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Three web accessibility evaluation perspectives for RIA

Published: 13 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), several challenges arise in the area of web accessibility evaluation. A particular set of challenges emerges from RIAs dynamic nature: original static Web specifications can change dramatically before being presented to the end user; a user triggered event may provide complete new content within the same RIA. Whatever the evaluation alternative, the challenges must be met.
We focus on automatic evaluation using the current WGAG standards. That enables us to do extensive evaluations in order to grasp the accessibility state of the web eventually pointing new direction for improvement.
In this paper, we present a comparative study to understand the difference of the accessibility properties of the Web regarding three different evaluation perspectives: 1) before browser processing; 2) after browser processing (dynamic loading); 3) and, also after browser processing, considering the triggering of user interaction events.
The results clearly show that for a RIA the number of accessibility outcomes varies considerably between those tree perspectives. First of all, this variation shows an increase of the number of assessed elements as well as passes, warnings and errors from perspective 1 to 2, due to dynamically loaded code, and from 2 to 3, due to the new pages reached by the interaction events. This shows that evaluating RIAs without considering its dynamic components provides an erroneous perception of its accessibility. Secondly, the relative growth of the number of fails is bigger than the growth of passes. This signifies that considering pages reached by interaction reveals lower quality for RIAs. Finally, a tendency is shown for the RIAs with higher number of states also exposing differences in accessibility quality.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
W4A '13: Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility
May 2013
209 pages
ISBN:9781450318440
DOI:10.1145/2461121
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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Published: 13 May 2013

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Author Tags

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

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W4A '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 7 of 20 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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  • (2023)Dynamic detection of accessibility smellsUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-023-01043-5Online publication date: 22-Sep-2023
  • (2022)A Systematic Review of Web Accessibility MetricsApp and Website Accessibility Developments and Compliance Strategies10.4018/978-1-7998-7848-3.ch004(77-108)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2021)Accessibility Support in Web FrameworksProceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3441852.3476531(1-4)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2021
  • (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
  • (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
  • (2019)Dynamic Web ContentWeb Accessibility10.1007/978-1-4471-7440-0_21(373-395)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2019
  • (2018)Design and Evaluation of a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CoMove) for Autism Spectrum Disorder InterventionACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/320968711:2(1-22)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2018
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