Reviews

Search results

• Participatory Design for Cognitive Accessibility of Web-based Interactive Systems

  Adrian Wegener · 2024 · Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This doctoral consortium paper outlines a PhD research program aimed at addressing the significant underrepresentation of cognitive accessibility in web accessibility research. The author notes that while cognitive disabilities account for a 28% share of disabilities in Germany,…

  cognitive accessibility · participatory design · attention · focus · ADHD

• Does ChatGPT Generate Accessible Code? Investigating Accessibility Challenges in LLM-Generated Source Code

  Wajdi Aljedaani, Abdulrahman Habib, Ahmed Aljohani, Marcelo Eler, Yunhe Feng · 2024 · Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents the first empirical evaluation of the accessibility of web code generated by ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), examining both how accessible the generated code is and how well the model can fix accessibility violations. The study involved 88 web developers who prompted…

  web accessibility · large language models · ChatGPT · automated testing · WCAG

• QualState: Finding Website States for Accessibility Evaluation

  Filipe Rosa Martins, Letícia Seixas Pereira, Carlos Duarte · 2024 · Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper introduces QualState, a web crawling tool designed to solve a fundamental limitation of automated accessibility evaluation: the inability to test dynamic content in Single Page Applications (SPAs). SPAs like Facebook, Google Maps, and Gmail change their content in…

  automated testing · web accessibility · single page applications · web crawling · accessibility evaluation

• Me, the Web and Digital Accessibility

  Reinaldo Ferraz · 2024 · Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024 (WWW)

  This personal essay traces the parallel trajectories of Reinaldo Ferraz's career and the evolution of the web in Brazil, from his first encounter with computers in 1992 through his current role at NIC.br (the Brazilian Network Information Center). Born in 1977 in a São Paulo…

  autoethnography · web accessibility · Brazil · web standards · digital accessibility history

• Invisible, Unreadable, and Inaudible Cookie Notices: An Evaluation of Cookie Notices for Users with Visual Impairments

  Janice M. Clarke, Maryam Mehrnezhad, Ehsan Toreini · 2024 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This study investigates the accessibility of cookie notices for users with visual impairments (VI), combining automated testing of 46 top UK websites with a user study of 100 participants who use assistive technology. The researchers employed multiple testing approaches: WAVE…

  screen readers · visual impairments · privacy · web accessibility · cookie consent

• A More Accessible Web with Natural Language Interface

  Xiang Deng · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This extended abstract proposes building a general natural language interface (NLI) for the Web that would allow users to express their needs in plain language and have the system automatically carry out the required actions on any website. The approach aims to reduce the…

  natural language processing · web accessibility · web automation · semantic parsing · large language models

• Understanding and Improving Drilled-Down Information Extraction from Online Data Visualizations for Screen-Reader Users

  Ather Sharif, Andrew M. Zhang, Katharina Reinecke, Jacob O. Wobbrock · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This extended abstract presents enhancements to VoxLens, an open-source JavaScript plug-in that improves the accessibility of online data visualizations for screen-reader users (SRUs) through a multimodal approach. Over 7.6 million people in the United States use screen readers,…

  screen readers · data visualization accessibility · alternative text · sonification · blind and low vision

• Accessibility Metatesting: Comparing Nine Testing Tools

  Jonathan Robert Pool · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This short paper presents a systematic empirical comparison of nine automated web accessibility testing tools that are amenable to integration into multi-tool testing regimes (free or nearly free, controllable via APIs or NPM packages, and comprehensive in scope). The nine tools…

  automated accessibility testing · web accessibility · accessibility testing · accessibility evaluation · WCAG compliance

• OPTIMAL-EM: Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This extended abstract presents OPTIMAL-EM, a prototypical tool and framework designed to optimise the web accessibility evaluation process by systematically selecting representative pages from a website for auditing. Currently, accessibility evaluations supported by…

  automated accessibility testing · web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · web crawling · machine learning

• Towards Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This doctoral consortium extended abstract presents a PhD project proposing a novel framework and prototypical tool for optimising web accessibility evaluation through statistically representative page sampling. The work is the single-author companion to the multi-author…

  automated accessibility testing · web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · web crawling · machine learning

• A platform to check website compliance with web accessibility standards

  Reinaldo Ferraz, Ana Duarte, João Bárbara, Adriano C.M. Pereira, Wagner Meira · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This short paper presents the TIC Web Acessibilidade platform, a comprehensive system for evaluating and monitoring the accessibility of Brazilian government websites at scale. Developed by NIC.br (the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee's executive arm) in collaboration with…

  automated testing · web accessibility · government accessibility · accessibility monitoring · web crawler

• Notably Inaccessible — Data Driven Understanding of Data Science Notebook (In)Accessibility

  Venkatesh Potluri, Sudheesh Singanamalla, Nussara Tieanklin, Jennifer Mankoff · 2023 · Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '23)

  This paper presents the first large-scale analysis of the accessibility of computational notebooks — interactive documents combining code, text, and data visualizations that have become the standard tool for data science work. The researchers analyzed 100,000 Jupyter notebooks…

  computational notebooks · data science · screen readers · blind and visually impaired · data visualization

• Towards Real-Time Measurements of Internet Health: Optimizing Large-Scale Web Accessibility Evaluations

  Luís P. Carvalho, Tiago Guerreiro, Shaun Lawson, Kyle Montague · 2023 · Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2023)

