Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Due to the extensive amount of information regarding web accessibility developed in recent years, developers find difficulties for creating accessible web applications. Accessibility knowledge management tools can facilitate this task. However, existing tools do not provide enough support to all the activities of the development process. In this sense, developers have to use diverse tools focused on different stages and they are also required to search for accessibility information from different sources. The aim of this paper is to present a framework for managing accessibility guidelines. It serves as a central repository where developers can search for accessibility guidelines, define new guidelines, and share them with other developers and evaluating them automatically. Therefore, this framework facilitates developers’ tasks as it gives support to several activities of different stages throughout the development process.

Practices supporting Web accessibility are spread out all over the world. However, the accessibility of multimedia content and rich Internet applications has been little discussed. These types of content are using a lot of visual cues and developing new techniques to make their visual interfaces richer. Therefore, it is generally believed that they are not accessible for people with visually disabilities. However, since there is neither objective data nor tools to measure the accessibility of such content, as a first step to tackle these new accessibility issues we focused on the Flash content. A survey was conducted using five metrics based on the problems faced by screen reader users. We developed a survey tool to assess their severity. Our results showed a complete lack of alternative texts from the developers in the sampled pages. Also, more than half of tested pages were hidden to screen reader users. We conclude that most of existing Flash content is not accessible and there is an emerging need to encourage the use of practices that make Flash content accessible.

The EU Tenuta project was funded to assist EU eTEN projects improve the usability and accessibility of new e-services that are being validated on a European scale. The challenges facing Tenuta included how to initially convince projects that these were important issues, how to gain the confidence of projects that they would benefit Tenuta assistance, and how Tenuta could make an effective contribution with only a few days support available to each project. The eventual strategy was to arrange activities such as training courses where we made personal contacts with projects, which resulted in being invited to provide on-site support. We carried out usability and accessibility evaluations before visiting projects, and reported the results as part of a two to three day workshop with the project, which included assistance with redesign, and a roadmap for future activities. Projects gave very positive feedback on the benefits obtained.

Testing for web navigability is one of the most important steps in the design of web product. However, navigability testing is an expensive technique which requires the use of many human resources. The user behavior recorded in such kind of tests is usually affected by the artificial situation created in the laboratory. In order to avoid such kind of drawbacks, we have developed ANTS (Automatic Navigability Testing System), an application able to observe and to record spontaneous user behavior in his/her own home.

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study, which aimed to devise a means of improving web accessibility for users with impairments. It looks at how web pages can be rated for accessibility using specific algorithms. These algorithms analyse and select web pages according to user preferences. The study gathered user defined ratings of web page elements, for different categories of special needs’ users that affect accessibility. The algorithms were then created using the results of these ratings. The paper also demonstrates the work in progress in relation to the extension of the Computer Aided Internet Navigation (CAIN) system, which aims to improve accessibility to web based information by re-ordering search results according to user needs.

We have been developing a barrier-free information receiving system for the purpose of communicating information in digital broadcasting to visually-impaired people. In the service of data broadcasting in digital broadcasting, many items constitute the menu screen. In this report, presentation methods and access methods using touch in combination with audio for the purpose of effective communication of menu screen structure are briefly explained. Secondly, results of evaluation experiments conducted to obtain a guideline to design hierarchical presentation structures easily accessible by visually impaired people, using the tactile interface in combination with audio presentation were discussed by focusing on the hierarchical structure of menu screens in data broadcasting.

This paper introduces Korean web accessibility activities, such as relational laws, ordinances, policies, guidelines. It also presents analytical result of the investigation on web-contents accessibilities of the 39 Korean government agencies. The result shows that only one agency provides web contents satisfying all the minimum requirements, while 97% of the agencies does not satisfy all the minimum requirements. Unfortunately, 6 agencies do not satisfy any.

This paper reports the results of an evaluative study of the Korean e-Government portal from the usability perspectives, using a common set of performance metrics from user participation. For fourteen civil affairs service sites, 51 participants performed usability tests and post-test interviews. The results showed that even though the e-Government services are fairly attainable, it takes too many steps and long time for users to complete the given tasks. The overall success rate to complete the tasks on e-Government was 0.69 and it took more than 4 minutes and 12 page navigations on average to complete simple transactions. A strong digital divide could be observed in the use of e-Government services in that the users with different vocations and ages resulted in difference in perceived usability and actual performance. Results suggest that not only are there wide variations in the usability for the services provided, but that significant work still needs to be undertaken in order to make the services of the e-Government more usable, particularly for the older users.

This paper aims to discover to what extent web accessibility is considered by the e-Government’s of Korea. Accessibility of the e-Government of Korea was evaluated using Web diagnostic engines that check the compliance level of Web sites to the W3C guidelines. The accessibility of the e-Government was at a lower level, complying to only 10% of the priority 1 checkpoints. This means that lack of coherent government policy for web accessibility causes lack of providing standard e-Government services for the part of the population with special needs.

This paper is based on a preliminary research conducted in 2005 into the current level of web accessibility in China. We evaluated a few websites which are meant to be information portals for the visually impaired. Results of the evaluations show none of them is compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1) [1] Level A checkpoints and most of them are inaccessible at all. Causes behind this situation may include lack of legislation from the government and lack of accessibility awareness of web designers. However, we found Chinese Web accessibility also faces more of a challenge as a result of the complications of Chinese language itself. We hope this paper could bring the attention of both Chinese government and Chinese web designers on web accessibility and also help international stakeholders to understand the facts in China.