It doesn’t matter if you are living in communist China, Castro’s Cuba or democratic United Kingdom, but on the net democracy rule. In todays virtual world user opinions fuels everything. Well, that’s where web 2.0 era start isn’t it?

A Poll is one of the oldest methods of collecting user opinions. An online poll is just the next generation of that. Most sites/blogs have a contact us section to reach the webmaster but we couldn’t rely on that to gather user opinions on a specific topic or subject.

To gather extensive user opinions we can conduct a survey but for a quick on-the-spot opinion we use a poll.There are several plug-in systems out there that let you add quick poll in your blog/website but what’s the use of a poll if a large portion of users cannot access them?

Today we will look at a few poll plug-ins and check out which is best for usability and accessibility. Our discussion will be limited to only WordPress plug-ins that can be used in WP blog/sites.

Poll Daddy

A widely popular hosted poll management solution. Creating poll is as easy as pie, just as simple as type in the question and answer. Poll Daddy offers variety of customisations like multiple choice, multiple votes, user’s answer, randomized answer, closing date etc. You also will have the ability to create poll that will be displayed in poll daddy site as well.

Poll daddy offers you 14 XHTML 1.0 compliant styled widgets which you can embed in your site or blog by way of JavaScript or Flash code snippets provided by them. You can also provide your user direct link to the poll where your user will vote directly in Poll Daddy site.

Poll daddy also allows you to create your widget style and offers RSS feeds for every poll you create. All in all so far sounds cool, doesn’t it? Well don’t get too high on that, here are some usability and accessibility issues that you should consider.

First the JavaScript, if the user has JavaScript disabled they won’t get the poll, they may even get warning message from their firewall application. That isn’t cool, because a lot of users set their firewall to block third part JavaScript and Cookies.

Second the Flash code snippet; it might be one of the rising elements of RIA (RICH Internet Application), but it has yet to fully support screen readers. So as you can see you are missing a huge potential portion of users who might be interested in your site/blog.

Democracy Ajax Poll

This nice little plug-in for WordPress does exactly what its name implies. A simple two step installation, you can even use it as a permanent sidebar element (additional tweaking required) to display an ongoing poll. Poll management is simple through WordPress admin panel. After initial configaration further CSS customization can be done to shape up the looks of the poll.

Just like other AJAX based applications this does have its accessibility issues. Another drawback of this plug-in is, occasionally it generates invalid code.

Democracy Ajax Poll is a great plug-in but only good for small scale polls with the obvious drawbacks.

WP-Polls

WP-Polls is probably the most widely used WordPress poll plug-in . Why? well, it gives you tons of customisation option which all validate to W3C. This cool plug-in adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customisable via templates and CSS styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you like.

Setting up WP-Polls is easy as two clicks. Poll management is so easy (via the WordPress admin control panel) that you can create the most basic poll to a complex poll on the fly.

You can create and maintain multiple polls simultaneously as well as having recurring poll to keep it ticking over.
Though WP-polls are AJAX based, in my test I didn’t came across with XSS or other slimy vulnerability so far. Java runs on server side. Strong CSS knowledge might be required for serious customization, cookie and IP setting may cause a warning massage through users firewall.

In a previous post Paul shared some information regarding increasing readership & accessibility. Apart from that information shared by Paul polls are also necessary in order to boost your readership. After all without user participation your blog is as good as dead static site.