On the Use of a Continuous Accessibility Assessment Process for Dealing With Website Evolution

Abstract

The accessibility of the websites is important to ensure the full access of relevant information to people with disabilities. Website evolution impacts the website accessibility, as the amount of accessibility faults in websites tend to increase during this phase. Normally, the accessibility evaluation is done before deployment but there is a lack of accessibility maintenance after evolution. Although legislation has been established for government websites, updates are not always conducted. This paper hypothesizes that adopting a continuous validation process of website accessibility could facilitate accessibility maintenance after each evolution. For this end, a tool was adapted to support developers on finding and fixing the accessibility faults. We invited governmental websites managers to participate on our evaluation procedure that was based on failures report by email, questionnaire and direct contact, to make them aware of the regulation and the faults found in the websites under their responsibility. Even after our contact and constant messages sent by email suggesting how to fix the faults the adhesion was low. The results suggested a notable lack of interest towards the regulation compliance and a strong lack of sensitivity towards people's disabilities.

Taiwan’s E-Government Usability from Foreign Perspective and Website Accessibility amid COVID-19 Pandemic

“…"One of the major elements of usability is accessibility that means the easiness of user with disabilities to access the sites." (Arasid et al, 2018;Da Silva, Da Silva, & De Oliveira Moraes, 2019;Hung, 2012;Lessa & Tsegaye, 2019;Verkijika & De Wet, 2018) Accessibility issues range from restricted or limited visibility to color blindness or even complete permanent blindness as an example. Most disabilities have a wide range of conventional sensory human dysfunctionality.…”