Search results for "Web accessibility"
showing 10 items of 15 documents
Does the law matter? An empirical study on the accessibility of Finnish higher education institutions’ web pages
2022
AbstractInformation and communication technology (ICT) has made higher education available to many students in a new way. The role of online learning in higher education institutions (HEIs) has grown to an unprecedented scale due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The diversity of higher education students has increased, and accessible solutions are needed. New European and national regulations support these trends. The research reported in this paper was conducted in Finland, which is one of the leading European countries in terms of high technology and digitalisation. The aim of this research is to explore the accessibility of all Finnish HEIs’ (N = 38) landing pages based on Web Content Accessibi…
The Content Web-Accessibility of Information and Technology Support in a Complex System of Educational and Social Inclusion
2018
Support for the socialization of people with special needs is an urgent task in the European space. The study of the system of educational and social inclusion requires an interdisciplinary approach, and a large number of components, their hierarchy, and other features states that the system of inclusion is complex, and therefore requires appropriate means of its modeling - complex networks, graphs, appropriate modeling languages, etc. An important stage in the study of complex systems is the evaluation of their information and technology component in terms of the web accessibility. The use of the recommendations outlined in the WCAG 2.0 while developing information technologies as a compon…
Web accessibility for individuals with cognitive deficits
2007
Tim Berners-Lee claimed in 2001 that “the power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect”. A considerable amount of work has been done to make the web accessible to those with sensory or motor disability, with an increasing number of government and enterprise intranet webs being “accessible”, and also with some consortiums and groups seriously approaching this commitment. Some authors, such as Harrysson, have already highlighted the need for a cognitively accessible web. However, in spite of good intentions, there has been little work to date that has tackled this task. At least until now, the existing WAI and NI4 recommendations …
Technology for supporting web information search and learning in Sign Language
2009
Sign Languages (SL) are underrepresented in the digital world, which contributes to the digital divide for the Deaf Community. In this paper, our goal is twofold: (1) to review the implications of current SL generation technologies for two key user web tasks, information search and learning and (2) to propose a taxonomy of the technical and functional dimensions for categorizing those technologies. The review reveals that although contents can currently be portrayed in SL by means of videos of human signers or avatars, the debate about how bilingual (text and SL) versus SL-only websites affect signers' comprehension of hypertext content emerges as an unresolved issue in need of further empi…
Information structure and practice as facilitators of deaf users' navigation in textual websites
2009
Deaf users might find it difficult to navigate through websites with textual content which, for many of them, constitutes the written representation of a non-native oral language. With the aim of testing how the information structure could compensate for this difficulty, 27 prelingual deaf users of sign language were asked to search a set of headlines in a web newspaper where information structure and practice were manipulated. While practice did not affect deep structures (web content distributed through four layers of nodes), wide structures (web content concentrated in two layers) did facilitate users' performance in the last trial block and compromised it in the first trial block. It is…
Accessibility of the Italian institutional web pages: a survey on the compliance of the Italian public administration web pages to the Stanca Act and…
2014
Accessibility of the Italian public administration web pages is ruled by the Stanca Act and in particular the Decree of the Minister issued on July 8, 2005. In this paper, an objective test is performed on the official web pages of the Italian province and region chief towns to check their compliance to the 22 technical requirements defined by the Stanca Act. A sample of 976 web pages belonging to the websites of the Italian chief towns have been downloaded in the period October---December 2012. Such a data collection has been submitted to Achecker, the worldwide recognized syntax and accessibility validation service. Several accessibility and syntax errors have been found following the aut…
Web accessibility for visual disabled: An expert evaluation of the Inclusite® solution
2012
This study analyzes web accessibility problems for people with visual disability and presents the results of testing a prototype of Inclusite® system, an access solution designed to facilitate web navigation for people with visual disability, consisting of a navigation interface through keyboard and speech synthesis. An expert typhlotechnologist conducts a navigation test in three sessions evaluating the prototype positively and suggesting aspects for improvement. The interface provides web access as a service, the access solution is hosted in the website, so that the user can perform navigation using a different computer (not the own) which does not have his usual technical aids, helping t…
Web access for people with visual disability
2012
This paper addresses the evaluation of a prototype of the Inclusite® solution, designed to enable web accessibility for visual disabled people. The interface provides the help from the Web and avoids users' dependence on software and devices normally used by them. An expert in typhlotechnology makes usability tests of Inclusite® interface, consisting of keyboard navigation combined with voice synthesis (synthesis of voice reads to the user the selections made from the keyboard). The evaluation of the initiative is very positive as it will contribute to reduction of costs by the users, not needing to purchase specific software, as well as reducing their dependence on the use of their own equ…
Accessibility of Public Web Services: A Distant Dream?
2013
Part 1: Long and Short Papers; International audience; Today, many public services are available online through Web sites. The accessibility of the sites, also to people with disabilities, is important because the accessibility concerns equality of citizens, a cornerstone of democracy. In the current study we carried out a meta-analysis of 17 studies concerning the accessibility of the Web sites of public administration. Furthermore, we assessed the accessibility of Web pages of 12 ministries of the Finnish government. The assessments were based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The results showed that in terms of the WCAG guidelines, the average accessibility of public We…
A web search methodology for health consumers
2014
Nowadays, many people use the World Wide Web to seek medical and health information but different users, such as providers (e.g., physicians) and consumers (e.g., patients), have different needs and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge. Generic and specific search engines and specialized health sites either do not exploit the whole web or overload users with information. This creates difficulties mainly to consumers who often do not exactly know how to find the desired information. Thus, an information retrieval system for the web that 'drives' the user in finding the relevant information would be very beneficial. This paper describes a web search methodology for he…