Process Model for Continuous Testing of Web Accessibility

The lack of accessibility on websites can result in people with disabilities not accessing information online. Therefore, this research aims to create a process model for continuous web accessibility testing by adapting and customizing three methodologies: Deming cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act), Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM), and Total Quality Management. The process model is composed of four phases. The first phase (Plan) allows defining the accessibility problem, its importance, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) against which it will be evaluated. In addition, determine the current situation of the websites, the potential causes of accessibility problems, classify the success criteria by principles, guidelines, and levels of conformity, to elaborate the solution plan and the action plan. The second phase (Do) allows the execution of the action plan to correct the accessibility problems. In this phase, we should perform continuous testing with automatic evaluation tools, end-users, and experts to corroborate that the changes have had an effect. The third phase (Check) allows measuring compliance and non-compliance with the defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This phase also explains the reasons for non-compliance. The fourth and last phase (Act) documents the solutions learned for inclusion in future developments. It was tested using a case study to determine the viability of the process model, which allowed corroborating its functionality and applicability. In future work, we plan to adapt the process model to different workgroups, develop accessible mobile applications, and comply with web accessibility in electronic documents.This work was supported by the Catholic University of Cuenca; the EduTech project (609785-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP) co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union and the project “Development of IoT systems for people with disabilities” (PID2019-111196RB-I00) of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation

Raising awareness of the accessibility challenges in mathematics MOOCs

MOOCs provide learning environments that make it easier for learners to study from anywhere, at their own pace and with open access to content. This has revolutionised the field of eLearning, but accessibility continues to be a problem, even more so if we include the complexity of the STEM disciplines which have their own specific characteristics. This work presents an analysis of the accessibility of several MOOC platforms which provide courses in mathematics. We attempt to visualise the main web accessibility problems and challenges that disabled learners could face in taking these types of courses, both in general and specifically in the context of the subject of mathematics

Transport poverty meets the digital divide : accessibility and connectivity in rural communities

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies

Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could become vulnerable because of exceptional circumstances such as stress, an unknown environment or even visual impairment (e.g. fire causing smoke). Within this scope, a crucial activity is to notify affected people about safe places and available evacuation routes. In order to address this need, we propose to extend an ontology, called SEMA4A (Simple EMergency Alert 4 [for] All), developed in a previous work for managing knowledge about accessibility guidelines, emergency situations and communication technologies. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic technique for knowledge acquisition and modeling on accessible evacuation routes. We introduce a use case to show applications of the ontology and conclude with an evaluation involving several experts in evacuation procedures. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

A framework for accessible m-government implementation

The great popularity and rapid diffusion of mobile technologies at worldwide level has also been recognised by the public sector, leading to the creation of m-government. A major challenge for m-government is accessibility – the provision of an equal service to all citizens irrespective of their psychical, mental or technical capabilities. This paper sketches the profiles of six citizen groups: Visually Impaired, Hearing Impaired, Motor Impaired, Speech Impaired, Cognitive Impaired and Elderly. M-government examples that target the aforementioned groups are discussed and a framework for accessible m-government implementation with reference to the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices is proposed

Synote mobile HTML5 responsive design video annotation application

Synote Mobile has been developed as an accessible cross device and cross browser HTML5 webbased collaborative replay and annotation tool to make web-based recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and others. It has been developed as a new mobile HTML5 version of the award winning open source and freely available Synote which has been used since 2008 by students throughout the world to learn interactively from recordings. While most UK students now carry mobile devices capable of replaying Internet video, the majority of these devices cannot replay Synote’s accessible, searchable, annotated recordings as Synote was created in 2008 when few students had phones or tablets capable of replaying these videos

The current state of accessibility of MOOCs: What are the next steps?

Accessibility focuses on supporting people with disabilities – such as those related to auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and vision requirements. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are no longer a novelty and the technologies associated with them should cater to all users irrespective of their accessibility requirements. In this paper, we will discuss the current state of research related to accessibility of MOOCs. We will then outline a research plan towards developing recommendations for the effective design of accessible MOOCs. The plan includes stages such as developing an evaluation instrument, evaluation of existing MOOCs and conducting empirical research with design teams of MOOCs and learners (MOOC-users)

Accessibility-based reranking in multimedia search engines

Traditional multimedia search engines retrieve results based mostly on the query submitted by the user, or using a log of previous searches to provide personalized results, while not considering the accessibility of the results for users with vision or other types of impairments. In this paper, a novel approach is presented which incorporates the accessibility of images for users with various vision impairments, such as color blindness, cataract and glaucoma, in order to rerank the results of an image search engine. The accessibility of individual images is measured through the use of vision simulation filters. Multi-objective optimization techniques utilizing the image accessibility scores are used to handle users with multiple vision impairments, while the impairment profile of a specific user is used to select one from the Pareto-optimal solutions. The proposed approach has been tested with two image datasets, using both simulated and real impaired users, and the results verify its applicability. Although the proposed method has been used for vision accessibility-based reranking, it can also be extended for other types of personalization context