A Review of Trends in Research on Web Accessibility (original) (raw)

Determination and evaluation of web accessibility

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.

An Examination of Web Site Accessibility Issues

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

Towards a Web accessibility monitor

Proceedings of the Second European Medical and Biological Engineering Conference, 2002

As the information society develops, the “digital divide” grows. On the other hand, appropriate uses of new technologies can bridge the divide and enable new user groups to access information and participate in communication. In particular, people with disabilities may benefit from the development. We propose a tool to monitor the accessibility to content on the Internet. Using data warehouse techniques, we can discover how some accessibility properties depend on variables such as publishing tools, operating system, script ...

Analysis of Accessibility Initiatives Applied to the Web

International Journal of Web Portals, 2000

The objective of this study is to investigate the current accessibility initiatives applied to the Web and identify its main characteristics and trends. The method used was a literature review focused on work in the last twenty years in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada and Brazil, ranked according to their approaches, in six lines of study. As a result, points out the lack of studies that allow effective analysis of the accessibility of websites, and methods for continuous improvement of technical standards and recommendations. It follows, showing the application of usability metrics by Nielsen and ISO-9241 and the incorporation of research models of information behavior seeking for assessment of gaps in accessibility.

AccessWeb Barometer - A Web Accessibility Evaluation and Analysis Platform

2015

The constant evolution of all Web related technologies, and the considerable adoption of these everyday life, has brought to the discussion table the ability of these Web technologies and Web contents to become accessible to all, including those with some sort of disability. During the past years, a research project has been executed in order to, not only give the Web accessibility topic more visibility within our society, but also to achieve indicators on the levels of accessibility presented by privately held company websites. Considering the growing need to rapidly achieve Web accessibility indicators, whose complexity has significantly increased, the research team inherent to the referred project developed a software platform, entitled accessibility evaluations to multiple websites in simultaneous. It also has the ability to analyze and publish the results inherent to those evaluations, and to allow its users to create their own analysis and dashboards. In this paper, we present...

Web not for all: a large scale study of web accessibility

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.

Considering Web Accessibility in Information Retrieval Systems

International Conference on Web Engineering, 2007

Search engines are the most common gateway for information searching in the WWW. Since Information Retrieval systems do not take web accessibility into account, results displayed are not useful for users with disabilities. We present a framework that includes the requirements to overcome this situation. It is composed of three modules: Content Analysis Module, Accessibility Analysis Module and Results Collector

Towards Automated Web Accessibility Evaluation: A Comparative Study

International Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science, 2017

With each passing day, the Web is becoming increasingly important in our lives. Hence, the need of making it more accessible to everyone, especially for the disabled and elderly spurred a great interest in automated tools, the total registered number of which has been continuously increasing and reached from forty-five software bids in 2014 to ninety-three in 2017. The purpose of this empirical research is to assess and compare eight popular and free online automated Web accessibility evaluation tools (AWAETs) such as AChecker, Cynthia Says, EIII Checker, MAUVE, SortSite, TAW, Tenon and WAVE with regard to the WCAG 2.0 conformance. As a result, significant differences were observed in terms of tool's coverage (a maximum of 32.4%), completeness (ranges between 10% and 59%), correctness (an average of 70.7%), specificity (reaches 32%), inter-reliability (lies between 1.56% and 18.32%) and intra-reliability (the acceptable score), validity, efficiency and capacity. These eight criteria can help to determine a new role played by modern AWAETs as dependent methods in Web accessibility evaluation. Moreover, consequences of relying on AWAETs alone are quantified and concluded that applying such approaches is a great mistake since subjective and less frequent objective success criteria (SC) failed to be automated. However, using a good combination of AWAETs is highly recommended as overall results in all the mentioned quality criteria are maximized and tools could definitely validate and complete each other. Ultimately, integrating automated methods with the others is ideal and preferably at an early stage of the website development life cycle. The study also provides potential accessibility barriers that make websites inaccessible, challenges AWAETs are currently facing, nineteen pros and fourteen cons and fifteen improvement recommendations for the existing and next generation of AWAETs. Fundamentally, achieving the objectives of this study was possible due to the elaboration and implementation of a new five-phased methodology named as-5PhM-for-AWAEMs‖ for successful selection, evaluation and/or comparison of AWAEMs. In addition to providing detailed descriptions of the estimation process, this methodology represents eleven key criteria for effective selection of suitable AWAEMs and necessary numbers of web pages and expert evaluators for acceptable, normal or ideal assessment.

A.: Web accessibility guidelines: a lesson from the evolving Web

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:

Evaluation of Accessibility of Randomly Selected Websites

ATBU Journal of Science, Technology and Education, 2021

The continuous evolution of web technologies since the advent of the World Wide Web (www) has transcendentally enhanced the flexibility of interactions with increasingly varied and resourceful interfaces that supports dynamic web content. However, despite the increase in web interactivity, people with disabilities are still finding it difficult to access websites, due to non-compliant of most websites to the W3C guidelines. This research was carried out to evaluate websites' conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Ten websites were selected at random from different fields such as education, business, industry, and entertainment; which were evaluated using the TAW tool. The evaluation was based on the four general principles of WCAG 2.0: Operable, understandable, robust, and perceivable. Our finding discovered a lack of guidelines conformity by most if not all the selected websites.