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The impact of accessibility assessment in macro scale universal usability studies of the web

Published: 21 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a modelling framework, Web Interaction Environments, to express the synergies and differences of audiences, in order to study universal usability of the Web. Based on this framework, we have expressed the implicit model of WCAG and developed an experimental study to assess the Web accessibility quality of Wikipedia at a macro scale. This has resulted on finding out that template mechanisms such as those provided by Wikipedia lower the burden of producing accessible contents, but provide no guarantee that hyperlinking to external websites maintain accessibility quality. We discuss the black-boxed nature of guidelines such as WCAG and how formalising audiences helps leveraging universal usability studies of the Web at macro scales.

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cover image ACM Conferences
W4A '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A)
April 2008
207 pages
ISBN:9781605581538
DOI:10.1145/1368044
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: 21 April 2008

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Author Tags

  1. WIE
  2. audience modelling
  3. universal usability
  4. web interaction environments

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W4A '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 29 submissions, 41%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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  • (2019)The Current Status of Accessibility in Mobile AppsACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/330017612:1(1-31)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2019
  • (2019)Automatic Web Accessibility MetricsWeb Accessibility10.1007/978-1-4471-7440-0_27(505-521)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2019
  • (2016)Mining team characteristics to predict Wikipedia article qualityProceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Open Collaboration10.1145/2957792.2971802(1-9)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2016
  • (2012)Validating WCAG versions 1.0 and 2.0 through usability testing with disabled usersUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-011-0259-311:4(375-385)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2012
  • (2011)Global Web Accessibility Analysis of National Government Portals and Ministry Web SitesJournal of Information Technology & Politics10.1080/19331681.2010.5080118:1(41-67)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2011
  • (2011)Automatic web accessibility metricsInteracting with Computers10.1016/j.intcom.2011.01.00123:2(137-155)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2011
  • (2010)Macroscopic characterisations of Web accessibilityThe New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia10.1080/13614568.2010.53418516:3(221-243)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2010
  • (2009)Querying Web Accessibility Knowledge from Web GraphsHandbook of Research on Social Dimensions of Semantic Technologies and Web Services10.4018/978-1-60566-650-1.ch005(88-112)Online publication date: 2009
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