2009 Proceeding- General Chair:
- David Sloan,
- Program Chairs:
- Chieko Asakawa,
- Hironobu Takagi
The International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A) was started in 2004 with the aim of accelerating research activities towards an accessible World Wide Web. Through previous workshops, a growing number of participants from academia, industry, government and nonprofit organisations around the world have gathered to exchange their latest research results, widen their perspectives through discussions with their peers, and establish future research agendas across disciplines and sectors. Each year, we choose a theme to encourage a focus on the emerging challenges in a particular area of accessibility, and for W4A 2009 we posed the question: Web accessibility for older users are we there yet? Population demographics indicate that our populations are ageing across the board. With the growth of the knowledge economy, and a move from manual work to more thought and communication based activities, there is the very real possibility of older Web users being able to finding productive, fulfilling, and social empowering employment; if only technology, and specifically the Web, where available to them. We asked W4A participants to consider how this new population will interact with Web based resources, and what new problems in accessibility might require be to overcome? Will the Web provide the social, employment, and health care benefits currently unavailable to older users? Will complex and highly graphical interfaces excluded ageing users from access? How do the adaptation patterns for Web access by older people vary across cultures? What problems exist, what are the upcoming problems, what solutions are required? Finally, what effect will an ageing user population have on the wider Web?
This year, 9 technical papers and 9 communication papers were selected from 30 submissions through our thorough peer-review process. As usual, we received worldwide submissions, spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. This year we were particularly pleased to receive a number of submissions from the host venue, Spain. The coverage of submissions was comprehensive across Web accessibility research fields: exploration of more scientific, harmonized, and useful guidelines, new tools to improve accessibility, new accessibility technologies to tackle new social and rich websites, technologies to improve Web access in everyday life environments, reports from countries around the globe, and many papers that directly addressed the challenges supporting an ageing population of Web users.
This year, we have two outstanding keynote speakers. Andrew Arch is the W3Cs Web Accessibility and Ageing Specialist, and was previously Accessibility manager with Vision Australia. Andrew leads work on the EU-funded WAIAGE project, and will share his thoughts on progress towards a more usable Web for older people. Mike Paciello, founder of the Paciello Group (TPG), is a leading consultant in the accessibility industry. He co-chaired work on updating U.S. Rehabilitation Act. Section 508, wrote the first book on web accessibility for disabled people, and through TPG continues to actively work to help organisations to establish accessible Web sites. Mike's talk focuses on the potential of personas, scenarios and storytelling to enhance empathy amongst web designers for the challenges facing older web users. In addition to the keynotes, we are delighted to be hosting a panel session which will explore the particular challenges facing supporting older people in Spain in uptake and continuing usage of information and communication technology, and how these challenges compare with other parts of the world. Our thanks go to Alan Chuter (Technosite/ONCE) for organising this session.
Proceeding Downloads
Web accessibility for older users: successes and opportunities (keynote)
Web accessibility for older users -- are we there yet? We understand many of the needs, however there are some gaps in our knowledge and much integration and adoption still required.
The Web Accessibility Initiative: Ageing Education and Harmonisation (...
Age and web access: the next generation
When today's young adults become 'older adults' will they exhibit difficulties with technology that appear to characterize the current older generation? This paper is intended to begin a discussion of technology experience as related to aging. The goal ...
A survey of technology accessibility problems faced by older users in China
Internet accessibility for older users has become an important issue to promote inclusion and participation in the Information Society. In this paper, we propose an investigation into the technology accessibility problems faced by the elderly in China. ...
Hera-FFX: a Firefox add-on for semi-automatic web accessibility evaluation
Website accessibility evaluation is a complex task requiring a combination of human expertise and software support. There are several online and offline tools to support the manual web accessibility evaluation process. However, they all have some ...
Transition of accessibility evaluation tools to new standards
While automatic tools are not intended to replace human judgement they are crucial in order to develop accessible web sites. The release of WCAG 2.0 entails that the existing plethora of accessibility review tools will have to be updated. This paper ...
A framework for filtering web accessibility guidelines
This paper first presents a framework for filtering the Web Accessibility Guidelines according to contexts of use. It then presents a prototype that implements the framework and explains an evaluation of the prototype.
Prosumers and accessibility: how to ensure a productive interaction
User-generated content (UGC) has become prevalent on the Web. It is not created by professional developers, but by prosumers: basic web users that also produce their own content. Thus, they lack any background, training, wherewithal, awareness and ...
Augmenting social media accessibility
The popularity of social media is affecting society as they are changing the way communication, collaboration, interaction, and information are produced and consumed. A part of the society (e.g., the one more technologically advanced) takes advantage of ...
