Article

One year older, but not necessarily wiser: An evaluation of homepage accessibility problems over time

Springer Nature
Universal Access in the Information Society
Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Abstract

A large number of users with disabilities use assistive technology devices to browse the web. However, the use of assistive technologies can only be successful when the web sites are developed in such a way that they are compatible with such devices. Guidelines exist for creating accessible web sites. However, they are seldom followed, and current levels of web accessibility are low. Therefore, the question arises as to which is the major cause of inaccessibility, and how accessibility features of web sites evolve over time. A set of 50 web sites has been studied over time to determine if accessibility improves or declines. This research-in-progress paper presents a comparison of the results obtained in 2002 and 2003. Such a comparison leads to the conclusion that, in the time period of 1 year, the 50 web sites have actually become more inaccessible. Implications for developers, webmasters, and educators are also discussed in the paper.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

... As most web accessibility guidelines and laws were issued during 1999 and 2000, one may expect that web accessibility would have improved over the years. Unfortunately, a study of 50 websites of organizations in the mid-Atlantic USA over a one-year period in [2002][2003] found that the accessibility of these websites had actually declined [21]. Two studies of public and commercial websites in Greece were conducted in 2004 and 2008. ...
... • Developers, designers, webmasters, managers, and other stakeholders may lack knowledge about disability rights or may not be aware of accessibility issues [21,23,25,30,34]; • Developers may not prioritize accessibility issues or may not require accessibility compliance as part of site specifications [30]; • There is no mechanism in place to ensure accessibility compliance or no political will to push the issue forward [30]; • There exist time constraints, a lack of funds, and general technostress (e.g., having to keep up with new technologies) [25]; • There exists inaccurate coding practice [33]; • There is an increase in website complexity and the amount of content together with a focus on businesscentric orientation that values the visual effects more than the effectiveness and efficiency of users' tasks [33,34]; • Accessibility could reduce a website's quality in terms of its stability, security, and layout, as accessibility may limit the design options [23]. ...
... In terms of economic motivation, accessibility implementation could be a means to increase turnover, customer base, customer satisfaction, etc., as it may provoke a competitive advantage due to differentiation from direct competitions [23]. Creating an accessible website could-and would-attract greater numbers of potential users and customers with and without disabilities [25], and the increase in potential user and customer bases would possibly lead to improved profitability [21]. In terms of social motivation, organizations with elaborate social values (e.g., equality, ethical behavior, social commitment, responsible attitude toward society) will rather implement web accessibility for social reasons [23]. ...
Article
Full-text available
While websites are generally effective communication tools for information sharing, marketing, public relations, etc., people with disabilities and elderly individuals encounter considerable difficulty in accessing information through websites. To minimize this, countries around the world have made web accessibility compulsory by law and have implemented web accessibility certification programs. Therefore, the goal of this study is to analyze the effects of web accessibility certification on the perception of companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR). We conducted an experiment in which participants were instructed to browse the websites of two private Korean enterprises that had been granted web accessibility certification. The participants then completed a four-item questionnaire measuring some components of CSR. We analyzed the collected data using logistic regression analysis and multivariate analysis of variance. We also interviewed some of the participants after the experiment to collect more qualitative data. The analysis of results indicates that web accessibility certification marks significantly influence web users’ perceptions of the CSR of the companies that post the marks on their websites. The qualitative data also facilitate practical recommendations for effective web accessibility certification marks. The findings of this study add to the body of knowledge on web accessibility. This study thus contributes to both research and practice in the field of web accessibility.
... Early studies have suggested that teaching such guidelines along with techniques and tools to make the web accessible is an appropriate topic for Information Technology (IT) related courses [6]. Additionally, considering that at least 70% of websites are currently inaccessible and continuously in decline [7], the topic of accessibility should be addressed early on and become a standard part of IT-related curricula [6]. ...
... Since early 2000, there have been a number of attempts to integrate accessibility in computer science curricula [6][7][8]10,13,15,16] by advocating that the topic of accessibility should be integrated in a number of courses and programs [6]. For example, the accessibility-first pedagogy for web design courses highlights that accessibility should be a topic of interest to computer scientists [8]. ...
Article
Full-text available
Web accessibility is becoming a relevant topic with an increased number of people with disabilities and the elderly using the web. Numerous legislations are being passed that require the web to be universally accessible to all people, regardless of their abilities and age. Despite this trend, university curricula still teach traditional web development without addressing accessibility as a topic. To investigate this matter closely, we studied the syllabi of web development courses at one university to evaluate whether the topic of accessibility was taught there. Additionally, we conducted a survey with nineteen students who were enrolled in a web development course, and we interviewed three lecturers from the same university. Our findings suggest that the topic of accessibility is not covered in web development courses, although both students and lecturers think that it should. This generates lack of competence in accessibility. The findings also confirm the finding of previous studies that, among web developers, there is a low familiarity with accessibility guidelines and policies. An interesting finding we uncovered was that gender affects the motivation to learn about accessibility. Females were driven by personal reasons, which we attribute to females having an increased sense of empathy. Finally, our participants were divided in their opinions whether accessibility contributes to usability.
... A number of studies have examined website conformance to WCAG 1.0 guidelines (see Table 1). (2004) Nepal government websites Shah and Shakya (2007) Brazilian municipalities websites Freire, Bittar, and Fortes (2008) State legislative websites in the USA Fagen and Fagen (2004) University websites in the USA Bradbard, Peters, and Caneva (2010); Krach (2007) International university websites Kane, Shulman, Shockley, and Ladner (2007) Study about website quality, which focused on blind users Lazar, Allen, Kleinnman, and Malarkey (2007) Determined the accessibility levels over time of several websites arbitrarily chosen Lazar and Greenidge (2006) Spanish and North American university libraries Caballero, Faba, and De Moya (2009) Suggested some straightforward assessment models for the "cybermedia" Rodríguez, Codina, and Pedraza (2010) Revised the recommendations regarding credibility assessment and online information accessibility ...
... The main reasons for this accessibility-popularity correlation actually include the possibility that people become aware that a website is accessible and thus tend to visit it often, or that web developers of accessible websites spend more time making sure that their websites are appropriate in following other usability rules that make visiting easier for the public. Lazar and Greenidge (2006) also argued that an accessible website increases the number of users, which in turn improves the organisation's profit. This supports the idea that complying with standards is beneficial not only to Internet users but also to website developers and owners (Bravo, 2006) and highlights the benefits of diversity-based design. ...
Article
Full-text available
Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society.
