| What's the web like if you can't see it? | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1-8 | |
| Chieko Asakawa | |||
| Awareness of Web accessibility is spreading all over the world among Web
designers and developers, due to regulations such as the US law called Section
508 and guidelines like the W3C WCAG. We now see various Web accessibility
adaptations on the Web. For example, we see increasing use of alternative texts
for images and skip-navigation links for speed.
However, we sometimes find inappropriate ALT texts and broken skip-navigation links, even though they are present. These pages may be compliant, but they are not accessible or really usable. We analyzed such problems and found that some sites only try to comply with regulations and guidelines, but without understanding the needs underlying Web accessibility. We concluded that Web designers and developers should experience the real problems faced by people with disabilities so they can create truly accessible and usable pages. There was no practical way for them to experience disabilities. In this paper, after giving an overview of the historical progress of voice browsers, we discuss how much and how well the Web accessibility has progressed by analyzing real world improvements to existing sites. We then describe why the "disability experience" helps give a better understanding of the Web accessibility guidelines and regulations. Some tools like Home Page Reader and aDesigner are available to let designers experience blind users' perspective of usability. Finally, we discuss the future direction of our accessibility efforts. | |||
| Do text transcoders improve usability for disabled users? | | BIBA | Full-Text | 9-17 | |
| Giorgio Brajnik; Daniela Cancila; Daniela Nicoli; Mery Pignatelli | |||
| Text transcoders are web -- server systems that produce, on the fly, a
text-only version of a web page requested by a user of a browser. Although the
potential benefits of text transcoders axe multifaceted and discussions on
appropriateness of text transcoders to produce accessible versions of web sites
are still ongoing, at the moment the impact of transcoded pages on disabled web
users has not been scientifically studied yet.
This paper describes an experiment aimed at evaluating usability of web pages processed by a text transcoder and used by 29 disabled persons. Results based on subjective and objective data show how usability changes, and which results can be generalized to a wider population. | |||
| AcceSS: accessibility through simplification & summarization | | BIBA | Full-Text | 18-25 | |
| Bambang Parmanto; Reza Ferrydiansyah; Andi Saptono; Lijing Song; I Wayan Sugiantara; Stephanie Hackett | |||
| The goal of this project is to make the Web more accessible by providing
some of the features naturally available to sighted users to users with visual
impairments. These features are direct access and gestalt understanding, which
can emerge from simplification and summarization. Simplification is achieved by
retaining sections of the web page that are considered important while removing
the clutter. The purpose of summarization is to provide the users with a
preview of the web page. Simplification and summarization are implemented as a
"guide dog" that helps users navigate the entire web site. Note: Best Paper Award | |||
| Extracting content from accessible web pages | | BIBA | Full-Text | 26-30 | |
| Suhit Gupta; Gail Kaiser | |||
| Web pages often contain clutter (such as ads, unnecessary animations and extraneous links) around the body of an article, which distracts a user from actual content. This can be especially inconvenient for blind and visually impaired users. The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has defined a set of guidelines to make web pages more compatible with tools built specifically for persons with disabilities. While this initiative has put forth an excellent set of principles, unfortunately many websites continue to be inaccessible as well as cluttered. In order to address the clutter problem, we have developed a framework that employs a host of heuristics in the form of tunable filters for the purpose of content extraction. Our hypothesis is that automatically filtering out selected elements from websites will leave the base content that users are interested in and, as a side-effect, render them more accessible. Although our heuristics are intuition-based, rather than derived from the W3C accessibility guidelines, we imagined however that they would have little impact on web pages that are fully compliant with the accessibility guidelines. We were wrong: some (technically) accessible web pages still include significant clutter. This paper discusses our content extraction framework and its application to accessible web pages. | |||
| Interdependent components of web accessibility | | BIBA | Full-Text | 31-37 | |
| Wendy A. Chisholm; Shawn Lawton Henry | |||
