Web accessibility guidelines

Many websites remain inaccessible for people with disabilities, despite the availability of relevant guidelines and tools. This is mainly due to lack of training of Web designers on accessibility technology. This need is addressed, by ESALP, presented in this paper, a web-based application that is meant to be used as a tool to disseminate and teach Web accessibility guidelines and good design practices. The tool adopts an example-based learning approach. First, it exposes people to the accessibility impasses that arise when certain, established guidelines are violated, and then provides concise advice on how to avoid or resolve them. These examples were derived from an in-depth, Web accessibility evaluation study of 50 Greek websites. The results of this study, in agreement to similar studies, also indicated that the accessibility of the Greek Web is rather low. We argue that the presented tool could help in improving the accessibility of websites by increasing awareness, motivating and educating Web development stakeholders on the subject of accessibility.

2002

ABSTRACT There is still a large percentage of web resources that are inaccessible to many individuals. The authors previously developed a meta-method for evaluating the accessibility of existing web resources and now feel there is a need to provide advice on designing for accessibility during the development lifecycle. Despite the large quantity of resources on accessible design now available, there is still a shortage of practical information for web developers on the steps to be taken towards implementation.

2002

Abstract The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; however, access to the Web and its many applications cannot be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses a variety of concerns ranging from societal, political, and economic to individual, physical, and intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus, there are many perspectives from which Web accessibility can be understood and evaluated.

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.

Journal of Computer Science Technology, 2013

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) defines the guidelines to facilitate access for people with disabilities to ICT. This article presents a proposal to promote the unification and improvement of the works of two authors, combining the procedures and considerations after the evaluation of some web sites Northeast Argentina (NEA).

Disability and Rehability: Assistive Technology

"Purpose This article asserts that current approaches to enhance the accessibility of Web resources fail to provide a solid foundation for the development of a robust and future-proofed framework. In particular, they fail to take advantage of new technologies and technological practices. The article introduces a framework for Web adaptability, which encourages the development of Web-based services that can be resilient to the diversity of uses of such services, the target audience, available resources, technical innovations, organisational policies and relevant definitions of 'accessibility'. Method The article refers to a series of author-focussed approaches to accessibility through which the authors and others have struggled to find ways to promote accessibility for people with disabilities. These approaches depend upon the resource author's determination of the anticipated users' needs and their provision. Through approaches labelled as 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, the authors have widened their focus to account for contexts and individual differences in target audiences. Now, the authors want to recognise the role of users in determining their engagement with resources (including services). To distinguish this new approach, the term 'adaptability' has been used to replace 'accessibility'; new definitions of accessibility have been adopted, and the authors have reviewed their previous work to clarify how it is relevant to the new approach. Results Accessibility 1.0 is here characterised as a technical approach in which authors are told how to construct resources for a broadly defined audience. This is known as universal design. Accessibility 2.0 was introduced to point to the need to account for the context in which resources would be used, to help overcome inadequacies identified in the purely technical approach. Accessibility 3.0 moved the focus on users from a homogenised universal definition to recognition of the idiosyncratic needs and preferences of individuals and to cater for them. All of these approaches placed responsibility within the authoring/publishing domain without recognising the role the user might want to play, or the roles that other users in social networks, or even Web services might play. Conclusions Adaptability shifts the emphasis and calls for greater freedom for the users to facilitate individual accessibility in the open Web environment. "

Proceedings of the 31st ACM international conference on Design of communication - SIGDOC '13, 2013

The Web is currently the main way of providing computing services, reaching a larger number of users with different characteristics. As the complexity and interactivity of systems is increased, users become more demanding towards all the requirements associated to their distinct needs. Implementing the interaction requirements in the Web has become the main focus of accessibility and usability studies, describing essential design features which provide users with quality, assured systems. The focus on the users reinforced that as the number of users grows and the system became available to a wide variety of users, accessibility and usability features become even more critical to a Web application's success. In this paper, we present ACCESSA, a practical approach to rapidly improve the accessibility of existing Web systems, acting mainly in the interface design with no changes to the functional requirements of systems. The ACCESSA is based on the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and other patterns, choosing the guidelines that present lower implementation costs and represent higher severity accessibility issues.

2013

In recent years the growth of the World Wide Web exceeded all expectations.The World Wide Web is a fertile area for data mining research.Web mining is a research topic which combines two of the activated research areas: Data Mining and World Wide Web. Web mining research relates to several research communities such as Database, information Retrieval and Artificial intelligence, visualization. Automated analyses of WCAG 2.0 Level,a success criteria found high percentages of violations overall. Unlike more circumscribed studies, however, the sites exhibited improvements over the years on a number of accessibility indicators, with government sites being less likely than top sites to have accessibility violations. Examination of the causes of success and failure suggests that improving accessibility may be due, in part, to changes in website technologies and coding practices rather than a focus on accessibility per se. This paper reviews the research and application issues in web Access...

