Guidance for the development of accessibility evaluation tools following the Unified Software Development Process

Automated and semi-automated accessibility evaluation tools are key to streamline the process of accessibility assessment, and ultimately ensure that software products, contents, and services meet accessibility requirements. Different evaluation tools may better fit different needs and concerns, accounting for a variety of corporate and external policies, content types, invocation methods, deployment contexts, exploitation models, intended audiences and goals; and the specific overall process where they are introduced. This has led to the proliferation of many evaluation tools tailored to specific contexts. However, tool creators, who may be not familiar with the realm of accessibility and may be part of a larger project, lack any systematic guidance when facing the implementation of accessibility evaluation functionalities. Herein we present a systematic approach to the development of accessibility evaluation tools, leveraging the different artifacts and activities of a standardized development process model (the Unified Software Development Process), and providing templates of these artifacts tailored to accessibility evaluation tools. The work presented specially considers the work in progress in this area by the W3C/WAI Evaluation and Report Working Group (ERT WG

Breaking The Exclusionary Boundary Between User Experience And Access: Steps Toward Making UX Inclusive Of Users With Disabilities

This research paper points out that we as Designers have failed to come up with a model of UX that would proximate a satisfying user experience for users with disabilities. It underscores the gaps in designer knowledge about disabled bodies. The research paper also draws the attention of the designer community to the limited understanding we presently possess of the disabled people\u27s notions of, and expectations from, satisfying user experiences. It proposes a multi-step process for shifting the focus of design activity from a medical model of accessibility design that retrofits normative designs to the needs of users with disabilities to developing an accessible user experience model (AUX) of design that counts these users as design collaborators, possessors of special knowledge about disabled bodies, and untapped sources of innovative designs that might offer additional design features for all users

Prediction of Web Page Accessibility Based on Structural and Textual Features

ABSTRACT In this paper we present an approach to assessing the accessibility of Web pages, based on machine learning techniques. We are interested in the question of whether there are structural and textual features of Web pages, independent of explicit accessibility concerns, that nevertheless influence their usability for people with vision impairment. We describe three datasets, each containing a set of features corresponding to Web pages that are "Accessible" or "Inaccessible". Three classifiers are used to predict the category of these Web pages. Preliminary results are promising; they suggest the possibility of automated classification of Web pages with respect to accessibility

Avoiding to dispense with accuracy: A method to make different DTDs documents comparable

ABSTRACT The Italian regulations about Web content accessibility impose HTML 4.01 strict, XHTML 1.0 strict or superior grammar validity. Such markup constraints are complied by a low percentage of Public Institution sites. In order to include the largest amount of not strict DTD sites on a synthetic, realistic representation of accessibility degree, this paper presents an experimental approach to set up parameters for making validity measures uniform, despite they are taken from evaluating different grammars. The proposed method allows for effectiveness in computing and storing information which otherwise will be quite unfeasible. Finally, the generalization of such an approach is shown to be suited for markup quality evaluations, beyond explicit law requirements

Addressing Workplace Accessibility Practices Through Technical Communication Research Methods: One Size Does Not Fit All

Background: Accessibility of digital materials within workplaces continues to be an issue that is not readily and completely addressed through legal compliance and institutional policy. Despite the lack of marked improvement in digital accessibility, many continue to pursue a policy approach to accessibility, including checklists and guidelines. Literature review: Despite the attention paid to accessibility and surrounding issues by scholars in the field of technical and professional communication, little direction has been given to help practitioners advocate for accessibility in the workplace. Research question: Can common ground between institutional values and accessibility be discovered and leveraged to motivate value-driven accessibility? Research methods: Common ground theory was used to code and analyze data obtained from research interviews of 18 university instructors to determine how they consider accessibility within the process of developing their course documents. Data were coded and analyzed to discover common attitudes toward accessibility. Results and discussion: The data revealed that although instructors approached accessibility differently, all were motivated to work for student success, a fact that indicated common ground between instructor practices and accessibility. This finding suggests that accessibility advocates can motivate value-driven accessibility by leveraging common ground. Conclusion: I used the revealed common ground to inform the development of a digital accessibility resource, which underwent usability testing. My research-informed design process illustrates that despite institutional variability, technical and professional communicators can find and leverage common ground to move away from a singular, policy-driven approach to accessibility in favor of a more sustainable value-driven accessibility, which generates and supports long-term accessibility design

