More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Guidelines, icons and marketable skills: an accessibility evaluation of 100 web development company homepages

Authors:

Teresa D. Gilbertson,

Colin H. C. MachinAuthors Info & Claims

W4A '12: Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

Article No.: 17, Pages 1 - 4

https://doi.org/10.1145/2207016.2207024

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Accessible websites are increasingly desired by clients with many web developers listing accessibility as a skill offered by their companies. An accessibility and validation study of 100 UK web development company homepages found that, while the skill set is gaining popularity in terms of visibility, the mention of accessibility on a developer website has no impact in terms of the actual accessibility of the homepage. The presence of validation and conformance icons for XHTML, CSS, WCAG 1.0 and 2.0 also does not necessarily reflect the current state of the site, which may have changed multiple times since the validation occurred. Accessibility errors are still common, with missing alt text and labels and poor keyboard accessibility in terms of keyboard traps as well as omission of "lang" attributes and reused id attribute values listed among the most frequent barriers encountered.

References

[1]

Disability Rights Commission. 2004. The Web Access and Inclusion for Disabled People A Formal Investigation.

[2]

England, R. Flash tabbing and focus solution http://www.discombo.co.uk/new/flashfocus/.

[3]

Freire, A. P., Russo, C. M. and Fortes, R. P. M. 2008. A survey on the accessibility awareness of people involved in web development projects in Brazil. In Proceedings of the 2008 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A), Beijing, China, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 87--96.

Digital Library

[4]

Hackett, S., Parmanto, B. and Zeng, X. Number 6/November-December 2005. A retrospective look at website accessibility over time. Behaviour and Information Technology 24, 407--417(11).

[5]

Lazar, J., Dudley-Sponaugle, A. and Greenidge, K. 2004. Improving web accessibility: a study of webmaster perceptions. Computers in Human Behavior 20, 269--288.

[6]

Lazar, J. and Greenidge, K. 2006. One year older, but not necessarily wiser: an evaluation of homepage accessibility problems over time. Univers.Access Inf.Soc. 4, 285--291.

Digital Library

[7]

Lopes, R., Van Isacker, K. and Carricco, L. 2010. Redefining assumptions: accessibility and its stakeholders. In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Computers helping people with special needs: Part I, Vienna, Austria, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 561--568.

Digital Library

[8]

Olalere, A. and Lazar, J. 2011. Accessibility of U. S. federal government home pages: Section 508 compliance and site accessibility statements. Government Information Quarterly 28, 303--309.

[9]

Rosson, M. B., Ballin, J. and Rode, J. 2005. Who, What, and How: A Survey of Informal and Professional Web Developers. In Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 199--206.

Digital Library

[10]

Thompson, T. 2009. A Longitudinal Study on Higher Education Web Accessibility: Implications for Advocates. In 12th Annual Accessing Higher Ground Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference, Boulder, Colorado, November 10--14,.

[11]

Trewin, S., Cragun, B., Swart, C., Brezin, J. and Richards, J. 2010. Accessibility challenges and tool features: an IBM Web developer perspective. In Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A), Raleigh, North Carolina, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 32:1--32:10.

Digital Library

[12]

Giving keyboard focus to an embedded Flash movie http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15586.html.

[13]

W3C CSS Validation Service http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/.

[14]

W3C Validation Markup Service http://validator.w3.org/.

[15]

Web Accessibility Checker http://achecker.ca/checker/index.php.

[16]

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 W3C Recommedation 11 December 2008 http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/.

Cited By

Sharma TKaushik SYu YAhmed SWang Y(2023)User Perceptions and Experiences of Targeted Ads on Social Media Platforms: Learning from Bangladesh and IndiaProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581498(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581498
Abu Doush ISultan KAl-Betar MAlmeraj ZAlyasseri ZAwadallah M(2023)Web accessibility automatic evaluation tools: to what extent can they be automated?CCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction10.1007/s42486-023-00127-85:3(288-320)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42486-023-00127-8
Akgül Y(2022)Evaluating Accessibility and Usability of Airline WebsitesApp and Website Accessibility Developments and Compliance Strategies10.4018/978-1-7998-7848-3.ch010(254-271)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7848-3.ch010
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Guidelines, icons and marketable skills: an accessibility evaluation of 100 web development company homepages
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. HCI design and evaluation methods
  2. Interaction design
    1. Interaction design process and methods
      1. User centered design
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing profession
      1. Assistive technologies
  2. User characteristics
    1. People with disabilities

Recommendations

Experienced barriers in web applications and their comparison to the WCAG guidelines
USAB'11: Proceedings of the 7th conference on Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society: information Quality in e-Health

A German organization established the study “Web 2.0 Accessible” in 2008 which asked Internet users with disabilities about the barriers they experience when using websites and web applications. This paper gives some interesting facts of the study which ...
Can the Web Be Made Accessible for People with Intellectual Disabilities?

