Hironobu Takagi
Chieko Asakawa
Kentarou Fukuda
ABSTRACT
These days, accessibility-related regulations and guidelines have been accelerating the improvement of Web accessibility. One of the accelerating factors is the development and deployment of accessibility evaluation tools for authoring time and repair time. They mainly focus on creating compliant Web sites by analyzing the HTML syntax of pages, and report that pages are compliant when there are no syntactical errors. However, such compliant pages are often not truly usable by blind users. This is because current evaluation tools merely check if the HTML tags are appropriately used to be compliant with regulations and guidelines. It would be better if such tools paid more attention to real usability, especially on time-oriented usability factors, such as the speed to reach target content, the ease of understanding the page structure, and the navigability, in order to help Web designers to create not simply compliant pages but also usable pages for the blind. Therefore, we decided to develop Accessibility Designer (aDesigner), which has capabilities to visualize blind users' usability by using colors and gradations. The visualization function allows Web designers to grasp the weak points in their pages, and to recognize how accessible or inaccessible their pages are at a glance. In this paper, after reviewing the related work, we describe our approach to visualize blind users' usability followed by an overview of Accessibility Designer. We then report on our evaluations of real Web sites using Accessibility Designer. After discussing the results, we conclude the paper.
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Index Terms
- Accessibility designer: visualizing usability for the blind
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Reviews
Susan Loretta Fowler
When is a Web site actually usable by people who are fully or partially blind__ __ Is it enough to pass accessibility compliance tests__ __ Programs like Bobby (http://bobby.watchfire.com) do check that all pictures have ALT text, and that headings are compliant with regulations and guidelines. However, as the authors point out, rote compliance isn't enough. For example, developers know to provide alternate descriptive text for all pictures, but they often insert meaningless descriptions, such as "blank space" or "photo." Since most accessibility checkers look only for missing ALT text, but not for inappropriate ALT text, you can have a compliant Web site that is neither useful nor usable. This is where aDesigner steps in (you can download a copy from http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/adesigner). The program uses a new method that the authors call blind usability visualization. This method lets sighted Web developers tell at a glance how usable their entire site is for blind or partially sighted users. There are three parts to the evaluation process: Showing how long it takes to reach each part of the page, by using background colors. The darker the color, the more inaccessible that part of the page is. Showing which areas are accessible or inaccessible, and the order in which a voice browser will read each one, by filling them with lighter and darker colors. Showing which text is either extracted or generated by standard voice browsers without changing the layouts. Examples are ALT text, notification messages for the start and end of forms, and skip-links, which let voice browser users jump directly to various parts of the page. The paper describes the program, a set of evaluations against actual news sites, and a description of what happened when the authors used the program on one of their own intranet sites. This site had over 200 JavaServer Pages (JSPs), and a few static hypertext markup language (HTML) pages; with the help of aDesigner, the authors reduced the time needed to fix the site from months to a few weeks. If your sites need to comply with Section 508 rules, you would do well to read this paper. Takagi, Asakawa, Fukuda, and Maeda do an excellent job of describing problems most sighted designers and usability engineers may not have thought of. Better yet, they may have provided the solution as well. Online Computing Reviews Service
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