DETROIT — Quality should be Job 1 at Ford again.

The brand’s ranking fell 10 spots in Consumer Reports’ annual auto reliability survey, hurt by glitchy touch screens and transmissions. It now ranks 20th out of 28 major brands, based on a survey of the magazine’s subscribers.

The Dearborn, Mich., automaker had been closing the quality gap with Japanese brands in recent years, but it may need to take its own advice from a 1980s ad campaign, in which it told viewers that “Quality is Job 1.”

Japanese automakers continued to dominate the survey’s top rankings. Brands from Toyota, Honda and Mazda held the top nine spots in the 2011 study, while Chrysler’s Jeep was the top brand from a U.S. automaker. The Chrysler brand showed the most improvement over last year.

The findings are based on surveys taken this spring of subscribers who own or lease 1.3 million vehicles of model years from 2002 to 2011. The magazine uses the findings to predict reliability of 2012 models.

Consumer Reports ranks No. 3 on the list of information sources Americans use in choosing vehicles to buy, topped only by brand loyalty and recommendations from friends and family. The magazine released its annual survey results Tuesday in Detroit.