Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Universal web accessibility is an inalienable objective to guarantee the civil right of all users to access to the Information Society and to avoid the digital gap. This is a long process based on the promulgation of inclusive laws, specification of accessibility guidelines, and development of adequate design methodologies and tools. To the short term, websites that do not fulfil the Universal Accessibility specifications can be used by specific groups of users that are not affected by the barriers present in these websites. Personal web accessibility concept focuses on the need of providing people with the adequate methods and tools to design websites so that adaptation and customization could be performed. This paper describes an architecture aiming to help any user to find, select and use websites that are currently accessible to her or him. In addition, it will aid web developers to create websites according to specific users’ needs.

Many graphics used in Web pages are very attractive to the eye and useful for many people. However, with the extensive use of pixel graphics such as charts without textual description or image maps, Web pages are encountering an ever increasing amount of barriers. There are many developments to aid people with visual impairments to gain access to graphics on the Web but most of these techniques are not universally applicable to other disabilities. It is essential that future development concentrates on accommodating all kinds of disabilities. The use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) provides new possibilities as well as new challenges for the accessibility of Web sites. Consequently, this paper introduces a solution to make all graphics accessible to each user-group, and visualizes them in the resultant prototype .

People with dementia have not traditionally been seen as a user group for website development. This paper describes the first attempts to discover some of navigation design needs when developing an information-based website for people with dementia. A card sorting methodology is described using existing information that is provided for people with dementia about their condition. Some participants with dementia found it difficult to group concepts together. This could have a profound affect on the design of good websites.

Quality of websites is a key factor in addressing all users. Besides functional issues is the design of each web page affecting the ability to navigate and interact with web applications. Web designers are only slowly becoming aware of accessibility issues, more tools, better processes in creating high quality websites and a better understanding of guidelines is needed.

Testing accessibility of a web site is still an art. Lack of appropriate definitions of accessibility and of standard testing methods are some of the reasons why Web accessibility is so difficult to achieve.

The paper describes a heuristic walkthrough method based on barriers; it then discusses how methods like this can be evaluated, and it shows experimental data about validity and usefulness of the method when compared to .

This paper presents a detailed description of the work carried out under the umbrella of the EU-funded project BenToWeb to develop a complete XHTML 1.0 Test Suite in regard to conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 from the W3C. This initial work covered the Working Draft version of June 2005. A thorough evaluation involving end users is carried out at the moment of writing this paper.

The large amount of data produced by automatic web accessibility evaluation has to be preprocessed in order to enable disabled users or policy makers to draw meaningful conclusions from the assessment. We study different methods for interpretation and aggregation of the results provided by automatic assessment tools. Current approaches do not meet all the requirements suggested in the literature. Based on the UCAB approach decribed in UWEM 0.5 we develop a new aggregation function targeted at the requirements.

The evaluation of the accessibility of a web site calls for the participation of human evaluators: most of the checkpoints to be assessed cannot be evaluated fully automatically. This paper presents the second version of HERA, a multilingual online tool developed by the Sidar Foundation that automatically performs a preliminary analysis of a web page and then provides support for the complete manual evaluation process. This description includes the justification for a newer version, the technologies used, and the main strengths of HERA 2.0 as compared with other tools and version 1.0.

Two tools are presented which support test case management for accessibility test suites. Creating test suites for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 is one major objective of the EU-funded project BenToWeb. Parsifal is a desktop application which easily allows editing test description files. Test description files compose an XML layer containing descriptive information about the particular test cases. Amfortas is a web application which allows controlled evaluation of the test suites by users. Controlled in that sense means, that Amfortas not only stores the evaluation results, but also is aware of the physical and technical condition of the evaluator.

Functional web accessibility goes beyond complying with the technical requirements of Section 508 or W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. Current web accessibility policies and practices favor an “accessible repair” approach to web accessibility, which lead to resources that might meet the technical requirements of accessibility guidelines, but are still not functionally usable by people with disabilities. The University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign (UIUC) has developed a set of HTML best practices and accessibility management and visualization tools to improve the design and verification of the functional accessibility of web resources. The goal of these practices and tools is to support developers and administrators in creating and verifying the functional accessibility of their web resources. The practices encourage developers to use forward looking web design that improves the accessibility of web resources to everyone, including people with disabilities, by making web resources more adaptable to a wider range of technologies and user preferences.