... Given the fact that many websites fail to achieve web accessibility, a phenomenon that has been widely revealed by many researchers [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12], there is likelihood that Chinese websites may have major accessibility problems; however, there is a lack of research into the accessibility of Chinese websites. This paper thus aims to provide an overview of the status of web accessibility in China according to two evaluations, one in 2009 and the other in 2013. ...
... Another study found that the average accessibility level of social work education websites increased significantly from 2003 to 2008 [14]. On the other hand, some other longitudinal evaluation studies found web accessibility to be less accessible as webpage complexity increases [11,12,15]. ...
Article
Full-text available
The objective of this study was to provide an overview of the status of web accessibility in China and to reveal any improvements during the period 2009 to 2013. Two evaluation studies were carried out in 2009 and 2013, respectively. Thirty-eight popular Chinese websites were evaluated in 2009 and fifty in 2013 with reference to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG). The studies applied the conformance evaluation method with the help of the automatic evaluation tool Hera. The evaluation results indicated that none of the surveyed websites passed all the checkpoints of Priority 1 in both studies, which means no website met the minimum requirement for web accessibility. The average level of web accessibility worsened between 2009 and 2013 due to the increase of website complexity and the amount of content. However, e-government websites had made some significant improvement during these 4 years, which indicated that the government had realized the web accessibility issues and made some effort to address them. The evaluation also revealed five major accessibility barriers existing in both studies, and these barriers also served as technical suggestions for web content providers. The web accessibility of Chinese websites is far from satisfactory, and it is getting worse from 2009 to 2013. However, e-government websites had improved significantly in regards to accessibility due to the release of accessibility regulations. Thus, the reason that explains low web accessibility in China is the lack of awareness rather than lack of technical skills.
... A number of studies have examined website conformance to WCAG 1.0 guidelines (see Table 1). (2004) Nepal government websites Shah and Shakya (2007) Brazilian municipalities websites Freire, Bittar, and Fortes (2008) State legislative websites in the USA Fagen and Fagen (2004) University websites in the USA Bradbard, Peters, and Caneva (2010); Krach (2007) International university websites Kane, Shulman, Shockley, and Ladner (2007) Study about website quality, which focused on blind users Lazar, Allen, Kleinnman, and Malarkey (2007) Determined the accessibility levels over time of several websites arbitrarily chosen Lazar and Greenidge (2006) Spanish and North American university libraries Caballero, Faba, and De Moya (2009) Suggested some straightforward assessment models for the "cybermedia" Rodríguez, Codina, and Pedraza (2010) Revised the recommendations regarding credibility assessment and online information accessibility ...
... The main reasons for this accessibility-popularity correlation actually include the possibility that people become aware that a website is accessible and thus tend to visit it often, or that web developers of accessible websites spend more time making sure that their websites are appropriate in following other usability rules that make visiting easier for the public. Lazar and Greenidge (2006) also argued that an accessible website increases the number of users, which in turn improves the organisation's profit. This supports the idea that complying with standards is beneficial not only to Internet users but also to website developers and owners (Bravo, 2006) and highlights the benefits of diversity-based design. ...
Article
Full-text available
Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society.
... Traditional remediation methods have included manual adjustments directly in the HTML code by developers [52]. Yet, web accessibility is a challenging and elusive problem [14,32], to keep up with frequently changing technologies, researchers developed automated remediation approaches [9,36]. These tools can quickly identify and suggest fixes for accessibility barriers, though they often need manual oversight to ensure that the corrections meet all user needs effectively [6,38,41,49]. ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Web accessibility is essential for ensuring that all individuals, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities, can access and effectively use the internet. This principle is fundamental as digital platforms increasingly become primary channels for education, communication, commerce, and entertainment. Our study critically evaluates the effectiveness of accessibility overlays, which are third-party tools that claim to enhance website usability for people with disabilities. Specifically, we focused on the experiences of blind and low-vision users, who are disproportionately impacted by poor web accessibility. Through a combination of online surveys and interviews, we engaged with participants who employ a variety of assistive technologies to navigate the web. The empirical evidence gathered paints a troubling picture: despite their intended purpose, accessibility overlays often fail to deliver on their promises and, in many cases, increase existing challenges. Participants frequently reported that these overlays conflicted with their assistive technologies, leading to reduced functionality and increased frustration. This points to a significant misalignment between the design of these tools and the real-world needs of users. The study highlights the pressing need to move away from superficial technological fixes and towards deeper, more meaningful engagement with the needs of disabled users. This involves embracing user-centered design practices that integrate accessibility considerations from the ground up, ensuring that digital environments are truly inclusive. By prioritizing comprehensive, well-integrated solutions over patches like overlays, we can foster a more accessible and equitable digital landscape.
... Be that as it may, Indian society has officially understood the extent of Web accessibility, and changes have been made to advance this idea [1]. All over the world, many researchers are discussed about the websites which fail to reach the level of Web accessibility [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], to improve the accessibility problems in India, still there is a lack of investigation in private and public websites. The main aim of this study is to investigate the level of Web accessibility of private and public websites in India between 2017 and another in 2018. ...
... Lazar et al. (2004) in their seminal study of webmasters found that webmasters were knowledgeable about WCAG guidelines. But recent research literature both among web developers and developers-in-training is replete with studies that conclude that they do not keep up with the many nuances involved in interpreting and implementing website accessibility guidelines and criteria such as the WCAG (Antonelli et al., 2018;Ballesteros et al., 2015;Durdu & Yerlikaya, 2020;Farrelly, 2011;Ferati & Vogel, 2020;Freire et al., 2008;Harper & Chen, 2012;Inal et al., 2019Inal et al., , 2020Inal & Ismailova, 2018;Lazar & Greenidge, 2006;Lopes et al., 2010;Pichiliani & Pizzolato, 2019;Sánchez-Gordón & Moreno, 2014;Sørum et al., 2013;Tigwell et al., 2017). Of particular importance and concern is the recent work by Pichiliani & Pizzolato (2021), who found that an overlooked and critical consideration is a lack of understanding among web developers of cognitive disabilities and the science behind these disabilities, resulting in the absence of specific guidelines and web contexts that may be impacted by these cognitive disabilities. ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Since the beginning of the pandemic, every state public health agency in the United States has created and maintained a website dedicated to COVID 19. Our goal was to evaluate these websites for conformity to accessibility guidelines. Specifically, we assessed, on a scale of increasing levels of accessibility compliance requirements, the results of the efforts made by website developers to incorporate and meet accessibility compliance criteria. We focused on homepages and vaccine pages in 49 states. For this study, we used the automated AChecker tool to assess conformance to the WCAG 2.0 guidelines at A, AA and AAA levels of conformance, and conformance with the Section 508c standard. We also manually rated, on a scale 0 (none) to 3 (highest), the specific accessibility features, if any, that web developers had included on the pages. We found that accessibility violations were prevalent across states but to varying degrees for a specific accessibility criterion. Although violations were detected in all 4 POUR accessibility principles, the most number of known violations occurred in meeting the perceivability and operability principles. Most violations in 508c guidelines occurred in not providing functional text in scripting languages and in not providing text equivalents for nontext. The degree of effort and conformance significantly varied between states; a majority of states exhibited a lower degree of effort, while a few attempted innovative ways to enhance accessibility on their websites. The efforts seemed to focus on meeting the minimum threshold. It is not clear if websites were designed proactively for accessibility.