| Increasingly, the Web is providing unprecedented access to information and
interaction for people with disabilities. However, the Web will not be equally
accessible, allowing people with disabilities to access and contribute to the
Web, until:
* Authoring tools and development environments (including content managements
systems such as blogging applications) produce accessible Web content and have accessible interfaces; * Browsers, multimedia players and assistive technologies provide a completely usable and accessible experience; * Content is designed to be accessible. Web accessibility relies on tools that are designed to work together and support the needs of the people who use them. This paper describes how Web accessibility depends on several components working together. It demonstrates the relationship between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG). | |||
| Web composition with WCAG in mind | | BIBA | Full-Text | 38-45 | |
| Vicente Luque Centeno; Carlos Delgado Kloos; Martin Gaedke; Martin Nussbaumer | |||
| Accessibility should be a part of the Web design process instead of being a post-design repair process. Thus, it should be more integrated within the internal authoring tools' mechanism of generating new accessible Web contents. Web pages are usually composed of small pieces of HTML code which, dynamically nested and combined, generate full Web pages. This Web composition, specially when creating Web pages from data extracted from heterogeneous or external sources, should have accessibility into account in order to guarantee that the final page being constructed is accessible. This paper presents the set of rules that, in a Web composition process, a design tool must follow in order to create accessible Web pages. These rules are formalized with W3C standards like XPath and XQuery expressions. We also present WSLS as an accessibility enabled authoring tool that makes this task feasible, and focus in how this tool incorporates accessibility into the process of generating new Web contents. | |||
| Forcing standardization or accommodating diversity?: a framework for applying the WCAG in the real world | | BIBA | Full-Text | 46-54 | |
| Brian Kelly; David Sloan; Lawrie Phipps; Helen Petrie; Fraser Hamilton | |||
| Since 1999 the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have
provided a solid basis for implementation of accessible Web design. However it
is argued that in the context of evaluation and policymaking, inappropriate
reference to the WCAG may lead to serious practical difficulties in
implementation and monitoring of an effective accessibility policy. There is a
pressing need for a framework that guides appropriate application of the WCAG
in a holistic way, taking into account the diversity -- or homogeneity -- of
factors such as context of use, audience and audience capability, and access
environment. In particular, the current promotion of W3C technologies at the
expense of widely used and accessible proprietary technologies may be
problematic, as is the apparent reliance of the WCAG on compliant browsing
technology.
In this paper, a holistic application of the WCAG is proposed by the authors, whereby the context of the Web resource in question and other factors surrounding its use are used to shape an approach to accessible design. Its potential application in a real world environment is discussed. | |||
| An active step toward a web content accessible society | | BIBA | Full-Text | 55-59 | |
| Joonho Hyun; Doojin Choi; Sukil Kim | |||
| In this paper, we discuss Korean Web Content Accessibility Guideline 1.0 (KWCAG 1.0) enacted in late 2004. KWCAG 1.0 consists of 14 checkpoints that are categorized into 4 principles, similar to WCAG2.0 working draft as of June 2003. Several Priority 1 checkpoints of W3C WCAG 1.0 and guidelines of Section 508 were not included in KWCAG 1.0, as they were not applicable to Korean circumstances, wherein fancy images and fantastic animation elements are widely used to design web pages. | |||
| Is accessible design a myth? | | BIBA | Full-Text | 60-62 | |
| Eric A. Meyer | |||
| In this paper, I examine the historical attempts to create visual designs that are still accessible to handicapped users and assess the current state of accessible design. This is followed by a critical look at current assistive technologies, and a set of recommendations for future work in this area. | |||
| Platform-independent accessibility API: accessible document object model | | BIBA | Full-Text | 63-71 | |
| Andres Gonzalez; Loretta Guarino Reid | |||
| This paper addresses the problem of supporting accessibility in applications
that run in multiple operating environments. It analyzes the commonalities of
existing platform-specific Accessibility APIs, and defines a
platform-independent accessibility API, the Accessible DOM.
The Accessible DOM encompasses the features of existing APIs and overcomes
the limitations of existing APIs to express dynamic, complex document contents.
