Web Accessibility through Adaptation

Information, 2020

With the growth of e-services in the past two decades, the concept of web accessibility has been given attention to ensure that every individual can benefit from these services without any barriers. Web accessibility is considered one of the main factors that should be taken into consideration while developing webpages. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) have been developed to guide web developers to ensure that web contents are accessible for all users, especially disabled users. Many automatic tools have been developed to check the compliance of websites with accessibility guidelines such as WCAG 2.0 and to help web developers and content creators with designing webpages without barriers for disabled people. Despite the popularity of accessibility evaluation tools in practice, there is no systematic way to compare the performance of web accessibility evaluators. This paper first presents two novel frameworks. The first one is proposed to compare the performance of...

Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Research …, 2009

This paper introduces a methodology to improve the accessibility of websites with the use of free so-called automatic tools. The methodology has three iterative phases, namely assessing a website against accessibility guidelines, user testing and creating in-house 'guidelines' to prevent similar mistakes in future versions of the system. Aspects of accessibility addressed include the use of colour, accessibility guidelines and priorities, readability or comprehensibility, and screen reader simulators. We recommend free tools for each of these accessibility aspects and discuss the process that should be followed when evaluating a website.

Electronic notes in …, 2006

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from W3C consist of a set of 65 checkpoints or specifications that Web pages should accomplish in order to be accessible to people with disabilities or using alternative browsers. Many of these 65 checkpoints can only be checked by a human operator, thus implying a very high cost for full evaluation. However, some checkpoints can be automatically evaluated, thus spotting accessibility barriers in a very effective manner. Well known tools like Bobby, Tawdis or WebXACT evaluate Web ...

During the last decade, Web site accessibility and usability have become increasingly important. Consequently, many tools have been developed for automatic or semi-automatic evaluation of Web site accessibility. Unfortunately, most of them have not been updated over time to keep up with the evolution of accessibility standards and guidelines, thus soon becoming obsolete. Furthermore, the increasing importance of CSS in the definition of modern Web page layout, and the increasing use of scripting technologies in dynamic and interactive Web sites, has led to new challenges in automatic accessibility evaluation that few of the existing tools are able to face. This paper describes MAUVE, a software environment for Web site accessibility and usability evaluation. The tool is characterized by the possibility to specify and update the guidelines that should be validated without requiring changes in the tool implementation. It is based on an XML-based language for Web Guidelines Definition. It allows checking both HTML and CSS to detect accessibility issues and is able to validate dynamic sites as well, based on the use of a set of plugins for the most popular browsers.

Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Web Site Evolution

Tim Berners-Lee, the W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web: "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." ! Vanderheiden in 1990 states the importance of the design of Web Sites accessible to disable and elder peoples ! Carter and Markel state that the development of an accessible Web Site opens vast potential markets and has spillover effects for all users.

2008

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015

Massive volumes of information shared on the web together with linked open data initiatives and exabytes of data generated through social networks frequently disorientates and confuses web users in their everyday interaction. Additionally, web users constitute a highly heterogeneous entities with different needs and requirements. Considering this, user adaptive software systems have been developed as a new application approach to ease the interaction between users and web information with the intent to bridge the gap between such presentation and navigational pitfalls. The user adaptive interaction is especially useful when considering a marginalized group such as blind and visually impaired users. This paper attempts at providing an overview of a state-of-the-art survey concerning adaptive interaction between users and web information space with special emphasis on exploiting methods and techniques for adaptive web accessibility for blind and visually impaired people. Likewise, the exploration of possibilities of new methods and techniques for user adapted interaction for blind and visually impaired is highly required in order to alleviate the accessibility according to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Recent studies indicate that even when the guidelines are implemented on web information systems, there is little indication that people with disabilities will gain better accessibility. To address these issues, we introduce various visual and auditory approaches to extend such adaptive methods and techniques for blind and visually impaired.