  This paper investigates how to optimize page sampling strategies for large-scale web accessibility evaluations, aiming to make near real-time measurements of Internet Health feasible. Current large-scale accessibility studies are financially and time exhaustive, typically…

  web accessibility · large-scale evaluation · automated testing · internet health · WCAG

• The Accessibility of Data Visualizations on the Web for Screen Reader Users: Practices and Experiences During COVID-19

  Danyang Fan, Alexa Fay Siu, Hrishikesh Rao, Gene Sung-Ho Kim, Xavier Vazquez, Lucy Greco, Sile O'Modhrain, Sean Follmer · 2023 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This comprehensive mixed-methods study examines data visualization accessibility through three complementary investigations: an accessibility audit of 87 COVID-19 visualizations, an online survey of 127 screen reader users, and contextual inquiry with 12 participants. The…

  data visualization · screen readers · visual impairment · web accessibility · accessibility audit

• When Headers Are Not There: Design and User Evaluation of an Automatic Topicalisation and Labelling Tool to Aid the Exploration of Web Documents by Blind Users

  Jorge Sassaki Resende Silva, André Pimenta Freire, Paula Christina Figueira Cardoso · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2022)

  This paper addresses a fundamental problem for blind screen reader users: what happens when web documents lack proper heading markup, eliminating one of the primary navigation strategies available to them. The researchers designed and evaluated a tool that uses Natural Language…

  screen readers · headings · natural language processing · text segmentation · blind users

• Machine Learning for Accessible Web Navigation

  Tlamelo Makati · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This extended abstract explores how machine learning techniques, particularly reinforcement learning, can be adapted to improve web navigation accessibility in alignment with WCAG Guideline 2.4 (Navigable). The author observes that ML techniques have already been applied to…

  machine learning · web accessibility · reinforcement learning · web navigation · query optimization

• Creating an Open Source, Customizable Accessibility Checker for Content Authors

  Adam Chaboryk · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This extended abstract introduces Sa11y, an open-source, in-page accessibility checker specifically designed for content authors rather than developers. Created at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) to manage accessibility across several hundred website…

  automated testing · accessibility tools · content management · open source · quality assurance

• The Use of ADKAR to Instil Change in the Accessibility of University Websites

  Silvia Rodríguez Vázquez · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This short paper applies the ADKAR change management model — Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement — to understand what interventions are needed to improve web accessibility at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) in Switzerland. The author argues that…

  organizational accessibility · change management · higher education · web accessibility · accessibility policy

• Challenges and Opportunities in Creating an Accessible Web Application for Learning Organic Chemistry

  Allyson Grace Yu · 2022 · Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22)

  This paper investigates the accessibility challenges of creating web-based educational tools for organic chemistry, a STEM subject that relies heavily on visual 2D and 3D molecular representations. The author notes that while 19.8% of undergraduate students report having a…

  STEM accessibility · STEM education · web accessibility · organic chemistry · keyboard accessibility

• SoundCells: Designing a Browser-Based Music Technology for Braille and Print Notation

  William Payne, Fabiha Ahmed, Michael Gardell, R. Luke DuBois, Amy Hurst · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from New York University presents SoundCells, a free, open-source, browser-based music notation tool designed to be accessible to screen reader users while outputting music in three formats simultaneously: audio playback, visual print scores, and braille music…

  music accessibility · blindness · visual impairment · braille · screen readers

• Accessibility Assessment of Violations on the Stack Overflow Platform

  Ingrid M. Miranda da Silva, Luciano Arruda Teran, Marcelle Pereira Mota · 2022 · Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC)

  This study investigates whether code snippets shared on Stack Overflow — one of the world's most popular developer Q&A platforms with over 120 million monthly visitors — follow web accessibility guidelines. The researchers built a tool called A11y RepoMining that extends the…

  web accessibility · repository mining · software development · code quality · WCAG compliance

• "Every Website Is a Puzzle!": Facilitating Access to Common Website Features for People with Visual Impairments

  Natã M. Barbosa, Jordan Hayes, Smirity Kaushik, Yang Wang · 2022 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper addresses a fundamental challenge for screen reader users: while sighted users can rely on visual conventions to find common website features (log in at top right, contact at bottom), these shortcuts are inaccessible to users with visual impairments who must linearly…

  visual impairment · screen readers · web accessibility · machine learning · crowdsourcing

• Customizable Tabular Access to Web Data Records for Convenient Low-vision Screen Magnifier Interaction

  Hae-Na Lee, Vikas Ashok · 2022 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper introduces TableView+, a browser extension designed to address the significant challenges low-vision screen magnifier users face when browsing websites containing web data records—structured listings such as product catalogs, job postings, flight search results, and…

  low vision · screen magnifier · web accessibility · data extraction · browser extension

• The Transparency of Automatic Accessibility Evaluation Tools

  Parvaneh Parvin, Vanessa Palumbo, Marco Manca, Fabio Paternò · 2021 · Proceedings of the 18th International Web for All Conference (W4A '21)

  This paper examines a critical but often overlooked problem in automated accessibility testing: the lack of transparency in how evaluation tools operate and present their results. The authors observe that different accessibility evaluation tools frequently produce variable…

  automated testing · accessibility evaluation · WCAG · transparency · web accessibility

• Accessibility Challenges in Lab Simulations

  Matthew Ralston, Greg Gay · 2021 · Proceedings of the 18th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper describes the accessibility challenges encountered and solutions developed when creating online lab simulations for an Occupational Health and Safety course at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University). The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift from…

  education accessibility · online learning · keyboard accessibility · screen reader accessibility · ARIA