The Role of Automatic Support in Accessibility Validation
Speaker: Fabio PaternĂ² – Pisa, ItalyTopic(s): Human Computer Interaction , Society and the Computing Profession
Abstract
The importance of providing accessible applications for all, including people with cognitive or physical disabilities, has become increasingly recognised, given the rapid growth of online information and interactive services provided by web and mobile applications. This is confirmed by the indications provided by national and international legislations to support accessibility, which recently have also encouraged the adoption of solutions able to monitor the level of accessibility of the offered digital services.
In parallel, the guidelines for accessibility, which are developed by the W3C in the Web Accessibility Initiative, are continuously evolving, considering the need to better address the various possible disabilities and the evolution of digital technologies.
All such aspects imply that thorough accessibility validation requires considerable effort due to the number of elements and aspects that have to be checked. Thus, interest in automatic support for this activity is continuously increasing, and stimulates further research and development because of its potential to support the collection and analyses of data on the effective application of the accessibility guidelines, detect non-compliance in a consistent manner, and provide relevant information on how to address possible problems. At the same time, it is important to be aware that not all accessibility issues can be automatically detected; some of them require manual checking by accessibility experts, and subjective feedback is still important to consider. Even if the accessibility validation process cannot be fully automated, effectively supporting accessibility requires validation tools able to help check the correspondence between the requirements of accessibility guidelines and the characteristics of the Web pages and associated PDF documents under consideration.
In this talk, I report on the state of the art in the area of accessibility validation tools considering several aspects, such as how they should be able to support different types of stakeholders, the type of monitoring they should provide, the relevant accessibility metrics, and their transparency for their users.
I will also discuss our experiences in performing the Italian national monitoring of the public administration web sites accessibility with the MAUVE++ tool.
About this Lecture
Number of Slides: 40Duration: 45 minutes
Languages Available: English, Italian
Last Updated:
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