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User-Tailored Web Accessibility Evaluations
Markel Vigo
University of the BasqueCountryInformatika Fakultatea20018 Donostia, Spain+34 943 015113
markel@si.ehu.esAlfred Kobsa
University of California,IrvineDepartment of InformaticsCA 92697, USA+1 949 485-5020
kobsa@uci.eduMyriam Arrue
University of the BasqueCountryInformatika Fakultatea20018 Donostia, Spain+34 943 015160
myriam@si.ehu.esJulio Abascal
University of the BasqueCountryInformatika Fakultatea20018 Donostia, Spain+34 943 018067
 julio@si.ehu.es
ABSTRACT
 This paper presents a framework and system to evaluate theaccessibility of web pages according to the individualrequirements of users with disabilities. These requirements notonly consist of users’ abilities, but also users’ assistivetechnologies and the delivery context. In order to ascertaininteroperability with other software components, user requirements are specified taking advantage of the extensibilityof the W3C CC/PP recommendation and other feature-specification vocabularies. An evaluation tool capable of understanding these specifications generates evaluation reportsthat are tailored to the user’s individual needs. Quantitativeaccessibility measures resulting from personalized evaluationreports can be used to improve the web browsing experience for users with disabilities, such as through adaptive navigationsupport and by sorting the results of search engines according tousers’ personal requirements. In addition, developers benefitfrom personalized evaluations when developing websites for specific audiences.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
 H.1.2 [
User/Machine Systems
]: Human factors. H.5.2. [
UserInterfaces
]: Evaluation. H.5.4. [
Hypertext/Hypermedia
]: User issues. K.4.2 [
Social Issues
]: Assistive technologies for personswith disabilities.
General Terms
Human Factors, Standardization, Measurement.
Keywords
Web accessibility, user-tailored evaluation, guidelines, personalization, assistive technologies.
1.
 
INTRODUCTION
Web pages that comply with general accessibility guideline setscan still fail to be accessible since some users may stillexperience problems. For instance, Correani et al. [10] point outthat vision-impaired users may still encounter the following problems even when web pages meet the WCAG 1.0 Guidelines[8] and the Section 508 Standards [25]:
 
 Lack of context 
. The overall context is lost when visuallyimpaired users employ screen readers or screen magnifiersto scan the content.
 
 Information overload 
. Navigation is slowed down whennavigation bars, menus or banners are read time and again.
 
 Excessive sequencing when reading the information
.In addition, Theofanos and Redish [27] state that meetingaccessibility guidelines does not ensure the usability of a site,and enumerate some usability guidelines in order to build usableaccessible sites.Conversely, web pages not fulfilling accessibility guidelines cannevertheless still be accessible for certain user groups. For example, neither deaf nor physically handicapped users requirealternative descriptions of pictures. General accessibilityguidelines are an invaluable tool for guiding web designers indeveloping sites that are most likely accessible. From an enduser’s point of view, however, evaluation reports obtained fromtools that evaluate against general accessibility guidelines, andaccessibility metrics based thereon, are not very useful sincethey do not cater to users’ individual needs and abilities.To ameliorate the situation, Brajnik [5] grouped the WCAG 1.0guidelines by their impact on particular user groups, namely blind, low-vision, deaf, colour blind and physically handicappedusers, as well as people with cognitive disabilities. A similar approach can be applied to accessibility metrics: metrics can bedeveloped taking into account just those guidelines that have potential impact on a specific group of users.Selecting the guidelines that have an impact on one’s specificuser groups would in general seem sufficient for evaluating theaccessibility of a website for oneself. However, there are severalcases in which grouping guidelines by their impact on user groups is not enough, neither for evaluation purposes nor for assigning a quality rating in an accessibility metrics:
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 HT’07 
, September 10–12, 2007, Manchester, United Kingdom.Copyright 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-820-6/07/0009...$5.00.
 
The guideline contains unresolved references to the user’sdelivery context 
. In such a case, the guideline cannot be properly evaluated without concrete information about theusage situation. For instance, Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0[23] proposes not to use images wider than the width of thescreen, so as to avoid horizontal scrolling. In this particular 
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case, it is necessary to know the screen size of the accessdevice so that evaluations can be adjusted to each case.
 
The guideline is incomplete.
In such a case, additionalinformation is required for an accurate evaluation of theguideline. For instance,
 
WCAG 1.0 guidelines 12.1 and 12.2identify accessibility problems regarding the use of framesand define guidelines for how to deal with them. However,even when designers adhere to these guidelines, some blindusers may still have accessibility problems due to the assistivetechnology they use (e.g., old versions of the JAWS screenreader that are unable to detect frames). This problem is facedquite often since people with disabilities tend to be reluctantto change or upgrade their assistive technologies [9].
 