... The extent to which these homepages are accessible to all is thus an important research/empirical/policy question (Jaeger, 2003). Notably, examining the accessibility of home pages is of significance because an inaccessible home page is likely to limit access to any other subsidiary part of a Web site (Lazar and Greenidge, 2006;. ...
Article
Using basic accessibility standards, the presence or absence of essential usability features, and site accessibility statements, this study evaluates the accessibility of the home pages of the federal judiciary — those of the U.S. district, Appellate and specialty courts, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts (AO), the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), and the main homepage of PACER, the federal judiciary’s e-filing and e-records access system. Software evaluations reveal detected instances of a narrow set of accessibility issues, including scripts with no accompanying functional text, images/server-side image maps with no text equivalents/descriptors, and inaccessible forms. Manual evaluations of Web sites show a high proportion (about 67 percent) of the home pages provided skip navigation links, whereas smaller proportions provided direct or indirect links to accessibility information — about 15 percent and 12 percent, respectively, as well as controls for manipulating font size (about 12 percent). Notably, a sizeable proportion (about 45 percent) of home pages provided direct or indirect links to a “BrowseAloud” explanation and download page, apparently in lieu of information on accessibility. Finally, content analysis of existing Web site accessibility pages and policy statements show a high degree of variation, with some being exceptionally detailed and informative, and some less so.
... The homepages were evaluated first because it is the portal through which the users access the websites. If the home page is inaccessible, disabled user may find it challenging to access the remaining part of the website [29]. Only 1-level pages were evaluated. ...
Chapter
Websites are essential for learners’ access to information. However, due to the lack of accessibility and usability of websites, students with disabilities who solely rely on screen readers face challenges accessing webpage contents. This study explores accessibility and usability issues frequently encountered by screen reader students while interacting with Norwegian university webpages. An evaluation using automated tools showed that none of the university websites met the minimum WCAG 2.1 guidelines. Sixteen visually impaired participants were recruited and assigned five usability tasks on four different university websites. The results show that participants encountered usability and accessibility issues on all four websites. Recommendations for increased accessibility are proposed based on the findings.
... Alahmadi & Drew (2017) decided to base their analysis on three pages. Other authors opted for analyzing only the homepage, provided that it is the most significant and most representative of the institutions they assessed (Espadinha, Pereira, Silva, & Lopes, 2011;Ismail & Kuppusamy, 2018;Laitano, 2015;Lazar & Greenidge, 2006;Thompson, Burgstahler, & Moore, 2010). ...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this study is to assess the web accessibility concerning the websites of Chilean universities which are listed in The World University Rankings. Web accessibility is a fundamental factor in achieving a true educational inclusion. It is especially important in the light of the current trend of expanding not only the online content, but also online learning. What makes this even more essential is the Chilean legislation which under Law 20422 establishes the regulations regarding equality of opportunity and social inclusion of people with disabilities. The analysis has been conducted on the basis of the international standard set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), version WCAG 2.0. Evaluation methodology called WCAG-EM created by the same entity, has been applied in the analysis. Various automatic web accessibility evaluation tools have also been used, apart from manual verifications. The study reveals that the websites of Chilean universities have hardly complied with the regulation and that there are barriers and difficulties of access for the elderly and/or people with disabilities.
... They also found that levels of Web accessibility are low in Websites. 3 ...
... Using new technologies to build web pages will increase the complexity and reduce the accessibility of web sites. Lazar and Greenidge (Lazar & Greenidge, 2006) studied 50 web sites and checked if their accessibility becomes better or worse over time. ...
Article
Nowadays the internet is an important medium for serving people. Using the internet can help people completing several tasks and accessing different types of information (e.g., reading news, finding location for places, buying and selling products online, and so on). Accessing the internet is not an easy task for people with motor disabilities. The main barriers come from two issues: difficulty or inability in using the mouse and difficulty or inability on typing on the keyboard. The web accessibility guidelines are a set of suggested techniques to be used by web developers when designing, implementing, and maintaining websites to make them easy to access by people with disabilities. This chapter presents the importance of applying web accessibility standards and guidelines when designing and developing web pages. These guidelines are obtained from Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG), section 508, and other literature. The challenges and barriers encountered by people with motor disabilities when they use the web are presented. Then, different techniques that can be used by web developers to ensure the accessibility of websites for people with motor disabilities are introduced. At the end a discussion on evaluating and testing the website conformance to the web accessibility standards and guidelines is presented. Several evaluation techniques that can be used for web accessibility evaluation is introduced and explained to clarify the process of web accessibility testing.
... Las Pautas de Accesibilidad al Contenido en la Web (WCAG 1.0 y 2.0) creadas por el W3C (por medio de la Web Accessiblility Iniciative (WAI)) son la base internacional de la accesibilidad web. Éstas se basan en cuatro principios fundamentales (Lazar & Greenidge ,2006) que examinan un conjunto de sitios web al azar para determinar los niveles de accesibilidad. Además, estudian si la accesibilidad en estas web evoluciona con el tiempo. ...
Article
Full-text available
¿Son accesibles los sitios web recomendados como recursos docentes? Como docentes debemos abogar por webs accesibles con el fin de poder facilitar la formación a alumnado con NEAE. Con este objetivo surge el presente trabajo, el cual evalúa el nivel de accesibilidad web de los sitios recomendados como recursos docentes por los profesores que forman la red de investigación a la que pertenecemos. Para la evaluación hemos utilizado la herramienta TAW 2.0 que comprueba las pautas WCAG 2.0. Dichas pautas establecen estándares para el diseño y creación de páginas web accesibles. TAW clasifica los errores en tres tipos: “Problemas” (es una violación de una directriz de las pautas), “Advertencias” (es necesario comprobar manualmente) y “No verificado” (necesita una comprobación completamente manual). De los resultados de TAW extraemos que el 87.23% de las webs evaluadas tienen más de 10 Problemas en su primer nivel de profundidad, no logrando ninguna de ellas la calificación de cero Problemas. La Web 2.0, donde prima el compartir información, diseñar centrándose en el usuario y colaborar, nos debe hacer reflexionar sobre el acceso a la información y comunicación en la Red por parte de nuestro alumnado, sean cuales sean sus capacidades, y propiciar dicha accesibilidad.