The Accessible DOM can be used to support existing and future platform-specific accessibility APIs. It will also allow the development of platform-independent accessibility clients. | |||
| Designing learning systems to provide accessible services | | BIBA | Full-Text | 72-80 | |
| Pythagoras Karampiperis; Demetrios Sampson | |||
| The need for providing learners with web-based learning content that match their accessibility needs and preferences, as well as providing ways to match learning content to user's devices has been identified as an important issue in accessible educational hypermedia literature. Several initiatives already exist trying to provide accessible web-based learning environments addressing a broad range of access needs and requirements. However, the design and development of web-based learning environments for people with special abilities has been addressed so far by the development of hypermedia and multimedia based educational content that is specially designed for the user targeted group, as well as the use of dedicated infrastructure supporting the delivery of learning content. Such approaches not only prevent their user groups (learners and their tutors) from accessing other available resources, but also keep them dependent from the specific e-learning platform, since the supported hypermedia content and learning scenarios are a-priori designed for the targeted user group. In this paper we address the need for an architectural definition of a web-based learning system that satisfies the design steps and requirements identified following the current state-of-the-art accessibility approaches and techniques, as well as the need to define an accessibility application profile for enabling the formalization of learning object accessibility properties, in order to match learning content with learner accessibility preferences. | |||
| Automatic accessibility evaluation of dynamic web pages generated through XSLT | | BIBA | Full-Text | 81-84 | |
| André Pimenta Freire; Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes | |||
| Much effort has been dedicated to develop software aids for authoring and evaluating Web pages using accessibility guidelines and standards. The evaluation of dynamic Web pages is a problem still unsolved in the field of automatic evaluation tools, since the current evaluators are only able to evaluate static Web pages. Stone and Dhiensa have addressed this problem, and proposed a method for evaluating the accessibility of dynamic Web pages using a generalized page which contains all possible outputs that can be generated by a script. In this paper, we present another approach for evaluating the accessibility of dynamic Web pages generated using XML and XSLT. The approach consists of analysing an XSLT using a structure descriptor such as DTD or XSD to determine the different types of XML documents that can be generated. The strength of the presented approach is given by the fact that the use of XML features enhances the results gathered from automatic accessibility evaluation of dynamic Web pages. | |||
| A conceptual framework for accessibility tools to benefit users with cognitive disabilities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 85-89 | |
| Paul Ryan Bohman; Shane Anderson | |||
| The authors present a conceptual framework which tool developers can use to chart future directions of development of tools to benefit users with cognitive disabilities. The framework includes categories of functional cognitive disabilities, principles of cognitive disability accessibility, units of Web content analysis, aspects of analysis, and realms of responsibility. | |||
| Mozilla accessibility on Unix/Linux | | BIBA | Full-Text | 90-98 | |
| Louie Zhao; Jay Yan; Kyle Yuan | |||
| Web Accessibility (Ally) has been developed in recent years. Till recent days, no web browser on Unix/Linux has Ally support. This means the powerful Unix and the free Linux operating system is unusable by the disabled. People who had a computer, but could not afford $500 for Microsoft Windows, were unable to use his computer. This was the problem we were trying to address by adding Ally support into Mozilla on Unix/Linux. Mozilla was chosen because it's the most important open source cross-platform web browser and the dominant web browser on Unix/Linux. Although Mozilla is designed to be cross-platform, Ally support is platform-specific. This paper addresses how we solved the problem of architecting Ally support for Mozilla on Unix/Linux. | |||
| SemanticWeb enabled web accessibility evaluation tools | | BIBA | Full-Text | 99-101 | |
| Shadi Abou-Zahra | |||
| Evaluating Web sites for accessibility remains an effort intensive process. Potentially, evaluation tools can significantly improve the efficiency and quality of Web accessibility evaluations but the currently available tool market only provides little or no consistency in the reliability and performance amongst these tools. In fact, in some cases evaluation tools may be confusing or misleading to users with little or no experience in Web accessibility. This paper will highlight how the utilization of Semantic Web technologies in evaluation tools can facilitate the exchange of evaluation data between tools and hence provide new approaches to support designers, content authors, programmers, quality assurance reviewers, project managers, or other users in accomplishing their respective tasks during the development and maintenance of accessible Web sites. Furthermore, this paper will also highlight some additional usages of Semantic Web enabled Web accessibility evaluation tools beyond the scope of evaluation processes. | |||