"The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has a well-established framework for addressing accessibility based on three components: the accessibility of Web content, accessibility support in browsers and accessibility support in authoring tools, with a corresponding set of guidelines for each. These guidelines have been successful in raising awareness in Web accessibility at a political level, but have been less successful than might have been expected influencing the wider promotion and adoption of accessibility in Web technology. This is increasingly apparent as Web content becomes increasingly heterogeneous in terms of source, type, author and function. Standards, policy and guidelines overwhelmingly focus on accessibility of the end product – i.e. the Web page or site - and not the process used to create it. This is at odds with the transformation of Web-based user goals from receipt of static information to communication, and receipt or delivery of services and experiences. Thus it is the accessibility of the end goal that should be critical, and is dependent on the quality of the route(s) available to reaching that goal - making assessing accessibility of a technical unit such as a Web page less relevant. Instead, we argue a holistic approach is necessary – one that views positively, where appropriate, aggregation of alternatives in a way that allows each route to provide the best possible chance for disabled users to achieve the end goal, even if individual routes may themselves exclude certain groups. Since 2004 the authors have developed a framework for addressing the accessibility of Web resources, inspired by the holistic use of Web technology in e-learning, building on WAI guidelines but providing the flexibility needed to address the limitations of the guidelines and the diverse ways in which the Web is now being used. This paper reflects how the influence and impact of WCAG has changed over time, and, by reviewing the authors’ work conducted in recent years, considers how a more holistic approach to Web Accessibility in a Web 2.0 world can best be achieved. "

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.

Proceedings of California State University Northridge - Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities., 2001

Web instruction is not the only aspect of academic life that is growing. The ranks of online journals are expanding rapidly, as print journals add archives to the web. This paper discusses the importance to the academic community of making all web resources, including web journals, accessible to all. The researchers will present a pragmatic approach to the problem. A handout will be available with specific directions for online journals and for web courses. There will also be a discussion of icons that can be placed on websites to show accessibility, including an new icon specifically designed for the field of education. A look at the future will explain the use of XML / XSLT files that can transform both presentation and content to produce accessible pages. This protocol, being developed for wireless technologies such as cell phones and organizers, can also address the needs of the disabled if properly applied.

2008

Accessibility is the possibility of any person to make use of all the benefits of society, including the use of the Internet. Graphical are an obstacle for visually impaired persons to access the Internet, so they need a support technology capable of capturing interfaces and making them accessible. Interfaces should be designed so that when accessed by support technologies they continue to be friendly. For a site to be accessible to blind persons it is necessary that the information be reproduced by means of an "equivalent" textual description, capable of transmitting the same information as the visual resources. The present study is aimed at identifying and defining usability guidance compliant with accessibility W3C directives that can facilitate the interaction between visually impaired and the Internet and still guarantee sites with understandable navigation content. Towards this end an exploratory study was conducted, comprised of a field study and interviews with various visually disabled people from the Instituto Benjamin Constant, reference center in Brazil for the education and re-education of visually impaired persons, in order to get to know visually disabled users better. Through the understanding acquired, different types of impositions and limits that these users are subject to have been identified, enabling a better perception of their needs and special abilities. The impaired user-machine interaction were observed and analyzed, which enabled the identification of aspects that could contribute to the accessibility of sites, with emphasis on facilitating the access of those visually impaired to the Web.

2009

Abstract. This paper aims at contributing to the evaluation of web accessibility and thus promoting design for all, considering the design process as an iterative process containing evaluation as a fundamental component. More specifically, the paper: 1) rethinks Web Accessibility Evaluation notion and its abstract requirements, 2) investigates the usability of W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0), and 3) proposes an approach for an evaluation of the usability of accessibility guidelines.

2012

This is the author created version of a work that has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication by World Wide Web Journal, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. It incorporates referee’s comments but changes resulting from the publishing process, such as copyediting, structural formatting, may not be reflected in this document. The published version is available at:

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

The XXI Century society has developed a drive for Information and the Web, as one of the extremely important technologies of our times, represents the main channel to access it. As a result of this, one can perceive that the Web, and the inherent websites, must be accessible to all, in order to maintain the imperative social equality. Despite the legal requirements to the Portuguese Web content accessibility levels, in effect since 1999, the existent studies that focused on assessing those same levels of accessibility reported that the Portuguese websites, in their majority, were not compliant with the existent standards. In mid-2007 we started, within our research group and in partnership with both UMIC-Knowledge Society Agency and APDSI-Association for the Promotion and Development of the Information Society, a Web accessibility barometer. The goal of this barometer has been assessing the accessibility levels of the Portuguese websites, creating recommendations-for both the organizations and the civil society-towards the improvement of the referred websites, and publicly presenting the achieved results. One of the Portuguese enterprises that is adopting the accessibility standards into its public procurement platform anoGov is ANO. This company established a research project alongside UTAD University in order to achieve technical know-how and good practices that allowed them to develop accessible and usable Web content.