... It involves training all who are involved with web development and management, including webmasters, content providers, software engineers, web programmers, and managers and policymakers. Often, even minor changes to a web site can introduce accessibility problems, and accessibility problems tend to get introduced into web sites as the sites evolve over time (Lazar & Greenidge, 2006); (Hackett, Parmento, & Zeng, 2004). Frequent re-evaluations of web sites are often needed to ensure that a web site remains accessible. ...
... Furthermore, little evidence of improvement over time could be found, at least over the six years from 1997 to 2002 studied in [10], and the years from 2000 to 2005 studied in [20]. [18] found an actual decrease in accessibility across a variety of site types when comparing 2002 and 2003. ...
Conference Paper
This paper explores evidence for the conjecture that improvements in Web accessibility have arisen, in part, as side effects of changes in Web technology and associated shifts in the way Web pages are designed and coded. Drawing on an earlier study of Web accessibility trends over the past 14 years, it discusses several possible indirect contributors to improving accessibility including the use of new browser capabilities to create more sophisticated page layouts, a growing concern with improved page rank in search results, and a shift toward cross-device content design. Understanding these examples may inspire the creation of additional technologies with incidental accessibility benefits.
... However, the impact of WCAG 1.0 on improving the accessibility of the Web remained quite low throughout the period of its use. Evaluations using automated tools covering a small subset of the guidelines [13,14,33], expert evaluations using a combination of automated testing tools and human judgment [19,30], and user evaluations with disabled participants [4,10,24] all found the level of accessibility of web pages to be extremely low in both the public and private sectors. ...
Article
Full-text available
This paper describes an empirical study of the problems encountered by 32 blind users on the Web. Task-based user evaluations were undertaken on 16 websites, yielding 1383 instances of user problems. The results showed that only 50.4% of the problems encountered by users were covered by Success Criteria in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). For user problems that were covered by WCAG 2.0, 16.7% of websites implemented techniques recommended in WCAG 2.0 but the techniques did not solve the problems. These results show that few developers are implementing the current version of WCAG, and even when the guidelines are implemented on websites there is little indication that people with disabilities will encounter fewer problems. The paper closes by discussing the implications of this study for future research and practice. In particular, it discusses the need to move away from a problem-based approach towards a design principle approach for web accessibility.
... Accessibility is not only a build-phase concern, but also a site maintenance task. There is a trend for established websites to decline in accessibility over time [6] as sites continually update, allowing accessibility errors not originally present to appear in subsequent updates [8]. More recent research found that while some accessibility barriers such as non-descriptive alt texts have improved over time, keyboard navigation accessibility has declined with elements such as dynamic menus and Flash content having a growing negative impact on accessibility [10]. ...
Article
Accessible websites are increasingly desired by clients with many web developers listing accessibility as a skill offered by their companies. An accessibility and validation study of 100 UK web development company homepages found that, while the skill set is gaining popularity in terms of visibility, the mention of accessibility on a developer website has no impact in terms of the actual accessibility of the homepage. The presence of validation and conformance icons for XHTML, CSS, WCAG 1.0 and 2.0 also does not necessarily reflect the current state of the site, which may have changed multiple times since the validation occurred. Accessibility errors are still common, with missing alt text and labels and poor keyboard accessibility in terms of keyboard traps as well as omission of "lang" attributes and reused id attribute values listed among the most frequent barriers encountered.
... Furthermore, webmasters and designers are always updating their web pages, and often do not consider accessibility in their updates. Over time, many web sites actually increase the number of accessibility violations, rather than reducing the number of violations [4,12]. These factors all increase the importance of studying how computer frustrations, which are clearly present, impact on blind users browsing the web. ...
Conference Paper
While previous studies have investigated the impact of frustration on computer users' mood as well as the causes of frustration, no research has ever been conducted to examine the relationship between computer frustrations and mood change for users with visual impairment. In this paper, we report on a study that examined the frustrating experiences and mood change of 100 participants, all with visual impairments, when they were browsing the web. The result shows that frustration does cause the participants' mood to deteriorate. However, the amount of time lost due to frustrating situations does not have a significant impact on users' mood, which is very different from the previous research on users without visual impairment. The impact on work seems to have the greatest impact on user mood.
Chapter
Online shopping has become inevitable in the current era of the Internet. Due to the increasing number of Internet users, more and more businesses are focusing on online shopping. At the same time, customers also prefer online shopping due to the convenience and ease of use. During the website design process, factors such as attractive interface and fast access are often taken into consideration. But, the accessibility of the websites is often overlooked during the design process. Thus, an essential section of society, persons with disabilities do not get an equal opportunity while accessing the websites. This, in turn, may also affect the online shopping decisions of persons with disabilities. In this chapter, the accessibility of the top online shopping websites has been evaluated based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The websites have been classified based on accessibility into high, medium, and low accessibility. Furthermore, Karl Pearson’s coefficient of correlation among different types of problems faced by users and Spearman’s rank coefficient of correlation between the number of visits to a website and the number of problems faced by users have been calculated, and Kendall’s W test for ranking websites based on different types of problems faced by users has also been performed. The results reveal that 50% of the sites have high, 20% have medium, and 30% have low accessibility. Results of correlation analysis indicate that the problems related to the accessibility of websites are not correlated to the visits made by the users. The findings of the study can help in building an inclusive society and also provide managerial insights for the online shopping industry.KeywordsAccessibility analysisOnline shoppingWebsite accessibilityWCAG
Chapter
ADAS is a vision and sensor-based system that aids the driver in understanding the immediate surroundings and navigate around it in a semi-autonomous manner constantly, using different computer vision methods like object detection, depth estimation, image segmentation, image classification, etc. 3D scene understanding plays a major role in a driver assistance system, and monocular depth estimation, which is a pixel-level regression task for estimating the distance of objects from a single camera without camera calibration as performed in stere-vision-based depth sensing, is an important task in 3D scene understanding. ADAS also involves features like lane-departure warnings and lane-keeping assistance, which continuously requires it to predict the lane lines of a road, and that falls under the grouped task of lane detection. To solve the problem of lane detection and depth estimation, we initialize the proposed work with the simple, traditional computer vision approaches and then moved to some supervised, unsupervised, and self-supervised approaches involving deep neural networks. The overall aim of this research is to analyze, compare, and contrast various deep learning approaches that hold the potential for integration into autonomous vehicles and can improve the performance and safety of advanced driving assistance systems. We discuss all the methods and identify their shortcomings.