Audio presentation of auto-suggest lists
One of the most significant advances behind World Wide Web (Web) 2.0 is the ability to allow parts of a Web page to be updated independently. This can provide an exciting, interactive experience for sighted users, who are used to dealing with complex ...
Accessibility perspectives on enabling South African sign language in the South African national accessibility portal
Persons with disabilities are often marginalised from economy and society due to the lack of access to disability related information and services. Through the use of assistive technologies access to the information and services can often be obtained ...
The third age web: empathic design achieved through persona development & storytelling (keynote)
The Third Age Web - a usable Web designed to accommodate older adults - embraces the principles of user centered design; that is, a world wide web that is engaging, interactive, easy-to-use, navigable and otherwise relevant to the information & ...
Web presentation layer bootstrapping for accessibility and performance
In websites today, most browser incompatibilities are overcome using detection by available client features or the user-agent. This logic is often baked into JavaScript libraries client-side to limit functionality, or clients are filtered server-side to ...
Combining SADIe and AxsJAX to improve the accessibility of web content
The advent of Web 2.0 technologies has allowed once static Web documents to be transformed into online interactive applications. To facilitate the accessibility of this dynamic content, Google have developed the AxsJAX framework that can insert ...
Evaluation of techniques defined in WCAG 2.0 with older people
Although WCAG 2.0 offer techniques for making web content more accessible to all people, very little is known about how these techniques enhance web accessibility for older people. This paper addresses two techniques, keyboard-based navigation and ...
Virtual teaching in a society of learning
Education is a social practice historically placed and goes beyond all human activity, spreading to the network of relations that takes place in the social fabric, mediated or not by some kind of technology. Online education -- that is, computer ...
Adapting learning environments with AccessForAll
ATutor is an Open Source Web-based learning environment that has accessibility as a guiding development principle. From its beginning, ATutor was created to fill a need for an accessible network-based Learning Management System (LMS) [2] [3].
Continuing ...
User tests demonstration: real experiences in measuring web accessibility needs for people with disabilities and the elderly
- Jesus Hernandez Galán,
- Martinez Usero,
- J. Ángel,
- Martinez Usero,
- J. Ángel,
- Varela Méndez,
- M. Jesús,
- Varela Méndez,
- M. Jesús
A practical user test session with people with disabilities and the elderly is presented. The background and expert knowledge on web accessibility evaluation of ONCE Foundation, CIDAT and Technosite will be used to carry out a demonstrative workshop on ...
TeleWeb: accessible service for web browsing via phone
In this paper, we present TeleWeb -- a telephony service for web browsing via the most ubiquitous communication device, the Phone. TeleWeb integrates a simple and usable phone interface with the intelligent features such as context-directed browsing, ...
Accessibility for the HTML5 <video> element
In this paper, we describe existing implementations for putting subtitles and captions alongside the HTML5 <video> tag inside Web pages and a proposal for standardizing such approaches, which will make them interoperable and easier to be processed by ...
Web-based Chinese sign language broadcasting system
We have analyzed the requirement of the deaf who were aware of the necessity of using sign language animation to broadcast the text on the web pages. So we have designed the architecture and implemented the web-based Chinese Sign Language Broadcasting ...
About the relevance of accessibility barriers in the everyday interactions of older people with the web
This paper reports key findings of a 3-year ethnographical study of the everyday interactions of older people with the web. The data consisted of in-situ observations and conversations with 388 older people while using myriads of web and computer ...
User requirement analysis for a railway ticketing portal with emphasis on semantic accessibility for older users
In this paper, we present the results from a survey on user requirements for older users of online ticketing services of a nationwide railway ticket and travel information portal. Our survey shows that older users differentiate in their attitude towards ...
Getting mobile with mobile devices: using the web to improve transit accessibility
The current model for public transportation in urban environments poses many limitations for travelers who are blind or visually impaired. Small communities are serviced by transit authorities with constrained budgets. Accordingly, few resources are ...
Guideline aggregation: web accessibility evaluation for older users
Web site evaluation methodologies and validation engines take the view that all accessibility guidelines must be met to gain compliance. Problems exist in this regard as contradictions within the rule set may arise, and the type of impairment or its ...
Quantitative evaluation for web accessibility with respect to disabled groups
In this research, we propose a methodology for evaluating web accessibility with respect to disabled users, especially the vision-impaired and the hearing-impaired. Two stages are involved in our approach. In the first stage, we adopt barriers proposed ...
Metrics for accessibility on the Vamolà project
How far are the Web sites from accessibility? Such a question implies a measure and, before, metrics or a set of metrics to quantitatively describe distances or closeness to one or more aspects of inclusion. Quantitative evaluations can effectively ...
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- Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A)