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On the testability of WCAG 2.0 for beginners

Published: 26 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Web accessibility for people with disabilities is a highly visible area of research in the field of ICT accessibility, including many policy activities across many countries. The commonly accepted guidelines for web accessibility (WCAG 1.0) were published in 1999 and have been extensively used by designers, evaluators and legislators. W3C-WAI published a new version of these guidelines (WCAG 2.0) in December 2008. One of the main goals of WCAG 2.0 was testability, that is, WCAG 2.0 should be either machine testable or reliably human testable. In this paper we present an educational experiment performed during an intensive web accessibility course. The goal of the experiment was to assess the testability of the 25 level-A success criteria of WCAG 2.0 by beginners. To do this, the students had to manually evaluate the accessibility of the same web page. The result was that only eight success criteria could be considered to be reliably human testable when evaluators were beginners. We also compare our experiment with a similar study published recently. Our work is not a conclusive experiment, but it does suggest some parts of WCAG 2.0 to which special attention should be paid when training accessibility evaluators.

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Brajnik, G. "Validity and Reliability of Web Accessibility Guidelines" Proceedings of ASSETS'09 (October 25--28, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, USA). ACM Press. 2009. 131--138.
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Caldwell, B., Cooper, M., Reid, L. G., and Vanderheiden, G. (eds.). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. W3C Recommendation (2008). http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
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Chisholm, W., Vanderheiden, G., and Jacobs, I. (eds.). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. W3C Recommendation (1999). http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/
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Sampson-Wild, G. Testability Costs Too Much. A List Apart (2007). http://www.alistapart.com/articles/testability/
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Smith, J. Testability in WCAG 2.0. WebAIM Blog (2007). http://webaim.org/blog/wcag-2-testability/
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cover image ACM Other conferences
W4A '10: Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
April 2010
223 pages
ISBN:9781450300452
DOI:10.1145/1805986
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: 26 April 2010

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Author Tags

  1. teaching web accessibility
  2. web accessibility
  3. web accessibility evaluation

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  • (2024)Accessibility Inspections Using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by Novice Evaluators: an Experience ReportProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702040(1-10)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Compliance with web content accessibility guidelines in ophthalmology social media postsScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-59838-214:1Online publication date: 21-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Automating Error Identification and Evaluating Web Accessibility for Differently Abled UsersProceedings of Data Analytics and Management10.1007/978-981-99-6547-2_22(275-292)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2024
  • (2023)SIM-SR—Semiotic Inspection Method Mediated by Screen Reader: Analysing the Benefits of Bringing Communicability to the Accessibility Evaluation TableInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwad02335:2(276-300)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Critical Disability Studies in Technical Communication: A 25-Year History and the Future of AccessibilityThe Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Communication10.1007/978-3-031-14447-9_24(401-415)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2023
  • (2021)How Accessibility Practitioners Promote the Creation of Accessible Products in Large CompaniesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34492225:CSCW1(1-27)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
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  • (2021)Assessment of Video Accessibility by Students of a MOOC on Digital Materials for AllIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30791999(72357-72367)Online publication date: 2021
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