International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications, 2014

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the web. Web accessibility also benefits others including older people, and people in the rural areas. Currently, most websites have accessibility barriers that make it difficult or impossible for many people with disabilities to use the web. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was launched as an effort to improve the accessibility of the World Wide Web for people with disabilities. One of the roles of WAI is to develop guidelines and techniques that describe accessibility solutions for web software and web developers. A website optimized for accessibility will benefit everyone and worth investment as it gains a distinct competitive advantage and adds real value to the global community. This article presents the implementation of Firefox browser extension to adjust the HTML pages of existing web applications based on the recommendation of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The HTML adjustment is processed with two major steps, starting with the evaluation of HTML tags against the checkpoints defined as XPath 2.0 rules. In case the HTML element is nonconformance to WCAG 2.0, its location will then be returned to JavaScript for adjustments using the fixing rule satisfying the WCAG 2.0 success criteria. Examples of web accessibility adjustments are demonstrated. The browser extension is assessed compared to a web accessibility evaluation tool, for the correctness of identifying accessibility barriers.

Proceedings of the 2009 …, 2009

In this research, we propose a methodology for evaluating web accessibility with respect to disabled users, especially the visionimpaired and the hearing-impaired. Two stages are involved in our approach. In the first stage, we adopt barriers proposed by the Barrier Walkthrough method to classify possible barriers for each group of users on a web page. In addition, this method proposes checkpoints of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) as barrier causes. All barriers found at this stage would be transformed into the relevant checkpoints. In the second stage, the severity of barriers is assessed by analyzing violated checkpoints. Our formula will also calculate accessibility value from the violated checkpoints. The result of our approach can identify whether the evaluated web pages are suitable for different groups of the disabled.

Journal of Access Services, 2009

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was established to enhance the accessibility of Web resources for people with disabilities. In this article we argue that although WAI's advocacy work has been very successful, the WAI approach is flawed. Rather than WAI's emphasis on adoption of technical guidelines, the authors argue that the priority should be for a user-focused approach, which embeds best practices through the development of achievable policies and processes and which includes all stakeholders in the process of maximizing accessibility. The article describes a Tangram model, which provides a pluralistic approach to Web accessibility, and provides case studies that illustrate use of this approach. The article describes work that has informed the ideas in this article and plans for further work, including an approach to advocacy and education that coins the term Accessibility 2.0 to describe a renewed approach to accessibility, which builds on previous work but prioritizes the importance of the user.

IBM Systems Journal, 2005

The accessibilityWorks project provides software enhancements to the Mozillae Web browser and allows users to control their browsing environment. Although Web accessibility standards specify markup that must be incorporated for Web pages to be accessible, these standards do not ensure a good experience for all Web users. This paper discusses user controls that facilitate a number of adaptations that can greatly increase the usability of Web pages for a diverse population of users. In addition to transformations that change page presentation, innovations are discussed that enable mouse and keyboard input correction as well as vision-based control for users unable to use their hands for computer input. This paper begins with background information on the types of problems that may be experienced by Web users, and then describes the Web Adaptation

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

This paper provides an introduction to automatic and manual evaluation methods for analysis of web accessibility. The first topic examines the recent results in advances in authoring, including modifications to existing CMS systems and new development toolkits. Next, the session explores the accessibility of specialized content such as graphics and interface components. The last topic in the session covers the results of the Web Accessibility Benchmarking Cluster of European Union supported projects (WAB-Cluster). Authors discuss technologies needed for automatic as well as manual evaluation.

2010

Abstract The Web accessibility discipline strives for the study and improvement of front-end Web design towards people with disabilities. Best practices such as WCAG dictate how Web pages should be created accordingly. On top of WCAG, several evaluation procedures enable the measurement of the quality level of a Web page. We leverage these procedures in an automated evaluation of a nearly 30 million Web page collection provided by the Portuguese Web Archive.

The advantages of the new era of information are out of the capacities of the people with visual impairments. This is due to by the lack of sensibility of the Web contents developers and the low use of the accessibility guidelines. These situations can be solved with technology, and the result of the research presented in this paper offers a new system of solving one of the most important problems: the data table navigation. We present a solution that offers excellent results to make the natural complexity of these elements easy. The system is based on the visualization of the table’s content, in the same manner that uses a non-disabled person, but without the need made any image processing. The solution can help to us to obtain the total e-integration.

2006

The Web is becoming more important for communication and for data access. Unfortunately, not all Web sites are accessible for all users. Web accessibility is concerned with overcoming the barriers that users with disabilities face when they try to access information on Web sites. Currently, for disabled users, the Web presents many barriers that make it diffiult to use. These