Get help

• UW–Madison Accessibility Assistance:

  • Contact the DoIT Help Desk for general assistance or to report an accessibility or usability barrier with Qualtrics.

• UW System accessibility assistance:

  • Users should contact Qualtrics Support or their campus Help Desk for general assistance or to report an accessibility or usability barrier.

Additional information

• Additional service details are available on the Qualtrics Service page.

• UW-Madison maintains a Qualtrics KnowledgeBase, for troubleshooting specific problems or learning more about the tool.

• General documentation on how to use this tool can be found in the Qualtrics Support guides.

Accessibility and usability barriers 

The following information is provided to help people with disabilities know what potential barriers may exist in Qualtrics.

People who are colorblind or have low vision may have difficulty

As a person creating a survey, some items throughout Qualtrics lack strong color contrast. 

People taking a survey may experience poor color contrast unless the survey creator changes the layout. The current default "look and feel" option for a survey is called the "Flat" layout. The Flat layout has many contrast problems and should be avoided. There is a more accessible layout, called "Simple." We are working to make Simple the default layout, but until then, please navigate to "Look and feel" >> "Layout" and select "Simple." (See Figure 1.)  

Figure 1 caption: The Qualtrics navigation panel. To change to a more accessible version of a survey, navigate to "Look and feel" >> "Layout" >> "Simple" 

People who are blind or low vision and navigating via screen reader may have difficulty

Some users may experience difficulty navigating via screen reader in Qualtrics due to the following accessibility barriers:

• As a user creating a survey, you are unable to add alt text to the UW Madison logo, creating a possibly confusing experience for a user who is listening to the page being read via screen reader.

• Survey questions with images must have alternative text in order for screen reader users to answer.

• The following question types are not screen reader accessible and do not provide enough auditory information to complete the survey question:

  • Rank Order

  • Pick, Group, and Rank

  • Hot Spot

  • Heat Map

  • Graph Slider

  • Drill Down

  • Highlight

  • Signature

  • Matrix Table

  • Side by Side

  • Net Promoter Score

Magnification barriers may create difficulty for people with low vision

As a person creating a survey, many pages have elements that crash into each other when magnified, or require horizontal scrolling. Some features become completely unusable at 250% magnification.

People navigating via keyboard may have difficulty

Some users may experience difficulty navigating via keyboard due to the following accessibility barriers. 

• Keyboard focus is easily lost with many of the themes, making it difficult for keyboard users to see where their cursor is on the page.

• The following question types are not keyboard accessible:

  • Rank Order

  • Pick, Group, and Rank

  • Hot Spot

  • Heat Map

  • Graph Slider

  • Drill Down

  • Highlight

  • Signature