A Heuristic Method to Evaluate Web Accessibility for Users With Low Vision

Abstract

Checking the accessibility of a website is a significant challenge for accessibility experts. Users who suffer from age-related changes, such as low vision, poor hearing, and diminishing motor skills, among others, have problems accessing the services offered by the web. Currently, there are qualitative and quantitative methods to check if a website is accessible. Most methods apply automatic tools because they are low cost, but they do not present an ideal solution. Instead, heuristic methods require manual support that will help the expert to assess accessibility by establishing severity ranges. This research used a modification of the Barrier Walkthrough method proposed by Giorgio Brajnik considering the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1. The modification consisted of including persistence to determine the severity of an accessibility barrier. This method enabled the measurement of the accessibility of websites to test a new heuristic process and to obtain sample data for analysis. The method was applied to 40 websites, including those of 30 universities in Latin America, according to the Webometrics ranking, and 10 websites among the most visited, according to Alexa ranking. With this heuristic method, the evaluators concluded that although a website is in a high-ranking position, this does not imply that it is accessible and inclusive. However, the manual method takes too long, and it is therefore too costly to solve accessibility problems. This research can serve as a starting point for future studies related to web accessibility heuristics.INDEX TERMS Accessibility, assessment, barrier walkthrough, evaluation, heuristic method, low vision, website, web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

Accessibility in Web Development Courses: A Case Study

“…People with disabilities and the elderly are increasingly engaging in online learning as well as browsing the web to get access to information for their daily activities [1,2]. It is estimated that the community of the disabled consists of approximately 15% of the world population [3].…”

Empirical Studies on Web Accessibility of Educational Websites: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The quartiles of the 2019 SJR and JCR journals have not yet been published at the moment of writing this paper. Therefore, the 2018 quartiles were taken in this SLR for papers [55]- [59] published in 2019 (see full information in Table 7, Appendix A).…”

“…The following countries were taken from the papers according to where the educational websites were studied. It should be noted that the papers [52], [59] Figure 7 shows the number of papers per web accessibility standard. All 25 papers use the WCAG to evaluate the accessibility of educational websites, regardless of their versions.…”

“…• Paper [59] was the only one evaluated with WCAG 2.1 and conformance levels A and AA. Figure 10 shows that 20 of the 25 papers were not evaluated with real users and experts.…”

Combined Method for Evaluating Accessibility in Serious Games

“…In this study, we consider web accessibility as a starting point, which implies how users perceive, navigate, understand and interact on the web [13]; therefore, it is essential to keep in mind that the level of accessibility is the fundamental basis to facilitate access to serious games, especially for users with disabilities.…”