José L. Fuertes

On the testability of WCAG 2.0 for beginners

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.

Semi-automatic evaluation of web accessibility with HERA 2.0

The evaluation of the accessibility of a web site calls for the participation of human evaluators: most of the checkpoints to be assessed cannot be evaluated fully automatically. This paper presents the second version of HERA, a multilingual online tool developed by the Sidar Foundation that automatically performs a preliminary analysis of a web page and then provides support for the complete manual evaluation process. This description includes the justification for a newer version, the technologies used, and the main strengths of HERA 2.0 as compared with other tools and version 1.0

Towards a set of Measures for Evaluating Software Agent Autonomy

Agent-oriented software is an established research field. For this reason, it is important to develop comprehensive measures of excellence to evaluate this software. No set of measures defining the overall quality of an agent has been developed to date. Some attempts at evaluating agent quality have addressed certain agent features, like the development process. We believe that agent quality can be determined as a function of well-defined characteristics. Evaluated using appropriate measures, these characteristics will assure an agent’s reliability and correct functionality. This paper deals with an important agent feature, namely, autonomy. Autonomy is considered to be the agent’s ability to operate independently, without the need for human guidance or the intervention of external elements. The article proposes a set of measures used to evaluate the autonomy of a agent and presents a case study analyzing the behavior of these measures.

Teaching communication skills to hearing-impaired children

The Mehida multimedia system offers hearing-impaired children an easy and appealing way to learn how to communicate with their hearing and deaf peers. Mehida helps them acquire various communication skills simultaneously: sign language, speech, fingerspelling, lip reading, reading, and writing. Didactic activities and games teach the different means of communication. A character shaped like a pear assists and guides the children, explaining each activity and encouraging the children to identify with it throughout the process.

Measuring the Social Ability of Software Agents

To evaluate the global quality of a software agent it is necessary to define appropriate quality characteristics and to determine a set of measures for these features. A comprehensive set of measures has not yet been developed for agent-oriented software. However, some software measures have been adopted from other software paradigms, especially from the object-oriented paradigm because they have features in common. A key characteristic defining a software agent is its social ability, that is, its ability to interact with other agents to achieve its goals. This paper presents a first approximation to a set of measures for evaluating the social ability of software agents for use in the calculation of a global value for this characteristic.

Hera-FFX: a Firefox add-on for semi-automatic web accessibility evaluation

Website accessibility evaluation is a complex task requiring a combination of human expertise and software support. There are several online and offline tools to support the manual web accessibility evaluation process. However, they all have some weaknesses because none of them includes all the desired features. In this paper we present Hera-FFX, an add-on for the Firefox web browser that supports semi-automatic web accessibility evaluation.

Teaching web accessibility with “contramano” and hera

There is a need for training in design for all both at universities and in organisations, particularly as regards accessible web design. In this paper we present the experiences of the Sidar Foundation and the Technical University of Madrid in teaching web accessibility, focusing on the use of two key materials. The first one is Contramano, a fictitious web site designed to fail every accessibility checkpoint. It can be used to give examples of bad practices or as a basis for short exercises focused on specific checkpoints. The second material is the HERA tool, an on-line evaluation tool that has been designed to assist the manual evaluation of web accessibility. The paper will present the experience of using these materials in both higher education and other courses.

Developing Hera-FFX for WCAG 2.0

WCAG 2.0 was published in December 2008. It has many differences to WCAG 1.0 as to rationale, structure and content. Two years later there are still few tools supporting WCAG 2.0, and none of them fully mirrors the WCAG 2.0 approach organized around principles, guidelines, success criteria, situations and techniques. This paper describes the on-going development of an update to the Hera-FFX Firefox extension to support WCAG 2.0. The description is focused on the challenges that we have found and our resulting decisions.

SBT: a translator from spanish mathematical braille to MathML

One of the key issues for integrating blind people into everyday life is education. For many educational subjects, however, there is no suitable assistive technology for blind people. One especially sensitive question facing blind people is learning mathematical language, apart from interacting with sighted teachers and students. This article presents a Spanish mathematical Braille to mathematical notation (MathML) conversion system to fill this gap. The translation system has been designed as a portable programming library, it solves ambiguities in Spanish mathematical Braille and it generates an intermediate code, which means that it can be easily adapted to other Braille languages or to other output formats

Measuring the Pro-Activity of Software Agents

Despite having well-defined characteristics, software agents do not have a developed set of measures defining their quality. Attempts at evaluating software agent quality have focused on some agent aspects, like the development process, whereas others focusing on the agent as a software product have basically adopted measures associated with other software paradigms, like procedural and object-oriented concepts. Here we propose a set of measures for evaluating software agent pro-activity, the software agent’s goal-driven behavioral ability to take the initiative and satisfy its goals.