This article presents the findings of a research project that aimed to contribute to the social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the World Wide Web (the Web). The Inclusive New Media Design (INMD) project brought together ...
Accessibility of Indian Government Web Portals with respect to WCAG 2.0 and GIGW Guidelines
ICEGOV '18: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

Web portals are excellent means to connect with people. Governments in many countries are making innovative use of web portals for effective governance. While doing so one of the major requirements is to make the web portals accessible to all citizens ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

W4A '12: Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

April 2012

189 pages

ISBN:9781450310192

DOI:10.1145/2207016

General Chairs:
Markel Vigo
University of Manchester, UK
,
Julio Abascal
University of the Basque Country, Spain
,
Program Chairs:
Rui Lopes
Google
,
Paola Salomoni
University of Bologna, Italy

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Google Inc.
Interaction-Design.org: Interaction-Design.org
Microsoft: Microsoft
Zakon Group
IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 April 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

W4A '12

Sponsor:

Interaction-Design.org
Microsoft
IW3C2

W4A '12: International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

April 16 - 17, 2012

Lyon, France

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

22
Total Citations
View Citations
464
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)20
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 13 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Sharma TKaushik SYu YAhmed SWang Y(2023)User Perceptions and Experiences of Targeted Ads on Social Media Platforms: Learning from Bangladesh and IndiaProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581498(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581498
Abu Doush ISultan KAl-Betar MAlmeraj ZAlyasseri ZAwadallah M(2023)Web accessibility automatic evaluation tools: to what extent can they be automated?CCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction10.1007/s42486-023-00127-85:3(288-320)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42486-023-00127-8
Akgül Y(2022)Evaluating Accessibility and Usability of Airline WebsitesApp and Website Accessibility Developments and Compliance Strategies10.4018/978-1-7998-7848-3.ch010(254-271)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7848-3.ch010
Akgül Y(2022)Accessibility Evaluation of Turkish E-Commerce WebsitesApp and Website Accessibility Developments and Compliance Strategies10.4018/978-1-7998-7848-3.ch007(169-187)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7848-3.ch007
Chen SChen CFan LFan MZhan XLiu Y(2022)Accessible or Not? An Empirical Investigation of Android App AccessibilityIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.310816248:10(3954-3968)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3108162
Akgül Y(2021)The Accessibility, Usability, Quality and Readability of Turkish State and Local Government Websites an Exploratory StudyResearch Anthology on Digital Transformation, Organizational Change, and the Impact of Remote Work10.4018/978-1-7998-7297-9.ch039(780-802)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7297-9.ch039
Peixoto CBranco FMartins JGonçalves R(2021)A Multi-Perspective Theoretical Analysis to Web AccessibilityResearch Anthology on Digital Transformation, Organizational Change, and the Impact of Remote Work10.4018/978-1-7998-7297-9.ch005(70-92)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7297-9.ch005
Teran LSilva AMelo GMota M(2021)Intelligent Approaches in the Software Development Process: a Systematic Literature MappingProceedings of the X Latin American Conference on Human Computer Interaction10.1145/3488392.3488397(1-5)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488392.3488397
Chiou PAlotaibi AHalfond WSpinellis DGousios GChechik MDi Penta M(2021)Detecting and localizing keyboard accessibility failures in web applicationsProceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3468264.3468581(855-867)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3468264.3468581
Palmer ZOswal SKoris R(2020)Reimagining Business Planning, Accessibility, and Web Design Instruction: A Stacked Interdisciplinary Collaboration Across National BoundariesJournal of Technical Writing and Communication10.1177/004728162096699051:4(429-467)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047281620966990
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents