Evaluation of Web content accessibility in an Israeli institution of higher education

Nowadays, the Web constitutes an integral part of higher education and offers an unprecedented level of access to information and services. The increasing number of students with disabilities in higher education emphasizes the need of universities and colleges to make the necessary adjustments to ensure their Web content accessibility. Despite the development of technical standards and accessibility legislation, studies around the world have consistently shown that Web content accessibility remains a concern in higher education. Mandatory Web accessibility in Israel is at an early stage. The scope of the legal requirements applicable to higher education is not entirely resolved. The aim of this research is to explore the current implementation of Web accessibility in the Israeli higher education context, during a period of evolving legal changes in this regard. An automated evaluation tool was used to measure the adherence of the sample Web pages to the technical standards. Results show that all examined Web pages presented accessibility barriers and were non-compliant with the most basic conformance level. “Contrast” and “missing alternative text” errors were the most frequent problems identified in the evaluation. The library’s Web pages exhibit relatively better level of accessibility compared to the other examined Web pages of the university. The research highlights the need for clear and enforceable legislation to encourage academic Web accessibility. Additionally, technical training and awareness raising could be key elements in improving accessibility.     

The Art of the Accessibility Statement

ABSTRACT

Many libraries recognize the need to create Web sites accessible to users with disabilities, as legislated in U.S. Code Section 508, but Section 508 compliance defines a minimum legal level of accessibility. The same technology that can make a Web site available to users with disabilities can also make the site available to users with wireless devices, such as PDAs and cell phones, with Internet access. To bring about “maximum accessibility,” library Web designers need to implement Web standards. This article argues the place to begin implementing these standards is with an accessibility statement which serves as both a contract and a navigational aid.     

Exploring the relationship between web accessibility and user experience

Understanding the interplay between the user experience (UX) and Web accessibility is key to design Web sites that, beyond access, could provide a better UX for people with disabilities. In this paper we examine the relationship between UX attributes and Web accessibility. We measured accessibility in two ways: the perceived accessibility as reported by participants and accessibility in terms of conformance to guidelines. Findings uncover that perceived Web accessibility is significantly correlated with 27 of the 35 UX attributes analysed, suggesting these two qualities are closely related. The relationship between UX and conformance to WCAG 2.0 is more elusive: we only found significant correlations between the hedonic attributes original, innovative and exciting.     

Predicting web site audience demographics using content and design cues

The size and dynamism of the Web pose challenges for all its stakeholders, which include producers and consumers of content as well as advertisers who want to place advertisements next to relevant content. A critical piece of information for producers/publishers of content as well as advertisers is the demographics of the consumers who are likely to visit a given web site. In this article we explore predictive models that attempt to deduce the demographics of the audience of a web site using cues embedded in the design or the content of its homepage. We find that it is possible to effectively predict different types of demographics of consumers of web sites on the basis of the suggested approach. Through a statistical analysis we observe that several design elements and the content differ significantly among web sites dominated by consumers of different demographic classes. We also suggest the use of an ensemble classifier that combines the content and design cues with the goal of further improving the prediction performance.     

基于Web日志挖掘的信息无障碍网站设计研究

针对当前一些实现信息无障碍网站存在的问题,该文设计了一个网站设计架构,利用Web日志挖掘技术提取用户兴趣和访问优先序列,采取网站页面信息动态填充至网站主页通用框架模块中,实现智能化、个性化无障碍访问。     

The Beauty of Ugliness: Preserving while Communicating Online with Shared Graphic Photos

In this paper, we report on interviews with 11 Shia content creators who create and share graphic, bloody photos of Tatbeer, a religious ritual involving self-harm practices on Ashura, the death anniversary of the prophet Muhammad’s grandson. We show how graphic images serve as an object of communication in religious practices with the local community, the inner-self, and a wider audience. In particular, we highlight how content creators appropriated, in their own words, “ugly” photos to preserve the authenticity and beauty of their rituals while communicating their own interpretation of such rituals to others. We suggest that ugliness may be regarded as a useful resource to inform systems that seek to invite dialogue with marginalized or minority groups.     