Chapter
The World Wide Web (Web) has become an essential part of our daily life. Web accessibility remains an important issue because many people have limited access to the Web. It is essential to make this content accessible to all people. This chapter provides an overview of the importance of web accessibility. It explains the current status of the issue, accessibility guidelines and techniques to evaluate and achieve web accessibility. Useful resources and practical recommendations to increase accessibility are also included.
Chapter
Nowadays the internet is an important medium for serving people. Using the internet can help people completing several tasks and accessing different types of information (e.g., reading news, finding location for places, buying and selling products online, and so on). Accessing the internet is not an easy task for people with motor disabilities. The main barriers come from two issues: difficulty or inability in using the mouse and difficulty or inability on typing on the keyboard. The web accessibility guidelines are a set of suggested techniques to be used by web developers when designing, implementing, and maintaining websites to make them easy to access by people with disabilities. This chapter presents the importance of applying web accessibility standards and guidelines when designing and developing web pages. These guidelines are obtained from Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG), section 508, and other literature. The challenges and barriers encountered by people with motor disabilities when they use the web are presented. Then, different techniques that can be used by web developers to ensure the accessibility of websites for people with motor disabilities are introduced. At the end a discussion on evaluating and testing the website conformance to the web accessibility standards and guidelines is presented. Several evaluation techniques that can be used for web accessibility evaluation is introduced and explained to clarify the process of web accessibility testing.
Article
Although many studies have investigated how well government websites have implemented website accessibility standards, such as Section 508 and WCAG 2.0, very little research has been conducted exploring what factors influence the level of implementation. Based on the organizational innovation model proposed by Frances Berry, this study examines 342 county government websites in the USA and analyzes how several factors, such as budget resources, local demographics and forms of county government, influence the accessibility of the sites. The result of the OLS estimate indicates that the complexity of the websites and the county population density are the most important predictors of web accessibility. County budget is also a marginal predictor, while the percentage of the population with disabilities is a negative predictor. Given the slow progress in the implementation of higher accessibility standards in the USA, the findings of this study provide timely implications for policymakers and governments to improve the quality of their websites.
Chapter
Web accessibility evaluation checks the accessibility of the website to help improve the user experiences for disabled people. Due to the massive number of web pages in a website, manually reviewing all the pages becomes totally impractical. But the complexities of evaluating some checkpoints require certain human involvements. To address this issue, we develop the semi-supervised group sparse regression algorithm which takes advantages of the high precision of a small amount of manual evaluation results along with the global distribution of all the web pages and efficiently gives out the overall evaluation result of the website. Moreover, the proposed method can tell the importance of each feature in evaluating each checkpoint. The experiments on various websites demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm.
Article
The World Wide Web is an extremely powerful source of information, inspiration, ideas, and opportunities. As such, it has become an integral part of daily life for a great majority of people. Yet for a significant number of others, the internet offers only limited value due to the existence of barriers which make accessing the Web difficult, if not impossible. This article illustrates some of the reasons that achieving equality of access to the online world of education is so critical, explores the current status of Web accessibility, discusses evaluative tools and methods that can help identify accessibility issues in educational websites, and provides practical recommendations and guidelines for resolving some of the obstacles that currently hinder the achievability of the goal of universal Web access.
Article
Purpose As existing studies show the accuracy of sampling methods depends heavily on the evaluation metric in web accessibility evaluation, the purpose of this paper is to propose a sampling method OPS-WAQM optimized for Web Accessibility Quantitative Metric (WAQM). Furthermore, to support quick accessibility evaluation or real-time website accessibility monitoring, the authors also provide online extension for the sampling method. Design/methodology/approach In the OPS-WAQM method, the authors propose a minimal sampling error model for WAQM and use a greedy algorithm to approximately solve the optimization problem to determine the sample numbers in different layers. To make OPS-WAQM online, the authors apply the sampling in crawling strategy. Findings The sampling method OPS-WAQM and its online extension can both achieve good sampling quality by choosing the optimal sample numbers in different layers. Moreover, the online extension can also support quick accessibility evaluation by sampling and evaluating the pages in crawling. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the sampling method OPS-WAQM in this paper is the first attempt to optimize for a specific evaluation metric. Meanwhile, the online extension not only greatly reduces the serious I/O issues in existing web accessibility evaluation, but also supports quick web accessibility evaluation by sampling in crawling.
Conference Paper
To evaluate the accessibility level of a website, we need to obtain the accessibility evaluation results of the pages in this website. Due to the massive number of pages in a website and possible involvement of human inspection for conformance checking, directly evaluating all the pages is prohibitively expensive. In practice, we usually select a representative sample for accessibility evaluation of the whole site. This makes the evaluation results heavily dependent on the pages selected. Undersampling may lead to a large bias in evaluation. But oversampling will incur high evaluation expense. To address this issue, this paper proposes a semi-supervised machine learning method, called active-prediction, to obtain the accessibility evaluation results for all pages in a site. Active-prediction casts the website accessibility evaluation into a prediction problem by building learning models for each checkpoint in evaluation and consequently avoids the expensive cost in human inspection. To achieve a higher prediction accuracy with only a small number of training data, active-prediction exploits active learning techniques to select the most informative pages to train the models. Experimental results show that the active-prediction could achieve a high accuracy on predicting the accessibility results and better reflect the accessibility level of the websites than the existing methods.
Chapter
Democratic governments seek to serve all citizens equally and fairly. Achieving this ideal in e-governance will in large measure be determined by government’s commitment to the development of websites and web applications that encourage and enable participation by all. Accessibility and usability are gateways to participation. This chapter examines the professional and legal standards for accessibility and usability as well as studies on actual implementation. A survey of New York State webmasters found that while IT professionals considered usability and accessibility important, none of them rated user satisfaction as excellent. Agency management was perceived as less aware of the importance of usability and accessibility than IT professionals. Assuring usability and accessibility is an on-going, iterative process that requires continual accountability and involvement of user/citizens, political leaders, and IT professionals.
