Progress on Website Accessibility?

Abstract

Over 100 top-traffic and government websites from the United States and United Kingdom were examined for evidence of changes on accessibility indicators over the 14-year period from 1999 to 2012, the longest period studied to date. Automated analyses of WCAG 2.0 Level A Success Criteria found high percentages of violations overall. Unlike more circumscribed studies, however, these sites exhibited improvements over the years on a number of accessibility indicators, with government sites being less likely than topsites to have accessibility violations. Examination of the causes of success and failure suggests that improving accessibility may be due, in part, to changes in website technologies and coding practices rather than a focus on accessibility per se.

Investigating the Potential of a Dashboard for Monitoring U.S. Federal Website Accessibility

“…For instance, Youngblood [15] measures the number of accessibility errors as defined by an automated tool. Hanson and Richards [4] chose the percentage of violations of all sites in their sample. Others have attempted to come up with metrics that are computed, for instance the Web Accessibility Barrier score is a weighted average involving the number of accessibility barriers and barriers are prioritized based on how the violation is ranked within the WCAG, and the Web Accessibility Quantitative Metric prioritizes barriers that can be evaluated by automated tool, over those that require some human checking [13].…”

“…While there was much literature about Section 508 in the late 2000s, very little has been published about Section 508 since 2011, partially because there has been silence from the U.S. Federal Government, rather than transparency, so very little data has been available to analyze. Recent research from [4] shows that government web sites in the UK and US have made improvements since 1999 (around the time when the first Section 508 regulations were released), but many accessibility violations still exist.…”

Website content and design in SME: insights from Portugal

“…Some authors evaluate detailed website features such as content (e.g., Ting et al, 2013), accessibility (e.g., Hanson and Richards, 2013) and usability (e.g., Lee and Kozar, 2012). Other authors focus on evaluating websites from the user (e.g., Luo et al, 2012) and a quality (e.g., Rocha, 2012) perspective.…”

“…In turn, making websites accessible to all users increases online visibility, but this is an expensive and cumbersome task (Loiacono and Djamasbi, 2013). Not surprisingly, existing studies (e.g., Gonçalves et al, 2012a;Hanson and Richards, 2013) report that only a small percentage of enterprises comply with the de facto standard of website accessibility -the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAGs). Former website evaluation studies on SME have almost totally ignored website accessibility.…”

An Interactive Mode to Aid Web Accessibility Evaluation

“…Therefore, in order to help the special groups to obtain and understand the web page information and interact with the web page content, W3C proposed the Web Accessibility Initiative(WAI), aimed at improving people's emphasis on website Accessibility, and required information providers actively add interactive channels for special groups to reduce the stress on subsequent accessibility reconstruction [6]. At the same time, in order to protect the rights and interests of disabled people and promote the development of information accessibility, countries adopted different measures and formulated related website accessibility standards.…”