Mikael Snaprud

Global Web Accessibility Analysis of National Government Portals and Ministry Web Sites

Equal access to public information and services for all is an essential part of the United Nations (UN) Declaration of Human Rights. Today, the Web plays an important role in providing information and services to citizens. Unfortunately, many government Web sites are poorly designed and have accessibility barriers that prevent people with disabilities from using them. This article combines current Web accessibility benchmarking methodologies with a sound strategy for comparing Web accessibility among countries and continents. Furthermore, the article presents the first global analysis of the Web accessibility of 192 United Nation Member States made publically available. The article also identifies common properties of Member States that have accessible and inaccessible Web sites and shows that implementing antidisability discrimination laws is highly beneficial for the accessibility of Web sites, while signing the UN Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities has had no such effect yet. The article demonstrates that, despite the commonly held assumption to the contrary, mature, high-quality Web sites are more accessible than lower quality ones. Moreover, Web accessibility conformance claims by Web site owners are generally exaggerated.

A proposed architecture for large scale web accessibility assessment

This paper outlines the architecture of a system designed to demonstrate large scale web accessibility assessment developed in a European research project. The system consists of a set of integrated software components designed to automatically evaluate accessibility metrics for a large number of websites and present results in a common report. The system architecture is designed to be maintainable, scalable, and extensible in order to facilitate further development of the tool. To meet these design criteria within a limited set of resources, an Open Source approach is adopted both for selecting, designing and developing the software

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.

Disabled People from Welfare to Jobs: A Decision Support Tool

Despite repeated statements from successive governments in Norway, disabled people employment rate remains unchanged since 2000. A range of studies to describe and analyse the situation qualitatively and quantitatively have been performed, however we have not been able to find any study containing a decision support tool focusing on this issue. This paper presents a simulation model, built using the System Dynamics methodology. The model focuses on enabling disabled people to move from welfare to work, incorporating attitudes of disabled people and employers. The model is designed to cover selected factors that are believed to enable and encourage disabled people to take up jobs. It is intended to be used by policy makers, disability organisations, and individual citizens, and support more targeted discussions among them. To build the underlying model we have conducted an extensive literature review, and two surveys on attitudes of disabled people and employers. The paper contains a description of the model structure, and its behaviour.

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.

The european e-government web accessibility divide

Online interactions have rapidly become the main channel of communication as greater inclusiveness creates efficiencies for both the private and public sectors. In Europe, almost three-quarters of the population is now regularly using the Internet. But the push towards an information society also has unintended consequences as those who are unable to partake in it fall further behind in that they cannot utilize online services. Bridging digital divides is therefore more important than ever in creating an inclusive society and to reap the economic and social benefits thereof. This is of particular concern to people with disabilities. For instance, despite progress made in the supply of public sector information and services only 10% of Europes government websites are fully accessible today, according to a study carried out for the European Commission (EC). This paper briefly reviews digital divides that limit greater usage before turning to the web accessibility divide more specifically. Given a lack of existing legislation or uneven adoption in this area, third-parties in particular the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with their Web Accessibility Initiative and related communities are filling a void by setting standards and promoting implementation. In this regard, the paper discusses the efforts of the European Internet Inclusion Initiative (EIII), which is building a website that contains a new combination of existing and evolving evaluation tools and support for user testing of websites through crowd-sourcing in order to support greater digital inclusion.

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.

Evolving e-government benchmarking to better cover technology development and emerging societal needs

Many international e-government benchmarks seek to measure progress towards various versions of a digital society, and in this endeavor include a component of e-government. But because comparable international e-government data are scarce, most reports rely on the United Nations E-Government Development Index, specifically its Online Service Index as a benchmark. However, this assessment only captures national level initiatives at a broad level and does not link evaluation to outcomes and impacts, i.e. e-government performance relative to investment. This paper briefly reviews the current UN framework and assesses how it can evolve to meet new demands, such as calls to better connect investments to policy goals, and evolving user behavior. It also places this in the context of new technology trends, like mobile and social media which have not yet been fully embraced by e-government but which are likely to become increasingly important. Similarly, important trends in benchmarking and in benchmarking tools are surveyed. For example, is it possible to measure outcomes in a cost effective manner? What might be the role of non-UN data and of web metrics and social media analytics? How could relevant data and other information be better presented to countries and decision-makers in order to strengthen the goal of using the UN survey to support learning and improvement? In this context, the paper outlines the next feasible steps which the UN and similar benchmarks might adopt, including how the framework might be applied to local level assessments.

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.