as: “Less than b greater than welcome less than backslash b greater than”  in the screen reader. 

While this will not necessarily happen with all HTML coding added to your survey design, we recommend that you do not add HTML unless you have experience coding with screen readers.

5)  Do not change the colors in the default themes.

Being 508 compliant includes being accessible to users with visual impairments, such as colorblindness.  To make the survey design easily visible to all users, a proper amount of color contrast and brightness has been included within all default themes.

If you would like to change the color scheme but still maintain 508 compliancy, you can access the Juicy Studio website where there are free tools that will allow you to test color contrast for compliancy.

Click on this link to access their color contrast tool http://juicystudio.com/services/colourcontrast.php#result

Voluntary Product Accessibility Template: 

The purpose of the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, or VPAT, is to assist Federal contracting officials and other buyers in making preliminary assessments regarding the availability of commercial "Electronic and Information Technology" products and services with features that support accessibility.The VPAT was developed by the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) in partnership with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).