Annika Nietzio

The Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM) 1.2 for WCAG 1.0

Checking of web accessibility can be carried out in several ways along the same international standards. The evaluation methodologies used by evaluation and certification organizations in several European countries (such as AccessiWeb in France, Technosite in Spain and AnySurfer in Belgium) are different in subtle but meaningful ways, even though they are usually based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0). The Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM) is developed by European expert organisations and offers test descriptions to evaluate WCAG 1.0 conformance covering level AA, a clear sampling scheme, several reporting options, including score cards and other instruments to help communicate the results of evaluations. The aim is to establish the UWEM as the basis for web accessibility evaluation, policy support and possible certification in Europe.

Automatic checking of alternative texts on web pages

For people who cannot see non-textual web content, such as images, maps or audio files, the alternative texts are crucial to understand and use the content. Alternate texts are often automatically generated by web publishing software or not properly provided by the author of the content. Such texts may impose web accessibility barriers. Automatic accessibility checkers in use today can only detect the presence of alternative texts, but not determine if the text is describing the corresponding content in any useful way. This paper presents a pattern recognition approach for automatic detection of alternative texts that may impose a barrier, reaching an accuracy of more then 90%.

Accessibility of eGovernment web sites: towards a collaborative retrofitting approach

Accessibility benchmarking is efficient to raise awareness and initiate competition. However, traditional benchmarking is of little avail when it comes to removing barriers from eGovernment web sites in practice. Regulations and legal enforcement may be helpful in a long-term perspective. For more rapid progress both vendors and web site maintainers are willing to take short-term action towards improvements, provided that clear advise is available. The approach of the eGovernment Monitoring project (eGovMon) integrates benchmarking as a central activity in a user-driven project. In addition to benchmarking results, several other services and background information are provided to enable the users - in this case a group of Norwegian municipalities who want to improve the accessibility of their web sites - to gain real added value from benchmarking.

Towards Techniques for Easy-to-Read Web Content

Abstract Requirements for Easy-to-Read Web content can be derived from various sources. The requirements cover linguistic properties as well as aspects of presentation and interaction. This paper compares different approaches to check that the Web content is understandable. A major challenge is that many guidelines are language-dependent. We describe a method to extend the coverage of an existing author support tool across multiple languages and show how this can be a first step towards common Techniques for Easy-to-Read Web content.

Monitoring Accessibility of Governmental Web Sites in Europe

Web accessibility is an important goal of the European i2010 strategy. Several one-off surveys of eAccessibility have been conducted in the past few years. In this paper, we describe an approach to supplement the results of such surveys with automated assessments, that can easily be repeated at regular intervals. The software basis is provided by the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO). We analyse how the data collected by EIAO can be compared to other surveys.

Easy Access to Social Media: Introducing the Mediata-App

The Mediata app is a mobile application providing easy access to online platforms and social media for persons with acquired brain injury. Special focus is put on communication with friends and family and the use of mainstream social networks and communication platforms. The main functionality of the application can be used without assistance. In this way Mediata can enable self-determined use of ICT and increase participation and independence of persons with acquired brain injury. This paper reports the findings from two user requirements studies and the resulting design and implementation of the app.

Benefits and Challenges of Combining Automated and User Testing to Enhance e-Accessibility – The European Internet Inclusion Initiative

The European Internet Inclusion Initiative (EIII) presents a new approach by combining the benefits of automated and user testing in order to improve both the quality and the coverage of evaluation results. This paper provides an overview of the challenges posed by online accessibility assessment and outlines the initial steps towards the combination of automated and user testing in the form of crowd sourcing.

How long is a short sentence? --- a linguistic approach to definition and validation of rules for easy-to-read material

This paper presents a new approach to empirical validation and verification of guidelines for easy-to-read material. The goal of our approach is twofold. One the one hand, the linguistic analysis investigates if the well-known rules are really applied consistently throughout the published easy-to-read material. The findings from this study can help define new rules and refine existing rules. One the other hand, we show how the software developed for the linguistic analysis can also be used as a tool to support authors in the production of easy-to-read material. The tool applies the rules to the new text and highlights any passages that do not meet those rules, so that the author can go back and improve the text.

Following the WCAG 2.0 techniques: experiences from designing a WCAG 2.0 checking tool

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of how the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and its accompanying documents can be used as a basis for the implementation of an automatic checking tool and the definition of a web accessibility metric. There are two major issues that need to be resolved to derive valid and reliable conclusions from the output of individual tests. First, the relationship of Sufficient Techniques and Common Failures has to be taken into account. Second, the logical combination of the techniques related to a Success Criterion must be represented in the results. The eGovMon project has a lot of experience in specifying and implementing tools for automatic checking of web accessibility. The project is based on the belief that web accessibility evaluation is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to promote web accessibility and initiate improvements.

Web Page Clustering for More Efficient Website Accessibility Evaluations

Despite advances in the legal framework to assure web accessibility people with disabilities still find barriers hindering websites access. The European Internet Inclusion Initiative (EIII) has delivered methods and tools to carry out large scale evaluations of websites. The tools have been used to carry out 180 million tests on 540, 000 web pages to check 1065 websites at a rate of about 7 sites per hour. This paper outlines an approach to reduce the number of web pages needed to compute accessibility scores. The suggested approach relies on machine learning to cluster the web pages according to the barriers detected and to select representative pages for the score calculation. Analysis of the experimental results has confirmed the validity of the accessibility test result as a new feature for clustering web pages, which is planned to be implemented in the EIII website checker tools.