Web Accessibility Barriers in Geographic Maps

We present a novel and versatile online resource named Clothes4all which is a website, web application, and tool likewise, and which can be used to study various aspects of web accessibility. The article elaborates on the tool’s development, its features and possibilities, as well as use and potential methodology. Clothes4all mimics a web shop for clothes and consists as such of a set of coherent web pages that can be freely used, studied, and extended as desired, in particular aiming at user trials. The site’s main feature is that single or multiple accessibility barriers can be injected into or removed from its web pages in a controlled manner. The primary application area of Clothes4all is the testing and validation of accessibility checkers and validators themselves, and hereby the site is expected to eventually contribute to more accessible web pages. A secondary application area is education, as Clothes4all is a great resource to learn about web technologies, web accessibility, assistive technology, user diversity, impairments, and other aspects of online accessibility.

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QUANTITATIVE METRIC FOR RANKING WEB ACCESSIBILITY BARRIERS BASED ON THEIR SEVERITY

Journal of Information and Communication Technology ◽

10.32890/jict2017.16.1.8219 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Hayfa Yousef Abuaddous ◽

Mohd Zalisham Jali ◽

Nurlida Basir

Keyword(s):

User Experience ◽

Web Accessibility ◽

Assistive Technologies ◽

Screen Readers ◽

Wcag 2.0 ◽

Accessibility Barriers ◽

Web Developers

Web accessibility aims at providing disabled users with a barrierfree user experience so they can use and contribute. However, not all websites comply with WCAG 2.0 which results in Web accessibility barriers in websites. Thus, assistive technologies such as screen readers would not be able to interpret the presented contents on the monitor due to these barriers and this will contribute to making websites inaccessible to disabled users. This paper proposed an innovative metric that assigns measurable weight to each identified barrier based on its severity and impacts on the accessibility level, and then ranks the barriers accordingly. Following, Web developers can fix the highly ranked severe barriers instead of wasting time in studying and fixing less severe types of barriers that may rarely occur. An experiment was conducted to check the metric validity. We found the metric was valid and thereby we suggested the usage of the metric as a valid scientific measurement.

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