skip to main content
10.1145/1878803.1878812acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesassetsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Accessibility by demonstration: enabling end users to guide developers to web accessibility solutions

Published: 25 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Few web developers have been explicitly trained to create accessible web pages, and are unlikely to recognize subtle accessibility and usability concerns that disabled people face. Evaluating web pages with assistive technology can reveal problems, but this software takes time to install and its complexity can be overwhelming. To address these problems, we introduce a new approach for accessibility evaluation called Accessibility by Demonstration (ABD). ABD lets assistive technology users retroactively record accessibility problems at the time they experience them as human-readable macros and easily send those recordings and the software necessary to replay them to others. This paper describes an implementation of ABD as an extension to the WebAnywhere screen reader, and presents an evaluation with 15 web developers not experienced with accessibility showing that interacting with these recordings helped them understand and fix some subtle accessibility problems better than existing tools.

References

[1]
P. Abrahams. Testing websites with the WebAnywhere Screen-Reader http://www.bloorresearch.com/blog/, 2009.
[2]
ARIA. http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-roadmap/.
[3]
J. P. Bigham. Intelligent Interfaces Enabling Blind Web Users to Build Accessibility Into the Web. PhD thesis, University of Washington, 2009.
[4]
J. P. Bigham and R. Ladner. Accessmonkey: A collaborative scripting framework for web users and developers. In Proc. of the Intl. Cross-Disciplinary Conf. on Web Accessibility (W4A '07), pp. 25--34, 2007.
[5]
J. P. Bigham, T. Lau, and J. Nichols. Trailblazer: Enabling blind users to blaze trails through the web. In Proc. of the 12th Intl. Conf. on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2009), pp. 177--186, 2009.
[6]
J. P. Bigham, C. M. Prince, and R. E. Ladner. Webanywhere: A screen reader on-the-go. In Proc. of the Intl. Cross-Disciplinary Conf. on Web Accessibility (W4A 2008), pp. 73--82, 2008.
[7]
Y. Borodin, J. P. Bigham, Glenn Dausch, and I. V. Ramakrishnan. More than Meets the Eye: A Survey of Screen-Reader Browsing Strategies. In Proc. of the Intl. Cross-Disciplinary Conf. on Web Accessibility (W4A 2010), 2010.
[8]
J. T. Brudvik, J. P Bigham, A. C. Cavender, and R. E. Ladner. Hunting for headings: sighted labeling vs. automatic classification of headings. In Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Comp. and Accessibility (ASSETS 2008), pp. 201--208, 2008.
[9]
T. C. Craven. Some features of alt text associated with images in web pp. Information Research, 11, 2006.
[10]
A. Cypher. Eager: programming repetitive tasks by example. In Proc. of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human factors in Comp. Sys. (CHI '91), pp. 33--39, 1991.
[11]
Firefox accessibility extension, 2006. Illinois Center for Information Technology.
[12]
Google-AxsJAX. Accessed April 15, 2009. http://code.google.com/p/google-axsjax/.
[13]
S. Henry. Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design. Lulu.com, London, United Kingdom, 21 February 2007.
[14]
D. Hupp and R. C. Miller. Smart bookmarks: automatic retroactive macro recording on the web. In Proc. of the 20th annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '07), pp. 81--90, 2007.
[15]
Jaws 8.0 for windows. Freedom Scientific, 4 May 2009. http://www.freedomscientific.com.
[16]
C. Kelleher and R. Pausch. Stencils-based tutorials: design and evaluation. In Proc. of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human factors in Comp. Sys. (CHI '05), pp. 541--550, 2005.
[17]
J. Mankoff, H. Fait, and T. Tran. Is your web page accessible?: a comparative study of methods for assessing web page accessibility for the blind. In Proc. of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human factors in Comp. Sys. (CHI '05), pp. 41--50, 2005.
[18]
H. Petrie, F. Hamilton, N. King, and P. Pavan. Remote usability evaluations with disabled people. In Proc. of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Comp. Sys. (CHI '06), pp. 1133--1141, 2006.
[19]
H. Petrie and O. Kheir. The relationship between accessibility and usability of websites. In Proc. of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human factors in Comp. Sys. (CHI '07), pp. 397--406, 2007.
[20]
Roadmap for accessible rich internet applications (wai-aria roadmap). World Wide Web Consortium, 2007. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.
[21]
Selenium, 2009. http://seleniumhq.org/.
[22]
T. Selker. Cognitive adaptive computer help (coach). In Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 25--34, IOS, Amsterdam, 1989.
[23]
H. Takagi, C. Asakawa, K. Fukuda, and J. Maeda. Accessibility designer: visualizing usability for the blind. SIGACCESS Accessibility and Comp., (77-78):177--184, 2004.
[24]
H. Takagi, S. Kawanaka, M. Kobayashi, T. Itoh, and C. Asakawa. Social accessibility: achieving accessibility through collaborative metadata authoring. In Proc. of the 10th Intl. ACM SIGACCESS Conf. on Comp. and accessibility (ASSETS 2008), pp. 193--200, 2008.
[25]
H. Takagi, S. Kawanaka, M. Kobayashi, D. Sato, and C. Asakawa. Collaborative web accessibility improvement: Challenges and possibilities. In Proc. of the 11th Intl. ACM SIGACCESS Conf. on Comp. and accessibility (ASSETS 2009), 2009.
[26]
S. Trewin, B. Cragun, C. Swart, J. Brezi and J. Richards. Accessibility Challenges and Tool Features: An IBM Web Developer Perspective. In Proc. of the Intl. Web4All Conf. (W4A 2010), 2010.
[27]
Usatf - america's running routes - map it. Accessed May 1, 2009. http://www.usatf.org/routes/map/.
[28]
Wave web accessibility evaluation tool, 2009. http://wave.webaim.org/.
[29]
Webanywhere open source project, 2009. http://webanywhere.googlecode.com/.
[30]
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. World Wide Web Consortium. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/, 2009.
[31]
Window-eyes. GW Micro, 3 April 2009. http://www.gwmicro.com/Window-Eyes/.
[32]
Watchfire bobby. http://www.watchfire.com/products/webxm/bobby.aspx.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Constructing Websites with Generative AI Tools: The Accessibility of Their Workflows and Products for Users With DisabilitiesJournal of Business and Technical Communication10.1177/10506519241280644Online publication date: 28-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Accessibility Evaluation of Web Systems for People with Visual Impairments: Findings from a Literature SurveyProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702090(1-13)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2024)A Universal Web Accessibility Feedback Form: A Participatory Design StudyProceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference10.1145/3677846.3677853(106-117)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ASSETS '10: Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2010
346 pages
ISBN:9781605588810
DOI:10.1145/1878803
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]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 October 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. blind users
  2. evaluation
  3. web accessibility
  4. web usability

