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Visually impaired people and the emerging connected TV: a comparative study of TV and Web applications’ accessibility

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Abstract

With the TV signal digitization and the current market growth of connected TVs, the authors envision the appearance of accessibility barriers to visually impaired persons. The paper addresses the following hypothesis: (1) visually impaired users want to extend their TV usage to explore new TV features; (2) TV applications are in less conformance with accessibility guidelines compared to their Desktop versions. Additionally, the authors wanted to assess whether guideline conformance reflected real TV accessibility problems experienced by users. The methods used for this study included surveys aimed at characterizing the interest of the visually impaired population regarding the use of TV, and specifically of Web applications on TV, an automated accessibility evaluation to compare TV and Desktop versions of the same Web application, to understand their conformance with accessibility guidelines, and a user study where participants with visual impairments were asked to perform some tasks on both versions. From the survey, we confirmed that people with visual disabilities are interested in extra features on their TV. Results from the automated accessibility evaluation show that TV applications are in a significantly better level of conformance with accessibility guidelines. The user study has illustrated that users were unable to complete any task using the TV versions of the applications. The results from these studies demonstrated that the new features that come with connected TVs still have a long way to go in order to be accessible by all. Furthermore, they lead us to concur with other works that automated evaluations are not enough to assess the accessibility of a Web page.

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  1. LaSIGE, Departamento de Informática, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 1749–016, Lisboa, Portugal

    Daniel Costa & Carlos Duarte

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  2. Carlos Duarte
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Costa, D., Duarte, C. Visually impaired people and the emerging connected TV: a comparative study of TV and Web applications’ accessibility. Univ Access Inf Soc 16, 197–214 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-016-0451-6

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