Web Accessibility for Visually Impaired People: Requirements and Design Issues
Access to web content continues to be a challenge for the visually impaired, as the needs of such community are very diverse. The access is further hindered by the fact that designers continue to build websites non-compliant with Web Content Accessibility
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Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Oslo, Norway [email protected] 2 Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden [email protected] 3 Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden [email protected] 4 Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, Norrköping, Sweden [email protected] 5 South East European University, Tetovo, Macedonia [email protected] 6 Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain [email protected]
Abstract. Access to web content continues to be a challenge for the visually impaired, as the needs of such community are very diverse. The access is further hindered by the fact that designers continue to build websites non-compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). To better understand the needs of the visually impaired community, three workshops were organized with various stakeholders coming from three different countries. The results from the workshops suggest that one-solution-fits-all model is inadequate without considering the levels of visual impairment when providing customized web experience. A set of requirements devised from the workshops guided the process of building a middleware prototype. Using eight adaptation techniques, the prototype provides the required user experience based on users level of visual impairment. Preliminary evaluation of the middleware suggests that several adaptation techniques perform better with non-WCAG compliant websites compared to those being compliant.
1 Introduction The increased portability and wide adoption of diverse web content and mobile technologies have resulted in the fact that computers are not anymore perceived as distinct technological objects, but more as integrated tools to support our everyday activities [17]. The ubiquity of these environments creates the possibilities for people to communicate across multiple computational devices at the same time. These trends provided the opportunities for the evolvement of the web toward a fully-fledged software platform [18]. The main idea behind this view is the fact that people are actively engaged by contributing with digital content on the web through the use of different web and mobile applications and platforms across diverse devices [1]. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved A. Ebert et al. (Eds.): UsARE 2012/2014, LNCS 9312, pp. 79–96, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45916-5_6
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All these developments result in new ways for people to create, share, manage everyday life, as well as communicate with their friends and family. The different levels of accessibility of these solutions directly affect their use by diverse user groups. Primarily this creates challenges for user groups with special needs. One such user group is the community of visually impaired people, which is usually marginalized. Some of their challenges include lack of proper access to the different web content that could facilitate their everyday activities. Consideri
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