Chapter
In an ideal world, if developers follow technical standards related to accessibility and involve users with disabilities in the development process, it will result in fully accessible technology. However, accessibility standards have not been developed for every category of technology, and the application of existing standards do not automatically produce full accessibility. This is where evaluation methods come into play. Evaluation methods, including usability testing, expert reviews (inspections), and automated accessibility inspections, evaluate interfaces to determine if they are accessible and usable by people with disabilities.
Article
The main objective of this research is to analyze and compare the degree in which certain Accessibility Guidelines comply with two groups of web spaces which belong to the same conceptual typology: "University Libraries", but conform two different geographic, social and economical realities-Spain and the United States. Interpretation of results reveals the possibility of using web metrics techniques based on Web accessibility characteristics in order to contrast two categories of closed web spaces.
Article
The World Wide Web (Web) has become an essential part of our daily life. Web accessibility remains an important issue because many people have limited access to the Web. It is essential to make this content accessible to all people. This chapter provides an overview of the importance of web accessibility. It explains the current status of the issue, accessibility guidelines and techniques to evaluate and achieve web accessibility. Useful resources and practical recommendations to increase accessibility are also included.
Article
Democratic governments seek to serve all citizens equally and fairly. Achieving this ideal in e-governance will in large measure be determined by government's commitment to the development of websites and web applications that encourage and enable participation by all. Accessibility and usability are gateways to participation. This chapter examines the professional and legal standards for accessibility and usability as well as studies on actual implementation. A survey of New York State webmasters found that while IT professionals considered usability and accessibility important, none of them rated user satisfaction as excellent. Agency management was perceived as less aware of the importance of usability and accessibility than IT professionals. Assuring usability and accessibility is an on-going, iterative process that requires continual accountability and involvement of user/citizens, political leaders, and IT professionals.
Article
A model is presented depicting the driving forces (Web industry, consumers, U.S. federal government, and technology) promoting an accessible Web and potential solutions within those forces. This project examines two distinct solutions, lawsuits (a consumer-driven solution) and AcceSS 2.1 transcoder (a technology-driven solution) to provide more information on two under-researched methods that could have far-reaching impacts on Web accessibility for the blind. First, an evaluation of the intraclass correlation (ICC) between homepage Web Accessibility Barrier (WAB) scores and WAB scores of levels 1-3 found that the homepage is not sufficient to detect the accessibility of the website. ICC of the homepage and average of levels 1-3 is 0.250 (p=0.062) and ICC of levels 1, 2, & 3 is 0.784 (p < 0.0001). Evaluating the homepage and first-level pages gives more accurate results of entire site accessibility. Second, an evaluation of the WAB scores of the homepage and first-level pages of websites of five companies sued for alleged inaccessible websites found mixed results: lawsuits worked in two cases, but didn't in three. This is seen through an examination of accessibility and complexity of the websites for years surrounding the lawsuits. Each sued website is compared to a control website within the same industry and to a random group of websites representing the general Web. Third, a usability study of the AcceSS 2.1 transcoding intermediary found that technology can increase users' efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction in Web interaction, regardless of universal design. The study entails a within-subject cross-over design wherein 15 users performed tasks on three websites: one universally designed, one non-universally designed, and one reference site. Paired t-tests examine the effect of AcceSS 2.1 on time, errors, and subjective satisfaction and mixed-model analysis examines the effect of study design on outcomes. Results show that users perform tasks faster, with fewer errors, and with greater satisfaction when accessing pages via AcceSS 2.1, but users where less satisfied with the universally designed website and significant differences were found in the universally designed website and not the non-universally designed website. Website usability and ease of navigation are more important to users than simple accessibility.
Article
Web content accessibility, the practices by which web content is made usable by people with a variety of disabilities, is growing in importance and visibility. Currently, however, there are few formalized paths for accessibility training, leading many professionals to self-educate using textbooks, websites, and social media, which exert significant power over the meanings and practices of accessibility.In this paper, I analyze over 40 web references published between 1997 and 2012, and focus particularly on the genre of the “web accessibility myth list,” in which authors list misconceptions about accessibility and debunk them. These myth lists exert productive power within the industry and serve as a space of contestation. Myth lists encourage the production of professionalized, neoliberal worker identities, create community by reinforcing accessibility's historically oppositional relationship to web design, and promote conflicting ideologies of disability. Ultimately, study of this professional community indicates that industry studies can reveal the contexts not only of media texts, but of the conditions of media access itself.
Article
Full-text available
Web accessibility in the Argentine public university space. The study presents a first web accessibility diagnosis carried out in 2012 on a sample of pages from the Argentine public university space. The evaluation establishes the compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, taking into account the methodological recommendations from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The results suggest that the web accessibility barriers encountered are serious for the most part (level A). The most frequent are related to markup language syntax, content presentation, non-text content and visual readability of text. Likewise it is shown that by addressing these barriers, certain groups of people could benefit specifically.
Article
A WebQuest is an inquiry-based online learning technique. This technique has been widely adopted in K–16 education. Therefore, it is important that conditions of effective WebQuest design are defined. Through this article the author presents techniques for improving WebQuest design based on current research. More specifically, the author analyzes the WebQuest technique in terms of the principles of cognitive load theory, interactivity, accessibility, and usability and visual appearance. The author argues that several factors must be taken into consideration in order to effectively design WebQuests that will educate without impeding the learning process.
Book
Full-text available
(Hellenic text) Φιλοδοξία του συγκεκριμένου οδηγού αποτελεί η παρουσίαση της έννοιας της ηλεκτρονικής προσβασιμότητας για το περιεχόμενο του διαδικτύου (web accessibility), σε μία μορφή κατανοητή προς ένα κοινό που δεν διαθέτει την τεχνογνωσία ενός μηχανικού λογισμικού, αλλά που ενδιαφέρεται για το πως η κάπως αφηρημένη αυτή πρόνοια μετουσιώνεται σε πρακτικό αποτέλεσμα για τα άτομα με αναπηρία και τους ηλικιωμένους. Προς τούτο, παρέχεται ενδελεχής ενημέρωση για το συνεχώς βελτιούμενο νομοθετικό πλαίσιο, μία γνωριμία με τις απαραίτητες τεχνικές προδιαγραφές, καθώς και ορισμένα κατανοητά παραδείγματα για τις συνέπειες κακής ή ελλιπούς εφαρμογής τους.