Users’ individual needs are not well covered in group guidelines.
Group guidelines capture “typical” needs of their respective group members, but individual needs may deviateconsiderably (e.g., individual motor-impaired people havingmore residual physical abilities than the group guidelinesforesee).
 
Multiple group membership is not supported by evaluationtools
. Users can be members of different user groups (e.g.,deaf users tend to also have cognitive disabilities, and hencethey additionally require some guidelines for users withcognitive impairments). A similar situation occurs when physically handicapped users interact with handheld devices:guidelines for both mobile web devices and physicaldisabilities have to be taken into account.The conclusion from these problems is that assistivetechnologies, access device features and shared groupmembership have to be considered in user-specific accessibilityevaluation and measurement. This paper proposes a fine-grainedapproach for this purpose. It uses
 personal accessibility profiles
 containing individual disabilities, assistive technologies andaccess device constraints to dynamically generate personalizedaccessibility evaluation reports, while the user is browsing awebsite.
 Accessibility scores
inferred from personalizedevaluations can be employed to signal to the user the degree of accessibility of web pages in the current use context, even before the user visits these pages.
2.
 
SCENARIOS FOR PERSONALACCESSIBILITY
Personal accessibility evaluations can be performed in varioussituations to improve the web experience of users withdisabilities, and to help in the website development process.
2.1
 
Adaptive Navigation Support
Orientation and navigation are closely related since both refer tothe user’s navigational environment. Navigation is part of web browsing and consists in moving around in an electronicenvironment, deciding at each step where to go next [19].Orientation is the user’s understanding of current movementsand the navigation context. The former answers the question“where can I go?” while the later replies to “where am I?”According to Goble et al. [11], visually impaired users need to be explicitly warned of obstacles since their reliance onenvironmental cues is higher than for sighted users. Harper et al.[14] found that detecting and notifying users about barriers beforehand improves users’ orientation at a website.
 Local Guidance
[6] can be provided with this aim in mind, byindicating the most accessible links at the current web pageaccording to the user’s accessibility profile.
 Adaptive sorting 
 
can be performed by including a list of the most accessible linksat the top of every page or by including it in the browser GUI.
 Local orientation support 
can be obtained by annotating linkswith the quantitative accessibility rating of the linked web pages, so that users become informed about access barriers beforehand. In all cases, the linked pages of the current pagewould be pre-fetched and evaluated on the fly.The set of all accessibility measurements of upcoming links can be understood as a mobility ratio [14], i.e. an indicator of howwell people will be able to navigate a web page environment.Depending on the user’s disabilities, these “clues” should havedifferent formats: numeric link labels in the case of visuallyimpaired users, and icons or colour codes for all other users withdisabilities (or both, since the techniques are complementary).In addition to Local Guidance,
Global Guidance
can also be provided, using e.g. learning strategies such as in [20]. Knowinga user’s goal would then be reason enough to suggest “the mostaccessible path” for this objective.
2.2
 
Information Retrieval Systems
A study by Ivory et al. [18] with visually impaired usersconcludes that some of them desire to see additional details insearch result lists. The authors therefore recommend to sort or rank search results according to accessibility or usability. Wecan broaden this claim to include all disabilities. Theimplementation of this approach is quite straightforward:accessibility scores inferred from
 personal accessibility profiles
 could be included in IR systems, so that results are sorted bytheir accessibility, or the original results of the IR system could be re-ranked at the client side.Sorting of search engine results and adaptive navigation supportare complementary and can therefore also be combined. After querying a search engine, the user can select the best result froma list of items that was ranked or re-ranked according to his/her accessibility profile. Once the user visits the selected web page,link annotations indicating the accessibility values of the linked pages are also provided.
2.3
 
Developing Websites for SpecificAudiences
 Not only end users can benefit from personalized evaluations, but also web developers. Users’ particular disabilities, assistivetechnologies, access devices and multiple group membershipscan be considered when developing a website. From thedeveloper’s point of view, these requirements form part of thecontextual requirements for accessible sites [26]. Developerscan define or retrieve user profiles and evaluate their designsagainst them, and thereby use our framework in building sitesfor specific audiences.
3.
 