Bridging the accessibility gap in Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are being fostered as a global movement for providing educational opportunities to all. However, people with disabilities are still excluded from full participation because of the lack of accessibility of OER websites, as well as of the resources themselves. This work presents a proposal for the design of OER websites that would enable equitable access for all users. This design aims to bridge the accessibility gap through the personalization of the whole OER environment to facilitate an accessible User Experience (UX) based on a user profile that includes the self-identification of disability status. This profile configures not only the “look and feel” of the interface but also the delivery of educational resources suitable for this user profile. To achieve this purpose, the design goes beyond compliance with the ISO/IEC 40500 W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, since it includes the personalization of the accessible experience through usability considerations and adaptations of educational resources. The delivery of educational resources matches the user’s profile with regard to their sensory abilities, cognitive faculties and their requirements of functionality control, display layout and language. As a proof of concept, we have developed an OER website based on this design and have conducted a set of UX tests that include users with different disabilities. The test results confirm the feasibility and suitability of our design regarding accessible UX. Finally, the contribution of this document arises from the explicit recognition of the particular needs associated with the disability profiles to establish the response of the entire OER system which enables a truly inclusive experience by exempting the user from performing configuration tasks.     

Validating WCAG versions 1.0 and 2.0 through usability testing with disabled users

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has become the de-facto standard for accessibility on the Web. WCAG version 1.0 has become significant both as a practical tool and as an academic set of principles and is presently the basis of Web accessibility evaluations and guidelines in many countries. WCAG version 2.0 was released in 2008. This paper reports on a study that empirically validated the usefulness of using WCAG as a heuristic for website accessibility. Through controlled usability tests of two websites with disabled users (N?=?7) and a control group (N?=?6), it was found that only 27% of the identified website accessibility problems could have been identified through the use of WCAG 1.0. A similar analysis of conformance to WCAG 2.0 showed a marginal 5% improvement concerning identified website accessibility problems. Compensating for the low number of test subjects with confidence tests gave results that were still low (42% for WCAG 1.0 and 49% for WCAG 2.0, with 95% confidence). It is concluded from this that the application of WAI accessibility guidelines is not sufficient to guarantee website accessibility. It is recommended that future versions of the accessibility guidelines should be based on empirical data and validated empirically and that WAI expand their definition of accessibility to include “usability for all” in accordance with ISO 9241-171:2008.     

Improving web accessibility: a study of webmaster perceptions

Large percentages of web sites continue to be inaccessible to people with disabilities. Since tools and guidelines are available to help designers and webmasters in making their web sites accessible, it is unclear why so many sites continue to be inaccessible. In this paper, we present the “Web Accessibility Integration Model,” which highlights the multiple points within web development where accessibility can be incorporated or forgotten. It is uncertain why webmasters do not use the various tools and guidelines that currently are available for making web sites accessible. A survey was created, and data was collected from 175 webmasters, indicating their knowledge on the topic of web accessibility and the reasons for their actions related to web accessibility. Findings and future directions for research are discussed.     

Enhancing Web accessibility via the Vox Portal and a Web-hosted dynamic HTMLVoxML converter

Interactive voice browsers offer an alternative paradigm that enables both sighted and visually impaired users to access the World Wide Web. In addition to the desktop PC, voice browsers afford ubiquitous mobile access to the World Wide Web using a wide range of consumer devices. This technology can facilitate a safe, ‘hands-free' browsing environment which is of importance both to car drivers and various mobile and technical professionals. By providing voice-mediated access, information providers can reach a wider audience and leverage existing investment in their World Wide Web content. In this paper we describe the Vox Portal, a scaleable VoxML client, and a World Wide Web Server-hosted dynamic HTMLVoxML converter.     

