Collaborative web accessibility improvement: challenges and possibilities
Abstract
Collaborative accessibility improvement has great potential to make the Web more adaptive in a timely manner by inviting users into the improvement process. The Social Accessibility Project is an experimental service for a new needs-driven improvement model based on collaborative metadata authoring technologies. In 10 months, about 18,000 pieces of metadata were created for 2,930 webpages through collaboration. We encountered many challenges as we sought to create a new mainstream approach. The productivity of the volunteer activities exceeded our expectation, but we found large and important problems in the screen reader users' lack of awareness of their own accessibility problems. In this paper, we first introduce examples, analyze some statistics from the pilot service and then discuss our findings and challenges. Three future directions including site-wide authoring are considered.
BibTeX
@conference{Takagi-2009-126522,author = {Hironobu Takagi and Shinya Kawanaka and Masatomo Kobayashi and Daisuke Sato and Chieko Asakawa},
title = {Collaborative web accessibility improvement: challenges and possibilities},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '09)},
year = {2009},
month = {October},
pages = {195 - 202},
}