research-article

Certification or conformance: making a successful commitment to WCAG 2.0

Authors:

Suzette Keith,

Nikolaos Floratos,

Gill WhitneyAuthors Info & Claims

W4A '12: Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

Article No.: 21, Pages 1 - 4

https://doi.org/10.1145/2207016.2207029

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History

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Abstract

The need for accessible websites is well recognized and the accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0) provide an important benchmark standard for measuring progress of eGoverment and commercial websites. This study was commissioned by ANEC and aimed to examine the effects of voluntary and third party certification schemes on actual conformance with web accessibility standards.

A sample of 100 websites claiming voluntary or certified conformance to accessibility standards were selected from 5 European countries. In a combination of automatic tests and manual inspection it was found that simple measures of numbers of passes to WCAG 2.0 level A were highly disappointing. Closer inspection of the results revealed that a limited number of criteria at level A accounted for more than half the failures. These individual failures at level A tend to mask the commitment made by development teams to meet the needs of disabled users. Clearer processes are needed to identify and resolve these persistent barriers in order to support web development and achieve better and more consistent conformance to accessibility guidelines.

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Cited By

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López-Gil JPereira J(2024)Turning manual web accessibility success criteria into automatic: an LLM-based approachUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-024-01108-zOnline publication date: 16-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-024-01108-z
Sonnenberg C(2020)E-Government and Social Media: The Impact on AccessibilityJournal of Disability Policy Studies10.1177/104420732090652131:3(181-191)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2020
https://doi.org/10.1177/1044207320906521
Sonnenberg C(2019)Accessibility in E-GovernmentAdvanced Methodologies and Technologies in Government and Society10.4018/978-1-5225-7661-7.ch012(134-145)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-7661-7.ch012
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Index Terms

Certification or conformance: making a successful commitment to WCAG 2.0
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. HCI design and evaluation methods
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing profession
      1. Assistive technologies
  2. User characteristics
    1. People with disabilities

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Published In

W4A '12: Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

April 2012

189 pages

ISBN:9781450310192

DOI:10.1145/2207016

General Chairs:
Markel Vigo
University of Manchester, UK
,
Julio Abascal
University of the Basque Country, Spain
,
Program Chairs:
Rui Lopes
Google
,
Paola Salomoni
University of Bologna, Italy

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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 16 April 2012

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Interaction-Design.org
Microsoft
IW3C2

W4A '12: International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

April 16 - 17, 2012

Lyon, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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López-Gil JPereira J(2024)Turning manual web accessibility success criteria into automatic: an LLM-based approachUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-024-01108-zOnline publication date: 16-Mar-2024
Sonnenberg C(2020)E-Government and Social Media: The Impact on AccessibilityJournal of Disability Policy Studies10.1177/104420732090652131:3(181-191)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2020
Sonnenberg C(2019)Accessibility in E-GovernmentAdvanced Methodologies and Technologies in Government and Society10.4018/978-1-5225-7661-7.ch012(134-145)Online publication date: 2019
Sonnenberg C(2018)Accessibility in E-GovernmentEncyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Fourth Edition10.4018/978-1-5225-2255-3.ch305(3516-3525)Online publication date: 2018
Ikhsan ICatur Candra M(2018)Automatically: An Automated Refactoring Method and Tool for Improving Web Accessibility2018 5th International Conference on Data and Software Engineering (ICoDSE)10.1109/ICODSE.2018.8705894(1-6)Online publication date: Nov-2018
Lazar JGoldstein DTaylor A(2015)Ensuring Digital Accessibility through Process and PolicyundefinedOnline publication date: 19-Jun-2015
Sonnenberg CBecker S(2014)Mobile Web Accessibility and Government ComplianceEncyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition10.4018/978-1-4666-5888-2.ch752(7633-7640)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2014

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Recommendations

Evaluating the accessibility of public health websites: An exploratory cross-country study

Investigating accessibility on web-based maps

The extent of mobile accessibility coverage in WCAG 2.1: sufficiency of success criteria and appropriateness of relevant conformance levels pertaining to accessibility problems encountered by users who are visually impaired

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