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Evaluating the accessibility of rich internet applications

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The Web has been growing in size and complexity and is used for the most diverse activities in our every day life, becoming almost indispensable. Besides, Web applications are becoming more popular, and consequently used by a wide range of people. Thus, it is important to evaluate the accessibility of the new Rich Internet Applications (RIA) to guarantee that everyone can access the information.
Currently, there are some tools to evaluate the accessibility of classical Web pages, which use WCAG guidelines. However, Web applications impose different challenges, so it is mandatory to find a way to automatically obtain the dynamically introduced HTML code, in order to evaluate what users really experience.
This paper details a new process of accessibility evaluation of Web applications, which evaluates the content by triggering possible events that partially change the Web page. It also presents an experimental study with several Web applications, demonstrating the potential of this framework in evaluating Web applications.

References

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S. Abou-Zahra. Complete List of Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools, march 2006. Available from: http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/complete.
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M. Cooper. Accessibility of emerging rich web technologies: web 2.0 and the semantic web. In Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A), W4A '07, pages 93--98, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.
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M. Cooper, L. G. Reid, G. Vanderheiden, and B. Caldwell. Techniques for WCAG 2.0 - Techniques and Failures for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. W3C Note, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), October 2010. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-TECHS/.
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N. Fernandes, R. Lopes, and L. Carriço. On web accessibility evaluation environments. In Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, W4A '11, pages 4:1--4:10, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.
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J. L. Fuertes, R. González, E. Gutiérrez, and L. Martínez. Developing hera-ffx for wcag 2.0. In W4A '11: Proceedings of the 2011 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A), New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.
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B. Gibson. Enabling an accessible web 2.0. In Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A), W4A '07, pages 1--6, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.
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R. Lopes and L. Carriço. Macroscopic characterisations of Web accessibility. Found. Trends Web Sci., 16(3):1--130, 2010.
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  • (2024)Automatically Detecting Reflow Accessibility Issues in Responsive Web PagesProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639229(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
  • (2024)A large-scale web accessibility analysis considering technology adoptionUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-023-01010-023:4(1857-1872)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Large-scale study of web accessibility metricsUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-022-00956-x23:1(411-434)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
W4A '12: Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility
April 2012
189 pages
ISBN:9781450310192
DOI:10.1145/2207016
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

  • Google Inc.
  • Interaction-Design.org: Interaction-Design.org
  • Microsoft: Microsoft
  • Zakon Group
  • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 April 2012

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Author Tags

  1. automated evaluation
  2. web accessibility
  3. web application
  4. web browser processing
  5. web science

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  • Research-article

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W4A '12
Sponsor:
  • Interaction-Design.org
  • Microsoft
  • IW3C2

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Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Automatically Detecting Reflow Accessibility Issues in Responsive Web PagesProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639229(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
  • (2024)A large-scale web accessibility analysis considering technology adoptionUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-023-01010-023:4(1857-1872)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Large-scale study of web accessibility metricsUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-022-00956-x23:1(411-434)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
  • (2023)BAGEL: An Approach to Automatically Detect Navigation-Based Web Accessibility Barriers for Keyboard UsersProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580749(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Detecting Dialog-Related Keyboard Navigation Failures in Web ApplicationsProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00120(1368-1380)Online publication date: 14-May-2023
  • (2021)Detecting and localizing keyboard accessibility failures in web applicationsProceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3468264.3468581(855-867)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
  • (2020)Comparing accessibility evaluation plug-insProceedings of the 17th International Web for All Conference10.1145/3371300.3383346(1-11)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2020
  • (2020)Semantic web technologies applied to software accessibility evaluation: a systematic literature reviewUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-020-00759-y21:1(145-169)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2020
  • (2020)RiWAArch Style: An Architectural Style for Rich Web-Based ApplicationsProceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2020, Volume 310.1007/978-3-030-63092-8_20(292-312)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2020
  • (2019)Challenges of automatically evaluating rich internet applications accessibilityProceedings of the 37th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication10.1145/3328020.3353950(1-6)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2019
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