FRAMEWORK FOR PERSONALACCESSIBILITY EVALUATIONS
This section describes the components to automatically create personal accessibility profiles and calculate accessibility scores.
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Each component in the architecture can be considered to beautonomous with its own internal logic.First of all, we need an
accessibility evaluation engine
that isgeneric enough to be able to evaluate different guideline sets,since we aim at evaluating the accessibility problems of different access devices and users. To this end, we need a
repository of machine-understandable guideline sets
. In order toautomatically detect system features, a
module for system features detection
gathers information about installed assistivetechnologies, hardware constraints, etc. The output of thismodule is used to create
 personal accessibility profiles
. Usingthese profiles, a
 
module for guidelines instantiation
can retrieveguidelines regarding the user’s delivery context and fill in theunresolved and incomplete requirements that some guidelineshave (see Section 1). For this reason, a
common vocabulary
for describing user features becomes necessary, so that allcomponents in the framework can understand the information in profiles. Finally, we need a module that calculates thequantitative
accessibility score
based on reports produced by theevaluation engine.
3.1
 
Guidelines Repository
Guidelines are stored in an XML repository so that every systemcomponent can access them. They should be machine readablesince they are going to be evaluated by an autonomous module,the Evaluation Engine. We chose to implement guidelines inXML due to the fact that it is a very flexible standard for dataexchange. After studying the state-of-the-art on accessibilityguidelines, we developed a Uniform Guidelines Language(UGL) which is able to express a large number of guideline sets[2]
1
. UGL is capable of implementing guidelines regardless of their abstraction level (generic or specific), access devices,application type, or any combination thereof. In [3] we present amanagement system for UGL that is extremely useful for creating or editing guidelines in this repository. Developers whoare familiar with the representation of guidelines in UGL canedit them directly, while those who are less experienced have aweb interface available that guides them in editing guidelinesvia XHTML forms.
3.2
 
System Features Detector
The objective of this module is twofold: retrieving informationabout the user’s access device and detecting installed assistivetechnologies (ATs). The first task can be carried out usingsystem APIs offered by programming languages, and wouldconsist of obtaining device characteristics such as screen size,keyboard type, image format support, script languagessupported by browsers, and colour support. The second task isaccomplished by querying the System Registry in the case of Windows, or the /etc/.../ files in some Linux distributions. Thesequeries are used to check whether a particular assistivetechnology is installed (ATs includes both hardware such asBraille displays or input devices, and software such as screenreaders, screen magnifiers etc.). These queries compare databaseinformation on available ATs with key values in the System
1
The XML-Schema is available athttp://sipt07.si.ehu.es/evalaccess3/ugl.xsd, and its graphicalrepresentation at http://sipt07.si.ehu.es/evalaccess3/ugl.pngRegistry.
2
When a match is found, information regarding the ATis obtained from both information sources (database andRegistry).
3.3
 
A Vocabulary for User Profiling
The hardware and software characteristics detected by theSystem Features Detector become entered into the user’s profile.A user profile thus contains information on hardware andsoftware constraints, as well as the user’s assistive technologies.This
 personal accessibility
 
 profile
is implemented in CompositeCapabilities/Personal Profiles (CC/PP) [7], which is a W3Cstandard for modelling user profiles with a common vocabulary based on the Resource Description Framework RDF [24].CC/PP offers a framework to describe device capabilities anduser preferences. It is often used for content negotiation betweenuser agents and web servers. If extended correctly, CC/PP canalso be used for adapting to user’s disabilities [30]. However,the vocabulary of CC/PP for describing user profiles is limited.In order to enhance the expressiveness of CC/PP descriptions, itis usually necessary to define new vocabularies (the reuse of existing vocabulary extensions is thereby strongly encouraged).In this sense, the IMS Consortium has developed the IMSAccessibility Learner Profile (IMS ACCLIP) [17], an XML- based language focused on content adaptation issues in e-learning environments.To evaluate the coverage and expressiveness of our CC/PP based
 personal accessibility
 
 profile
, we analyzed the followingaccessibility guidelines: WCAG 1.0 [8], MWBP 1.0 [23], theIBM Accessibility Guidelines [16], the Web Design Guidelinesfor Elderly Users (DGEU) [21], and the IMS Guidelines for Developing Accessible Learning Applications (IMS) [4]. Theanalysis of these guidelines and their relationship to assistivetechnology and access devices is crucial to the design of a user-tailored vocabulary which takes into account disabilities, accessconstraints and the limitations of assistive technologies.
3.3.1
 
 Assistive Technologies
Assistive technologies play an important role in the applicationof accessibility guidelines. In their evolution over the years,they have increasingly gained control over formerly completelyinaccessible content, thus making browsing easier for users withdisabilities. Every new version of an assistive technologyaddresses new accessibility issues. Strict version control istherefore necessary since several guidelines are contingent ondifferent versions of user agents. These dependencies can begrouped into two main categories:
Negative dependencies
. Even if guidelines are fulfilled, someversions of ATs may not convey the content of a web pageadequately. For instance, even when a change in the languageof web content is correctly flagged using the
lang
attribute(see checkpoints 4.1 and 4.3 in WCAG [8]), the content willnot be adequately read out to users who are running older versions (<5.0) of the Jaws screen reader since those are notcapable of recognizing this HTML attribute.
2
This database on ATs must currently be maintained manually,which is a major drawback.
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