Web interaction environments : characterising Web accessibility at the large

Tese de doutoramento, Informática (Engenharia Informática), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2012Accessibility quality on the Web is essential for providing a good Web experience to people with disabilities. The existence of virtual ramps aid these users grasping and interacting withWeb content, just like the experience of those who are unimpaired. However, more often than not, Web pages impose accessibility barriers, usually centred on the unavailability of tailored content to specific perceptual abilities (e.g., textual description of images, enabling grasping information with assistive technologies), as well as on proper HTML structural elements that adequate the semantics of a Web page. When evaluating the accessibility quality of Web pages, the resulting analysis is often focused on a small sample set (e.g., a single Web page or a selection of pages from a Web site). While this kind of analysis gets the gist of accessibility quality, it misses the big picture on the overall accessibility quality of the Web. This thesis addresses the challenge of observing accessibility phenomena on the Web, through the experimental evaluation of large collections of Web pages. This resulted on new findings about the accessibility quality of the Web, such as its correlation with HTML element count, and the erroneous perception of accessibility quality by developers. Small-scale experiments have been verified also at large scale, such as the correlation between the usage of HTML templates and accessibility quality. Based on the challenges raised by the experimental evaluation, this thesis proposes a novel approach for large scale Web accessibility evaluation based on Linked Data, as well as the establishment of metrics to assess the truthfulness and coverage of automated evaluation methods.A qualidade da acessibilidade é um factor crucial para as pessoas com deficiências terem uma boa experiência de interacção com a Web.A qualidade da acessibilidade é um factor crucial para as pessoas com deficiências terem uma boa experiência de interacção com a Web. A existência de rampas virtuais ajuda estas pessoas a compreender e interagir com conteúdos Web, a par do que o utilizador comum já experiencia. Porém, a maioria das páginas Web ainda contêm barreiras à acessibilidade. Estas barreiras centram-se normalmente na indisponibilidade de conteúdos perceptíveis por diferentes tipos de capacidades (e.g., descrições textuais de imagens), bem como no uso incorrecto de elementos HTML de acordo com a semântica de uma página Web. Nos dias de hoje, a avaliação da qualidade de acessibilidade de páginas Web é ainda efectuada em pequena escala (e.g., uma página Web ou, no melhor caso, um conjunto de páginas representativas de um sítio Web). Apesar deste tipo de avaliações resultarem na compreensão de alguns fenómenos do estado da acessibilidade na Web, ainda não se sabe qual o seu impacto em larga escala. Esta tese discute os principais desafios na observação da acessibilidade da Web, tendo por base um conjunto de avaliações experimentais de colecções de grande dimensão de páginas Web. Destes estudos destacam-se as seguintes contribuições e resultados:a diferença drástica na interpretação dos avisos resultantes de avaliações de acessibilidade Web: um dos resultados principais da avaliação experimental em larga escala destaca a diferença na interpretação dos avisos (warnings) da aplicação de técnicas da norma WCAG, onde a interpretação optimista (i.e., a visão da maioria dos criadores de páginas Web) se distancia amplamente da interpretação conservadora (onde os avisos são interpretados como erros); a correlação entre a qualidade da acessibilidade de uma página Web e a sua complexidade: este mesmo estudo de larga escala revelou uma correlação entre a complexidade de uma página Web (no que diz respeito ao número de elementos HTML que contém) e a qualidade da acessibilidade. Quanto menor a complexidade de uma página Web, mais certa se torna a alta qualidade da acessibilidade dessa página; o benefício do uso de templates e sistemas de gestão de conteúdos na melhoria da acessibilidade de páginas Web: em ambos os estudos experimentais de acessibilidade foi detectada uma correlação entre a qualidade de acessibilidade das páginas Web e o uso de templates e sistemas de gestão de conteúdo. Esta propriedade foi verificada quer em pequena escala (sobre uma colecção de páginas Web da Wikipedia), quer em larga escala; o incumprimento das regras mais elementares e mais conhecidas da acessibilidade: estes estudos experimentais permitiram também verificar que, apesar de toda a envagelização e educação sobre as questões de acessibilidade na Web, a maioria das regras de acessibilidade são incessantemente quebradas pela maioria das páginas Web.Esta problemática verifica-se, em particular, nas regras de cumprimento de acessibilidade mais conhecidas, tal como por exemplo a disponibilidade de textos alternativos a conteúdos multimédia. Com base nestas experiências e resultados, esta tese apresenta um novo modelo de estudo da acessibilidade na Web, tendo por base o ciclo de estudos da Web em larga escala. Deste modelo resultaram as seguintes contribuições: um modelo para a avaliação distribuída de acessibilidade Web, baseado em propriedades tecnológicas e topológicas: foi concebido um modelo de avaliação de acessibilidade Web que permite a concepção de sistemas de avaliação com base em propriedades tecnológicas e topológicas. Este modelo possibilita, entre outras características, o estudo da cobertura de plataformas e avaliadores de acessibilidade, bem como da sua aplicação em larga escala; uma extensão às linguagens e modelos EARL e Linked Data, bem como um conjunto de definições para extrair informação destes: este modelo de avaliação de acessibilidade Web foi sustentado também pela sua concretização em linguagens e modelos já existentes para o estudo de acessibilidade (EARL) e da Web em larga escala (Linked Data), permitindo assim a sua validação; definição dos limites da avaliação de acessibilidade Web: por fim, este modelo de avaliação de acessibilidade permitiu também delinear uma metodologia de meta-avaliação da acessibilidade, na qual se poderão enquadrar as propriedades dos avaliadores de acessibilidade existentes. Todas estas contribuições resultaram também num conjunto de publicações científicas, das quais se destacam: Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, A Web Science Perspective of Web Accessibility, in submission for the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), ACM, 2011; Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, Macroscopic Characterisations of Web Accessibility, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia – Special Issue on Web Accessibility. Taylor & Francis, 2010; Rui Lopes, Karel Van Isacker and Luís Carriço, Redefining Assumptions: Accessibility and Its Stakeholders, The 12th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP), Vienna, Austria, 14-16 July 2010; Rui Lopes, Daniel Gomes and Luís Carriço, Web Not For All: A Large Scale Study of Web Accessibility, W4A: 7th ACM International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 26-27 April 2010; Rui Lopes, Konstantinos Votis, Luís Carriço, Dimitrios Tzovaras, and Spiridon Likothanassis, The Semantics of Personalised Web Accessibility Assessment, 25th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), Sierre, Switzerland, 22-26 March, 2010 Konstantinos Votis, Rui Lopes, Dimitrios Tzovaras, Luís Carriço and Spiridon Likothanassis, A Semantic Accessibility Assessment Environment for Design and Development for the Web, HCI International 2009 (HCII 2009), San Diego, California, USA, 19-24 July 2009 Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, On the Gap Between Automated and In-Vivo Evaluations of Web Accessibility, HCI International 2009 (HCII 2009), San Diego, California, USA, 19-24 July 2009; Rui Lopes, Konstantinos Votis, Luís Carriço, Spiridon Likothanassis and Dimitrios Tzovaras, Towards the Universal Semantic Assessment of Accessibility, 24th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC),Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 8-12 March 2009; Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, Querying Web Accessibility Knowledge from Web Graphs, Handbook of Research on Social Dimensions of Semantic Technologies, IGI Global, 2009; Rui Lopes, Konstantinos Votis, Luís Carriço, Spiridon Likothanassis and Dimitrios Tzovaras, A Service Oriented Ontological Framework for the Semantic Validation of Web Accessibility, Handbook of Research on Social Dimensions of Semantic Technologies, IGI Global, 2009; Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, On the Credibility of Wikipedia: an Accessibility Perspective, Second Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web (WICOW 2008), Napa Valley, California, USA, 2008; Rui Lopes, Luís Carriço, A Model for Universal Usability on the Web, WSW 2008: Web Science Workshop, Beijing, China, 22 April 2008; Rui Lopes, Luís Carriço, The Impact of Accessibility Assessment in Macro Scale Universal Usability Studies of the Web, W4A: 5th ACM International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, Beijing, China, 21-22 April 2008. Best paper award; Rui Lopes, Luís Carriço, Modelling Web Accessibility for Rich Document Production, Journal on Access Services 6 (1-2), Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009; Rui Lopes, Luís Carriço, Leveraging Rich Accessible Documents on the Web, W4A: 4th ACM International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, Banff, Canada, 7-8 May 2007.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, SFRH/BD/29150/2006