Language independent search in MediaEval's Spoken Web Search task

In this paper, we describe several approaches to language-independent spoken term detection and compare their performance on a common task, namely “Spoken Web Search”. The goal of this part of the MediaEval initiative is to perform low-resource language-independent audio search using audio as input. The data was taken from “spoken web” material collected over mobile phone connections by IBM India as well as from the LWAZI corpus of African languages. As part of the 2011 and 2012 MediaEval benchmark campaigns, a number of diverse systems were implemented by independent teams, and submitted to the “Spoken Web Search” task. This paper presents the 2011 and 2012 results, and compares the relative merits and weaknesses of approaches developed by participants, providing analysis and directions for future research, in order to improve voice access to spoken information in low resource settings.     

Implementing Web 2.0 technologies in higher education: A collective case study

Web 2.0 technologies are becoming more popular in the everyday lives of students. As a result, teachers and designers have begun to explore their use in formal education. This paper presents evaluation findings from a collective case study of six Web 2.0 implementations in Australian higher education. The research was undertaken as part of a larger study that sought to understand how today’s students use information and communication technologies to support their learning. Conducted across three universities, the research included a range of disciplines, class sizes and year levels. A common evaluation strategy was used in order to collect comparable data from which commonalities and differences could be identified. This paper provides an overview of the study, describes the methodology used, summarises the implementation experiences of staff and students involved and presents the key findings. The results suggest that most students had little prior experience with relevant technologies and that many struggled to see the value of using Web 2.0 technologies for learning and teaching, both of which have important implications for the design of appropriate learning tasks. While the argument can be made for improving the design through better task-technology alignment, this study also highlights inherent tensions between Web 2.0 and educational practices.     

Evolution patterns and gradual trends

Nowadays, many databases record ordered or temporally annotated data, such as Web access logs or genomic sequences. Therefore, sequence mining has become an important research area. Among these data mining approaches, sequential patterns aim at describing frequent behaviors. In the access data of a commercial Web site, one may, for instance, discover that “35% of customers successively buy a PSP then a memory stick and PSP games”. To provide more complete information, fuzzy sequential patterns were designed, including quantitative values within the mining task. Such patterns, considering the previous example, would be “35% of customers buy a PSP, then they buy few games many times, and then they buy a high‐capacity memory stick once.” However, symbolic or fuzzy sequential patterns, in their current form, do not allow to extract temporal tendencies that are typical of sequential data. By means of temporal tendency mining, one may discover in the same access data that “An increasing number of purchases of PSP games during a very short period is frequently followed by a purchase of a high‐capacity memory stick a few days later.” It would be easy to conclude that the users either quickly succeed in registering or make several attempts before they look at the help page within a few seconds. To the best of our knowledge, no method has been designed for discovering this kind of patterns. Therefore, we propose, in this paper, two approaches that extract pattern‐expressing trends or evolution. First, we define evolution patterns that summarize the evolution of the quantities in the data. We explain how they can be obtained from a quantitative sequence database. Second, we define gradual trends in fuzzy sequential data. These trends describe variations in the fulfillment of fuzzy properties according to time. For both kinds of patterns, we developed algorithms that were implemented and tested on real data. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Building a Usable and Accessible Semantic Web Interaction Platform

Semantic Web applications take off is being slower than expected, at least with respect to “real-world” applications and users. One of the main reasons for this lack of adoption is that most Semantic Web user interfaces are still immature from the usability and accessibility points of view. This is due to the novelty of these technologies, but this also motivates the exploration of alternative interaction paradigms, different from the “traditional” Web or Desktop applications ones. Our proposal is realized in the Rhizomer platform, which explores the possibilities of the object–action interaction paradigm at the Web scale. This paradigm is well suited for heterogeneous resource spaces such as those common in the Semantic Web. Resources, described by metadata, correspond to the objects in the paradigm. Semantic web services, which are dynamically associated to these objects, correspond to the actions. The platform is being put into practice in the context of a research project in order to build an open application for media distribution based on Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, its usability and accessibility have been evaluated in this real setting and compared to similar systems.     

