Willian Massami Watanabe

Facilita: reading assistance for low-literacy readers

Texts are the media content primarily available on Web sites and applications. However, this heavy use of texts creates an accessibility barrier to those who cannot read fluently in their mother tongue due to both text length and linguistic complexity. To offer an accessible alternative to these readers, shorter and simplified versions of text content should be provided. Taking that into consideration, this paper introduces Facilita, an assistive technology to help lower-literacy users to understand the text content of Web applications. Facilita generates an accessible content from Web pages automatically, using summarization and simplification techniques. It is also important to consider interface design requirements, since Facilitas target audience (the functionally illiterate) is often classified as computer illiterate as well. Thus, interaction and user interface design were developed considering the limitations and skills of the functionally illiterate.

Improving WCAG for elderly web accessibility

The increase of aging people and the possibilities that are extended to the Internet users have led studies into improvement of web accessibility solutions for older people [30]. Most older adults present some decline in their cognitive, visual, hearing and motor skills [13]. Nowadays, however, the Web faces new technological challenges that extend the initial idea of cross-platform and inter-operational nature of the HTML and HTTP. The challenges are posed as accessibility barriers and consider the skills, capabilities, culture, languages, disabilities, among other characteristics related to the user as a human being, in contrast to the hardware and software requirements previously addressed. The human characteristics of the challenge can be seeing as the ultimate barrier of the initial Web requirements of cross-platform and inter-operational environment, and goes towards social inclusion of people whatever differences they might present in the Web. In this paper we propose the establishment of a new set of success criteria that address older users accessibility into the normative document of WCAG 2.0. The proposed recommendations were identified from a composition of usability studies with real older users and were tested for different scenarios.

Using acceptance tests to validate accessibility requirements in RIA

Accessibility stands as a quality requirement for Web applications. However, current accessibility automatic evaluation tools are not capable of evaluating DOM dynamic generated content that characterizes Ajax applications and RIAs - Rich Internet Applications. In this context, this paper describes an approach for testing accessibility requirements in RIA, by using acceptance tests. The authors had implemented a set of assistive technology user scenarios in the acceptance tests, in order to guarantee keyboard accessibility in web applications. As the scenarios were implemented as acceptance tests scenarios, they provide accessibility analysis over all layers of the software, from server-side to client-side implementations (JavaScript and dynamically generated DOM elements) in RIA. The test scenarios are automatically executed, and by doing so, fit the Continuous Integration process of constant delivery of new functionalities in Web projects.

Web communication and interaction modeling using model-driven development

During the development of web-based applications, communication and interaction issues have become even more important, due to the variety of user types that can work together. In this paper we describe the adoption of Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach to support a feasible way to help developers to take into account the issues, regarding to the Web users variety. In general, a good design of the interactions and communication issues implies in high cost and time consuming tasks, and requires that developers be flexible and rapidly change the conception of the interfaces. The meta-models approach presented in this paper aims to map interaction and communication requirements in a practical and useful way during the web application development.

Usability evaluation of horizontal navigation bar with drop-down menus by middle aged adults

The Web has become an extremely important source of information and services that have been made widely available. Navigation is an important aspect in designing a Web site in order to make the information easy to find, however the task of organizing and structuring information from a website can become complex as the set of information and services provided increases. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of eight different types of menus while performing two tasks for each menu. The target for the experiment was of people aged over 40 and some experience in using the Internet. The experiment revealed that menus which presented properties more commonly found in web applications, the task completion time and number of errors was lower, during the sessions.

WCAG conformance approach based on model-driven development and WebML

Accessibility is an important quality attribute for Web applications. The W3C has defined a set of guidelines that must be followed to deploy accessible web applications, however there is no process that support WCAG requirements during the software development lifecycle. This work proposes the inclusion of the WCAG 2.0 accessibility concerns in a Model-Driven Development, more specifically in the WebML process.

Adapting Web content for low-literacy readers by using lexical elaboration and named entities labeling

This paper presents an approach for assisting low-literacy readers in accessing Web online information. The “Educational FACILITA” tool is a Web content adaptation tool that provides innovative features and follows more intuitive interaction models regarding accessibility concerns. Especially, we propose an interaction model and a Web application that explore the natural language processing tasks of lexical elaboration and named entity labeling for improving Web accessibility. We report on the results obtained from a pilot study on usability analysis carried out with low-literacy users. The preliminary results show that “Educational FACILITA” improves the comprehension of text elements, although the assistance mechanisms might also confuse users when word sense ambiguity is introduced, by gathering, for a complex word, a list of synonyms with multiple meanings. This fact evokes a future solution in which the correct sense for a complex word in a sentence is identified, solving this pervasive characteristic of natural languages. The pilot study also identified that experienced computer users find the tool to be more useful than novice computer users do.

Acceptance tests for validating ARIA requirements in widgets

Accessibility refers to a quality requirement for web applications. However, current accessibility automatic evaluation tools cannot evaluate dynamic generated content that characterizes Ajax applications and RIAs. In this context, this paper describes an approach for evaluating Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) requirements, by using acceptance tests. The authors implemented a set of disabled user interaction scenarios as acceptance tests in order to verify keyboard accessibility in RIA and automatically evaluate ARIA conformance in widgets. The inclusion of disabled user interaction scenarios in the evaluation process is necessary to analyse ARIA requirements since dynamic changes are accommodated in the DOM structure. Two evaluation tool prototypes were developed and validated in separate case studies. The results show evidence that the proposed evaluation approach is capable of evaluating ARIA conformance in RIA widgets.

Fona: Quantitative Metric to Measure Focus Navigation on Rich Internet Applications

The Web 2.0 brought new requirements to the architecture of web systems. Web applications’ interfaces are becoming more and more interactive. However, these changes are severely impacting how disabled users interact through assistive technologies with the web. In order to deploy an accessible web application, developers can use WAI-ARIA to design an accessible web application, which manually implements focus and keyboard navigation mechanisms. This article presents a quantitative metric, named Fona, which measures how the Focus Navigation WAI-ARIA requirement has been implemented on the web. Fona counts JavaScript mouse event listeners, HTML elements with role attributes, and TabIndex attributes in the DOM structure of webpages. Fona’s evaluation approach provides a narrow analysis of one single accessibility requirement. But it enables monitoring this accessibility requirement in a large number of webpages. This monitoring activity might be used to give insights about how Focus Navigation and ARIA requirements have been considered by web development teams. Fona is validated comparing the results of a set of WAI-ARIA conformant implementations and a set of webpages formed by Alexa’s 349 top most popular websites. The analysis of Fona’s value for Alexa’s websites highlights that many websites still lack the implementation of Focus Navigation through their JavaScript interactive content.

W4A 2010: a web accessibility conference report from the Google W4A student award winners

2010 saw the launch of the W4A student award scheme, generously supported by Google, to enable two of our most promising web accessibility research students to attend W4A --- the annual International Cross-Disciplinary Research Conference on Web Accessibility. This years conference was held in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 26--27 April, and our two award winners were Maia Naftali (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Willian Massani Watanabe (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil). Maia and Willian have kindly provided their reflections on the conference below.