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

ASSETS '10
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

Upcoming Conference

ASSETS '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)34
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Constructing Websites with Generative AI Tools: The Accessibility of Their Workflows and Products for Users With DisabilitiesJournal of Business and Technical Communication10.1177/10506519241280644Online publication date: 28-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Accessibility Evaluation of Web Systems for People with Visual Impairments: Findings from a Literature SurveyProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702090(1-13)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2024)A Universal Web Accessibility Feedback Form: A Participatory Design StudyProceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference10.1145/3677846.3677853(106-117)Online publication date: 13-May-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)Breaking the News Barrier: Towards Understanding News Consumption Practices among BVI Individuals in IndiaProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675608(1-11)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)ProgramAlly: Creating Custom Visual Access Programs via Multi-Modal End-User ProgrammingProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676391(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2024)DIY Assistive Software: End-User Programming for Personalized Assistive TechnologyACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing10.1145/3654768.3654772(1-1)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
  • (2024)AXNav: Replaying Accessibility Tests from Natural LanguageProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642777(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Don’t Confuse! Redrawing GUI Navigation Flow in Mobile Apps for Visually Impaired UsersIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.348522550:12(3351-3368)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Examining the Accessibility of Generative AI Website Builder Tools for Blind and Low Vision Users: 21 Best Practices for Designers and Developers2024 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm)10.1109/ProComm61427.2024.00030(121-128)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2024
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media