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present longitudinal data on the accessibility of 56 North American academic library web sites, as well as insights into the connection between accessibility and certain design methods and technologies. Design/methodology/approach Bobby 3.1.1 was used to evaluate compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. Also studied were the main method of page layout (CSS versus HTML tables), whether a content management system was used, and whether skip‐navigation links were employed. Findings The percentage of Bobby‐approved pages has remained consistent around 60 per cent in 2010 and 2012. However, the percentage of errors per page, a metric more sensitive to the pervasiveness of accessibility barriers, has steadily and significantly decreased. Sites whose layouts are built with cascading style sheets have fewer errors per page than those that use tables for layout. Sites that use a CMS have considerably higher percentages of approved pages and fewer errors per page than sites that are not built with a CMS. Research limitations/implications The principal tool used, Bobby 3.1.1, is capable of detecting only a subset of accessible design principles. Future studies should examine compliance with the newer WCAG 2.0 guidelines. Practical implications The use of a content management system may have a positive impact on accessibility. While this study reveals some promising trends, more education and continued advocacy is needed to increase web accessibility at libraries. Originality/value This is the only study that provides up‐to‐date trend information about the accessibility of a broader set of academic library web sites (a set not limited to one state) over an extended time period. It is also the only accessibility study comparing academic library web sites that use a content management system to those that do not.
Article
Full-text available
It is well documented that government agencies, at all levels, continue to have problems ensuring that government web sites follow laws related to web accessibility for people with disabilities. Although there are a number of published studies on government web accessibility that are point-in-time, there are no published studies consisting of a longitudinal analysis of state-level government web site accessibility. This paper contributes to the research literature in three ways: 1) an accessibility inspection of 25 Maryland state government homepages in 2012 which involved 150 human inspections of web pages, 2) a comparison of the results from 2012 to a similar accessibility evaluation in 2009, and 3) a discussion of the role of a web page template, which was introduced in Maryland state government shortly after the 2009 evaluation. The data from this longitudinal evaluation leads to the conclusion that web page templates do tend to result in more accessible sites within state government.
Article
U.S. federal websites are required to be accessible for people with impairments. However, despite the existing regulations and guidelines, many federal websites continue to be inaccessible, and accessibility policy statements available on federal websites often do not provide any useful information. This paper provides three contributions to the research literature: (1) an accessibility evaluation of 100 federal home pages using both human and automated methods, (2) a content analysis of existing website accessibility policy statements, and (3) a discussion of the relationship between actual Section 508 compliance and the existing accessibility policy statements on a website. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving policy related to Section 508 compliance for websites.
Article
This paper takes a disability studies perspective on the history of the development of web content accessibility policies in the United States. Using procedural documents, popular press accounts, and policy documents themselves, augmented by personal interviews with key participants, I sketch a critical history of accessible web development. First, I argue that the world wide web consortium accessibility guidelines (WCAG 1.0, 1999) and US government Section 508 standards (2001) emerged out of the confluence of three trends: the ongoing work on telecommunications accessibility, the increasing attention to the civil rights of people with disabilities under a social model of disability, and the development of and enthusiasm for the Internet and the Web. A key tension can be traced through these historical processes, as both documents grappled with concepts of accessibility as it related to usability, universal design principles, and disability status. In my analysis of this tension, I use the recurrent theme of variation to develop a productive and progressive notion of ‘access’ that challenges understandings of accessibility as based on accommodating disability. By centering variation, accessibility can address a range of bodily differences, including (but not limited to) disability, and create a more inclusive cultural and political sphere online. Finally, I argue that variation has also proven productive for theoretical models of disability and for new media studies, and thus it may hold great promise for the future expansion of accessible web content across a variety of sites and Web2.0 services.
Article
This paper details the findings from a study of airline compliance with Department of Transportation (DOT) regulations requiring that persons with disabilities not be discriminated against in the pricing of airline travel. These regulations mandate that if an airline website is inaccessible for persons with disabilities, the airline must charge the same price that is available on the website and may not charge a fee for purchasing tickets over the phone. To evaluate compliance, the websites of leading airlines were examined for accessibility in terms of the ability to check flight schedules and order tickets. Among the four airlines with barriers to accessibility on their websites, a series of phone calls were made by researchers to assess whether the DOT regulations would be followed. Two of the airlines, USAirways and United, practiced discriminatory pricing, even after being made aware of the regulations, in over one-third of the phone calls. This paper details the findings from the study and analyzes the data in terms of website accessibility, civil rights for travelers with disabilities, and policy implications.
Article
While previous studies have investigated the impact of frustration on computer users' mood as well as the causes of fr ustration, no research has ever been conducted to examine the rel ationship between computer frustrations and mood change for users with visual impairment. In this paper, we report on a st udy that examined the frustrating experiences and mood change of 100 participants, all with visual impairments, when the y were browsing the web. The result shows that frustration does cause the participants' mood to deteriorate. However, the amo unt of time lost due to frustrating situations does not have a significant impact on users' mood, which is very different from the pr evious research on users without visual impairment. The impact on work seems to have the greatest impact on user mood.
Chapter
All citizens have the right to access information from their government. At both the federal and state levels in the United States, citizens with impairments expect the same access to government information as anyone else. When government information is available on a web site, that information must be accessible for people with impairments. People with perceptual, motor, and/or cognitive impairments may access web sites using different assistive technologies, such as screen readers or alternative keyboards, or may need content in alternative formats (e.g. a transcript needs to exist for any audio). In cooperation with the Maryland Technology Assistance Program, a research group from Towson University evaluated Maryland state government web sites for accessibility. The goal of this paper is to report on how well Maryland state government web sites are currently meeting the needs of these diverse user populations. This is a major issue: recent population estimates indicate that approximately 112 000 individuals in Maryland between the ages of 16 and 74 have a sensory impairment, and 281 000 individuals in Maryland between the ages of 16 and 74 have a physical impairment (see www.ilr.cornell.edu/edi/DisabilityStatistics/acs.cfm for more population statistics).
Article
Large percentages of web sites continue to be inaccessible to people with disabilities. Since tools and guidelines are available to help designers and webmasters in making their web sites accessible, it is unclear why so many sites continue to be inaccessible. In this paper, we present the “Web Accessibility Integration Model,” which highlights the multiple points within web development where accessibility can be incorporated or forgotten. It is uncertain why webmasters do not use the various tools and guidelines that currently are available for making web sites accessible. A survey was created, and data was collected from 175 webmasters, indicating their knowledge on the topic of web accessibility and the reasons for their actions related to web accessibility. Findings and future directions for research are discussed.
Conference Paper
We introduce a new approach towards a more accessible Web by means of more accessible knowledge acquisition mechanisms. Our strategy is to detect the Web designer's needs for knowledge that can be collected from minorities of Web users, and subsequently to design mechanisms that allow the proper elicitation of such knowledge from Web users. We discuss how this scenario places marginal Web users in a privileged position that appeals for their inclusion. Additionally, we illustrate how this approach might help build a more accessible Web, to the benefit of visually-impaired knowledge contributors.