基于Web2.0的教学多媒体共享平台应用探讨

论述了多媒体共享平台如何应用于教学中,介绍了Web2.0的基本概念与其在教育中的应用发展,分析了网络资源的分类与其作为开放学习的特性,随后介绍了网络教学多媒体共享平台的机制,进而分析其在教育与学习应用的相关实例。最后,提出对于教学多媒体共享平台在图书管理领域的可能应用建议。希望通过分析论述及创新观点的提出,能为相关研究者提供研究与应用的参考。     

The design and evaluation of accessibility on web navigation

Web sites have been deployed to create and sustain business competitiveness in a trend of emerging Web technologies and growing e-commerce. One critical success factor of e-commerce is the ability to allow information to be retrieved from a Web site in an efficient and effective manner. Such ability, being determined by both the Web site structure and the Web page organization, can be measured in terms of accessibility and popularity of Web pages. The relationship between accessibility and popularity of web pages is dynamic in nature and can be analyzed to enhance a Web design. Having observed the lack of means to measure information retrieval of a Web site, this paper purports to introduce a guideline to evaluate Web page accessibility based on several structural-based accessibility models where an innovative accessibility–popularity (A–P) analysis is deployed to measure and, thereby, to modify a Web structure. Both push (i.e. demand driven) strategies and pull (i.e. design driven) strategies are incorporated into such guideline. Further, accessibility models are analyzed and compared in order to identify appropriate applications for each model. The paper is concluded by a summary of future directions of the accessibility models.     

将游戏元素注入手机动漫的必要性及其技术可行性

诸如动画、游戏之类的通用娱乐软件的生产者无疑有两大夙愿：首先,希望自己的作品能获得观赏者较长时间的青睐,使观赏者从同一动画作品中获得更多的愉悦（通常,观众对某件动画作品只浏览一遍就没有兴趣了）。其次,希望软件能做到＂网络无关性＂,让观众通过以太网或无线网都能欣赏到自己的作品,从而拥有最广泛的用户群体。文章围绕这两个方面进行了初步的探讨。     

Accessibility of American University Special Education Departments’ Web sites

In the last 20 years, the World Wide Web (Web) has gone from being the means of disseminating information for a few scientists to a universal means of disseminating information across the globe. While the Web provides an unprecedented level of access to information for many, if not properly designed, Web sites can actually create a number of barriers to information access to persons with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accessibility of home pages of University Departments of Special Education. A total of 51 Special Education departmental Web sites were located using a popular online search engine and evaluated for accessibility. Two Web site evaluation programs were used to determine whether the Web sites meet minimum accessibility guidelines, and one of them was used to quantify the number of accessibility errors on each site. The results indicated that most (97 %) of the pages evaluated had accessibility problems, many (39 %) of which were severe and should be given a high priority for correcting. The good news is the majority of errors can easily be corrected. The work reflects a need for Departments of Special Education to examine the accessibility of their home pages. Direction for improving accessibility is provided.     

Database Security

“Why do I need to secure my database server? No one can access it — it’s in a DMZ protected by the firewall!” This is often the response when it is recommended that such devices are included within a security health check. In fact, database security is paramount in defending an organizations information, as it may be indirectly exposed to a wider audience than realised.This is the first of two articles that will examine database security. In this article we will discuss general database security concepts and common problems. In the next article we will focus on specific Microsoft SQL and Oracle security concerns.Database security has become a hot topic in recent times. With more and more people becoming increasingly concerned with computer security, we are finding that firewalls and Web servers are being secured more than ever (though this does not mean that there are not still a large number of insecure networks out there). As such, the focus is expanding to consider technologies such as databases with a more critical eye.