Combination of automatic and manual testing for web accessibility

Master's thesis Information- and communication technology IKT590 - University of Agder 2018Web accessibility is an indispensable medium for online communication and digital inclusion nowadays. With the recent adoption of the Web Accessibility Directive making the Internet resources accessible has become a legal obligation and strikes a need for more detailed and reliable ways of web accessibility evaluation of the websites. Throughout the years, many tools have been developed for testing web accessibility as well as a plethora of metrics that are expected to convey the results. Unfortunately, in most cases the findings appear to be incomplete since the studies rely only on one testing method, i.e., automatic or manual. The study has set itself a goal to contribute with knowledge to solving three research questions. First, how to combine results from automated and manual evaluation of web accessibility? Second, how to express the integration results in a quantitative manner? Finally, what is the impact of the dynamic content on the integration results when the content of the website is frequently updated and personalized? This thesis proposes a novel approach to integration of manual and automated accessibility testing, where the results of the evaluations are combined on the basis of accessibility guidelines. Additionally, a quantitative metric – Union Score, together with a graphical visualization called Accessibility Pie Chart, are propounded, as the means for expressing the outcomes of the accessibility evaluation with use of the combined approach. The research has been grounded on the mixed-method approach and embedded the findings of the conducted interviews into a quantitative study. In order to find emphirically the most suitable method for combining manual and automated testing, fifteen web pages selected from two websites were chosen for evaluation with two testing tools: WTKollen Checker and WTKollen User-Testing Tool. The findings of the analysis show that WCAG 2.0 may serve as a bridge between manual and automated evaluation outcomes and result in an increased coverage of the Success Criteria. The proposed metric has been preliminarily validated with regard to its application for benchmarking purposes and supplemented with a graphical way of presenting accessibility testing results. Furthermore, it is concluded that the suggested integration approach can be deployed. Yet, the challenge of dynamic content evaluation requires more research attention. The study has contributed to the current state of knowledge about web accessibility evaluation and the results are expected to be used for implementation of the novel approach. For the future paths, a more extended study on the proposed metric’s properties is advised. Also, the importance of further research in the area of dynamic content evaluation is highlighted