Article
Full-text available
Content accessibility is a key feature in highly usable Web sites, but reports in the popular press typically report that 95% or more of all Web sites are inaccessible to users with disabilities. The present study is a content accessibility compliance audit of 50 of the Web's most popular sites, undertaken to determine if content accessibility can be conceived and reported in continuous, rather than dichotomous, terms. Preliminary results suggest that a meaningful ordinal ranking of content accessibility is not only possible, but also correlates significantly with the results of independent automated usability assessment procedures.
Article
Full-text available
An increasingly important topic in the field of information technology is accessibility, which means that information systems can be effectively used by people with disabilities. U.S. Federal regulations require accessibility for certain types of informational systems and web sites. Accessibility is not a topic that has been addressed in the information systems curriculum in the past. This paper presents information on accessibility, and the related technological and legal issues. Advice on how best to incorporate the topic into an undergraduate information systems curriculum is presented, along with specific courses in which accessibility would be a good fit.
Article
Full-text available
This article describes one of the first documented participatory design (PD) efforts specifically aimed at older users. The goal of the project was to make an existing World Wide Web (WWW) site more user-friendly for older users, specifically in terms of display format issues. A PD team was assembled from a group of community-dwelling older adults and developers from a university research lab. After the developers established the trust and confidence of the participants and developed a conceptual user model (based on a survey and previous literature), the PD team evaluated the original design. Prototypes were iteratively developed and tested by the PD team to improve problems found in the original design. Specific design improvements and general design guidelines for older WWW users are discussed.
Article
From the Publisher: Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities is a vital tool for Web site developers and administrators who need to understand the law, the requirements of the disabled, and the processes of site evaluation and implementation. It includes an authoritative compendium of development tools and utilities, and is packed with examples demonstrating techniques for adjusting HTML tags, scripts, and other code to improve accessibility. Readers will learn answers to the challenges ahead, including how to: deliver highly graphic and visual content to the blind; provide access to Internet kiosks for the physically challenged; enable nonverbal users to "speak" to devices with voice recognition interfaces. This is a critical resource in helping companies comply with the "effective communication" requirement of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Article
Large percentages of web sites continue to be inaccessible to people with disabilities. Since tools and guidelines are available to help designers and webmasters in making their web sites accessible, it is unclear why so many sites continue to be inaccessible. In this paper, we present the “Web Accessibility Integration Model,” which highlights the multiple points within web development where accessibility can be incorporated or forgotten. It is uncertain why webmasters do not use the various tools and guidelines that currently are available for making web sites accessible. A survey was created, and data was collected from 175 webmasters, indicating their knowledge on the topic of web accessibility and the reasons for their actions related to web accessibility. Findings and future directions for research are discussed.
Article
This paper reports on a study of 50 home pages in the Mid-Atlantic United States, to determine what accessibility problems exist. The 50 home pages were evaluated using both the U.S. Government's Section 508 guidelines, as well as the Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) Priority Level 1 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). According to both sets of guidelines, 49/50 sites were found to have accessibility problems, although some of the accessibility problems were minor and easy to fix. There are two troubling findings from this study. The web sites that had the most accessibility problems were organizations in the web development and information technology field, which ideally should be the leaders in making the web more accessible. The web accessibility software testing tools, which are available to assist people in making their web sites more accessible, are flawed, inconsistent, and require large numbers of manual checks, which many developers may not be able to do. More people need to become aware of the topic of web accessibility, and the testing tools need to be improved so that
Article
The article focuses on the need of encouraging research on universal usability of computers to empower every citizen The article focuses on the need of encouraging research on universal usability of computers to empower every citizen. Universal usability can be defined as having more than 90% of all households as successful users of information and communications services at least once a week. A 1998 survey of U.S. households shows that 42% have computers and 26% use Internet-based email or other services. A research agenda based on three challenges in attaining universal usability for web-based and other services include the first challenge to cope with the technology variety by supporting the 100-to-1 range of hardware, software and network access speeds. The other two challenges include the accommodation of enormous diversity of users and bridging the gap between what users know and need to know. Attaining benefits of universal access to web-based and other information, communications, entertainment, and government services will require a more intense commitment to lowering costs, coupled with human-computer interaction research and usability engineering. As a concluding note, the article points out the success of the U.S. in making their services usable by many on recognition of centrality of usability by it. INSET: Web Resources for Universal Usability .
Conference Paper
An analysis of the home pages of all fifty US states reveals great variety in key design features that influence efficacy. Some states had excessively large byte counts that would slow users connected by commonly-used 56 K modems. Many web sites had low numbers of or poorly organized links that would make it hard for citizens to find what they were interested in. Features such as search boxes, privacy policies, online help, or contact information need to be added by several states. Our analysis concludes with ten recommendations and finds many further opportunities for individual states to improve their Websites. However still greater benefits will come through collaboration among the states that would lead to consistency, appropriate tagging, and common tools.
Article
Introduction The goal of universal access to information and communications services is compelling. It has united hardworking Internet technology promoters, telecommunications business leaders, and government policy makers. Their positive motivations include innovative visions, corporate opportunities, and social goods respectively, although critics see unreasonable zeal for technology, pursuit of high profit margins, and regulatory excesses or omissions. Each sector is working hard to contribute what they see as valuable, while trying to respond to critics. Most technology infrastructure developers seek to accommodate high volumes of use, reliably and rapidly even at peak periods, while ensuring security. Most service providers strive to develop popular communications, e-commerce, healthcare, education, and other services, while ensuring profitability. Most government officials struggle to provide safety for consumers, freedom of speech, and privacy protection, while supporti
Improving web-based civic information access: a case study of the 50 US States Increasing the usability of online information for older users: a case study in participatory design
  • I Ceaparu
  • B Shneiderman
  • Kurniawan
Ceaparu I, Shneiderman B (2002) Improving web-based civic information access: a case study of the 50 US States. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international symposium on technology and society, pp 275–282 2. Ellis R, Kurniawan S (2000) Increasing the usability of online information for older users: a case study in participatory design. Int J Human Comput Interact 12(2):263–276
Integrating accessibility into the information systems curriculum. In: Proceedings of the international asso-ciation for computer information systems
  • Lazar
Lazar J (2002) Integrating accessibility into the information systems curriculum. In: Proceedings of the international asso-ciation for computer information systems, pp 373–379
Maximum accessibility
  • J Slatin
  • S Rush