Web accessibility for people with disabilities is a highly visible area of research in the field of ICT accessibility, including many policy activities across many countries. The commonly accepted guidelines for web accessibility (WCAG 1.0) were published in 1999 and have been extensively used by designers, evaluators and legislators. W3C-WAI published a new version of these guidelines (WCAG 2.0) in December 2008. One of the main goals of WCAG 2.0 was testability, that is, WCAG 2.0 should be either machine testable or reliably human testable. In this paper we present an educational experiment performed during an intensive web accessibility course. The goal of the experiment was to assess the testability of the 25 level-A success criteria of WCAG 2.0 by beginners. To do this, the students had to manually evaluate the accessibility of the same web page. The result was that only eight success criteria could be considered to be reliably human testable when evaluators were beginners. We also compare our experiment with a similar study published recently. Our work is not a conclusive experiment, but it does suggest some parts of WCAG 2.0 to which special attention should be paid when training accessibility evaluators.
Abstract. The design of a user interface usable by blind people sets specific usability requirements that are unnecessary for sighted users. These requirements focus on task adequacy, dimensional trade-off, behaviour equivalence, semantic loss avoidance and device-independency. Consequently, the development of human-computer interfaces (HCI) that are based on task, domain, dialog, presentation, platform and user models has to be modified to take into account these requirements. This paper presents a user interface model for blind people, which incorporates these usability requirements into the above HCI models. A framework implementing the model has been developed and implemented in an electronic speaking bilingual software environment for blind or visually impaired people and in an educational system for children with special educational needs.
Abstract. There are specific usability requirements that have to be met when developing dual interfaces, that is, graphical user interfaces that are adapted for blind users. These include task adequacy, dimensional trade-off, behavior equivalence, semantic loss avoidance and device independence. Consequently, the development of human-computer interfaces that are based on the task, domain, dialog, presentation, platform and user models has to be modified to take into account these requirements. This paper presents a framework that includes these requirements, allowing for the development of dual interfaces. The framework includes a set of guidelines for interface design, a toolkit for the low effort implementation of the user interface, and a programming library for the inclusion of speech and Braille in applications. A case study of the development of one such dual interface application is also presented.
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