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Is your web page accessible?: a comparative study of methods for assessing web page accessibility for the blind

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Web access for users with disabilities is an important goal and challenging problem for web content developers and designers. This paper presents a comparison of different methods for finding accessibility problems affecting users who are blind. Our comparison focuses on techniques that might be of use to Web developers without accessibility experience, a large and important group that represents a major source of inaccessible pages. We compare a laboratory study with blind users to an automated tool, expert review by web designers with and without a screen reader, and remote testing by blind users. Multiple developers, using a screen reader, were most consistently successful at finding most classes of problems, and tended to find about 50% of known problems. Surprisingly, a remote study with blind users was one of the least effective methods. All of the techniques, however, had different, complementary strengths and weaknesses.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2005
928 pages
ISBN:1581139985
DOI:10.1145/1054972
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 April 2005

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Author Tags

  1. assistive technologies
  2. disability
  3. evaluation
  4. web accessibility

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CHI '05 Paper Acceptance Rate 93 of 372 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Towards Automated Accessibility Report Generation for Mobile AppsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/367496731:4(1-44)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Tab to Autocomplete: The Effects of AI Coding Assistants on Web AccessibilityProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688513(1-6)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)“Not Only Annoying but Dangerous”: devising an ecology of protections for photosensitive social media usersProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675610(1-14)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
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