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Capability survey of user agents with the UAAG 1.0 test suite and its impact on Web accessibility

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Abstract

To determine how well user agents conform to UAAG 1.0, capabilities of user agents were investigated with UAAG 1.0 Test Suite. It was found that 20 Priority 1 checkpoints were met by all the user agents, while 12 Priority 1 checkpoints, relating to multimedia control and time-dependent interactions, were failed by all of them. The results showed that two major Japanese user agents did not have enough functions to navigate through the Web, whereas the latest ones did have those functions. These results show that there are user agents which meet many requirements of UAAG 1.0 but Web authors still have to pay attention to the capability of the user agents that are considered to be used to browse their content.

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Notes

  1. http://www.pctalker.net/ (in Japanese)

  2. http://www.ssct.co.jp/barrierfree/95reader/ (in Japanese)

  3. http://www-06.ibm.com/jp/accessibility/soft/hpr.html (in Japanese)

  4. http://www.extra.co.jp/jaws/index.html (in Japanese)

  5. http://www-306.ibm.com/able/solution_offerings/hpr.html

  6. http://www.freedomsci.com/fs_products/JAWS_HQ.asp

  7. However, JAWS could stop refresh in virtual view when configured appropriately.

  8. These problems were reported to UAWG.

  9. The retail price of Japanese user agents are (as of this writing): $333 for PC-Talker, $305 for 95 Reader, $131 for Home Page Reader, and $1243 for JAWS 6.2. Thus, JAWS costs around four times the price of the popular Japanese screen readers.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Makoto Ueki, Masaya Ando, Ai Omote, and Masako Muraoka for examining user agents on many test files. The authors thank Prof. Jun Ishikawa for examining JAWS 7.1. This research could not have been completed without their support. This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas, #16091210, 2004.

The objective of the current research is neither to provide an overall evaluation of user agents nor to criticize any particular user agents. The results were obtained with the test files described in this paper. These results may not generalize to other cases.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, 2-6-1 Zenpukuzi, Suginami-ku, Tokyo, 167-8585, Japan

    Takayuki Watanabe

  2. Department of Systems Engineering, Graduate School of Electro-Communications, 1-5-1 Chofugaoka, Chofu-shi, Tokyo, 182-8585, Japan

    Masahiro Umegaki

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  1. Takayuki Watanabe
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  2. Masahiro Umegaki
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Correspondence to Takayuki Watanabe.

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Watanabe, T., Umegaki, M. Capability survey of user agents with the UAAG 1.0 test suite and its impact on Web accessibility. Univ Access Inf Soc 6, 221–232 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-007-0087-7

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