Applying the Barrier Walkthrough Method: Going Beyond the Automatic Evaluation of Accessibility

Braga, Hélio; Pereira, Letícia Seixas; Ferreira, Simone Bacellar Leal; Silveira, Denis Silva da

doi:10.1016/j.procs.2014.02.051

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Braga et al [30] applied the BW method to improve the automatic evaluation of accessibility in the Bank of Brazil. The research revealed a series of critical barriers that affect the effectiveness, productivity, and satisfaction of elderly users with some disability related to vision, hearing, and motor skills, among other dysfunctions.…”

Section: Heuristic Methods Based On the Barrier Walkthroughmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Automatic tools cannot detect all accessibility barriers [29]; therefore, to complement this process of evaluation, applying a heuristic method is suggested, which, according to the definition, is based on the use of empirical rules to arrive at a solution. This research applied the BW method [30], eliminating the most critical number of barriers for the user. This process can take a long time and be tedious since the accessibility of a website is not always evident for both the users and the web accessibility expert.…”

Section: A Web Accessibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Heuristic Method to Evaluate Web Accessibility for Users With Low Vision

2019

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Checking the accessibility of a website is a significant challenge for accessibility experts. Users who suffer from age-related changes, such as low vision, poor hearing, and diminishing motor skills, among others, have problems accessing the services offered by the web. Currently, there are qualitative and quantitative methods to check if a website is accessible. Most methods apply automatic tools because they are low cost, but they do not present an ideal solution. Instead, heuristic methods require manual support that will help the expert to assess accessibility by establishing severity ranges. This research used a modification of the Barrier Walkthrough method proposed by Giorgio Brajnik considering the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1. The modification consisted of including persistence to determine the severity of an accessibility barrier. This method enabled the measurement of the accessibility of websites to test a new heuristic process and to obtain sample data for analysis. The method was applied to 40 websites, including those of 30 universities in Latin America, according to the Webometrics ranking, and 10 websites among the most visited, according to Alexa ranking. With this heuristic method, the evaluators concluded that although a website is in a high-ranking position, this does not imply that it is accessible and inclusive. However, the manual method takes too long, and it is therefore too costly to solve accessibility problems. This research can serve as a starting point for future studies related to web accessibility heuristics.INDEX TERMS Accessibility, assessment, barrier walkthrough, evaluation, heuristic method, low vision, website, web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

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Section: Heuristic Methods Based On the Barrier Walkthroughmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Web Accessibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Heuristic Method to Evaluate Web Accessibility for Users With Low Vision

2019

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“…Eler et al [5] check for missing attribute fields or incorrect attribute values related to accessibility of web pages, an approach that is also used in a few patents [6], [7]. The bulk of existing work focuses on topics such as evaluating best practices for conducting empirical accessibility evaluations, such as manual checklist walkthroughs [8] or enlisting visually-impaired users as part of user studies [9]. A number of open-source tools have been developed to conduct simple syntactic accessibility tests that only check a few attribute values in a web page.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic Web Accessibility Testing via Hierarchical Visual Analysis

Bajammal

Mesbah

2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

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Web accessibility, the design of web apps to be usable by users with disabilities, impacts millions of people around the globe. Although accessibility has traditionally been a marginal afterthought that is often ignored in many software products, it is increasingly becoming a legal requirement that must be satisfied. While some web accessibility testing tools exist, most only perform rudimentary syntactical checks that do not assess the more important high-level semantic aspects that users with disabilities rely on. Accordingly, assessing web accessibility has largely remained a laborious manual process requiring human input. In this paper, we propose an approach, called AXERAY, that infers semantic groupings of various regions of a web page and their semantic roles. We evaluate our approach on 30 real-world websites and assess the accuracy of semantic inference as well as the ability to detect accessibility failures. The results show that AXERAY achieves, on average, an F-measure of 87% for inferring semantic groupings, and is able to detect accessibility failures with 85% accuracy.

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“…This study was developed from previous works [15][16][17]; in the current work, the authors apply three modifications to the BW method. The first modification comprises widening the scale to examine the persistence and impact between zero (0) and three (3).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Heuristic Method for Evaluating Accessibility in Web-Based Serious Games for Users with Low Vision

et al. 2020

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Nowadays, serious games have become a beneficial resource in the learning process; they are part of our culture and promote social inclusion. Designing accessible serious games is a complete challenge, even more for non-experts. Most existing serious games do not meet accessibility standards because of a lack of methods that include standards and help create more accessible serious games. For this reason, our research presents a heuristic method with three modifications to Giorgio Brajnik’s barrier walkthrough method and based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1). We defined 28 barriers for the users with low vision and the related impact and persistence variables by defining severity ranges to evaluate accessibility. This method allows measuring the accessibility of web-based serious games; the method proposed in this article can be a good help for non-experts. As a case study, this heuristic method was applied to 40 web-based serious games. The evaluators concluded that serious games should apply WCAG 2.1 to achieve an adequate and inclusive accessibility level. However, this study has limitations; the heuristic method depends on the evaluators’ experience. This work can contribute to studies related to accessibility heuristics in serious games; it can also help construct a software tool that applies WCAG 2.1 and helps experts and non-experts evaluate accessibility in serious games.

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Applying the Barrier Walkthrough Method: Going Beyond the Automatic Evaluation of Accessibility

Cited by 8 publications

References 5 publications

A Heuristic Method to Evaluate Web Accessibility for Users With Low Vision

A Heuristic Method to Evaluate Web Accessibility for Users With Low Vision

Semantic Web Accessibility Testing via Hierarchical Visual Analysis

A Heuristic Method for Evaluating Accessibility in Web-Based Serious Games for Users with Low Vision

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