Accessibility designer: visualizing usability for the blind

These days, accessibility-related regulations and guidelines have been accelerating the improvement of Web accessibility. One of the accelerating factors is the development and deployment of accessibility evaluation tools for authoring time and repair time. They mainly focus on creating compliant Web sites by analyzing the HTML syntax of pages, and report that pages are compliant when there are no syntactical errors. However, such compliant pages are often not truly usable by blind users. This is because current evaluation tools merely check if the HTML tags are appropriately used to be compliant with regulations and guidelines. It would be better if such tools paid more attention to real usability, especially on time-oriented usability factors, such as the speed to reach target content, the ease of understanding the page structure, and the navigability, in order to help Web designers to create not simply compliant pages but also usable pages for the blind. Therefore, we decided to de...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ASSETS
• Authors: Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Kentarou Fukuda, Junji Maeda
• Keywords: Accessibility Designer, ASSETS 2004, Blind Users, Compliant Pages