Abstract
The purpose of this study is to provide an accessibility measure of webpages, in order to draw disabled users to the pages that have been designed to be accessible to them. Our approach is based on the theory of belief functions, using data which are supplied by reports produced by automatic web content assessors that test the validity of criteria defined by the WCAG 2.0 guidelines proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) organization. These tools detect errors with gradual degrees of certainty and their results do not always converge. For these reasons, to fuse information coming from the reports, we choose to use an information fusion framework which can take into account the uncertainty and imprecision of information as well as divergences between sources. Our accessibility indicator covers four categories of deficiencies. To validate the theoretical approach in this context, we propose an evaluation completed on a corpus of 100 most visited French news websites, and 2 evaluation tools. The results obtained illustrate the interest of our accessibility indicator.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abascal, J., Arrue, M., Fajardo, I., Garay, N., Tomhas, J.: The use of guidelines to automatically verify web accessibility. Universal Access in the Information Society 3(1), 71–79 (2004)
Brajnik, G.: Comparing accessibility evaluation tools: a method for tool effectiveness. Universal Access in the Information Society 3(3-4), 252–263 (2004)
Brajnik, G.: Web Accessibility Testing: When the Method is the Culprit. In: International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs, ICCHP 2006, pp. 156–163 (2006)
Brajnik, G.: Validity and Reliability of Web Accessibility Guidelines. In: Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS, pp. 131–138 (2009)
Caldwell, B., Cooper, M., Guarino Reid, L., Vanderheiden, G.: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2 (December 11, 2008), http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
Dempster, A.P.: Upper and Lower probabilities induced by a multivalued mapping. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 38, 325–339 (1967)
Dubois, J.-C., Le Gall, Y., Martin, M.: Software Engineering System for the Analysis of Accessibility Data. Patent No. 1451562, Filed February 26th 2014
European Disability Strategy 2010-20: A Renewed Commitment to a Barrier-Free Europe. COM 636 final (2010)
Gay, G., Qi Li, C.: AChecker: open, interactive, customizable, web accessibility checking. In: W4A International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, vol. 33, ACM Press (2010)
Ivory, M.Y., Yu, S., Gronemyer, K.: Search result exploration: a preliminary study of blind and sighted users’ decision making and performance. CHI Extended Abstracts, pp. 1453–1456. ACM Press (2004)
Martin, A., Osswald, C., Dezert, J., Smarandache, F.: General combination rules for qualitative and quantitative beliefs. Journal of Advances in Information Fusion 3(2), 67–82 (2008)
Nielsen, J., Tahir, M.: Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed. New Riders Publishing (2001)
Shafer, G.: A mathematical theory of evidence. Princeton University Press (1976)
Smets, P.: Belief Functions: the Disjunctive Rule of Combination and the Generalized Bayesian Theorem. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 9, 1–35 (1993)
Vanderheiden, G.C., Vanderheiden, K.R.: Accessible design of consumer products: guidelines for the design of consumer products to increase their accessibility to people with disabilities or who are aging. Madison - WI, Trace R&D Center (1991)
Vigo, M., Brajnik, G.: Automatic web accessibility metrics: where we are and where we can go. Interacting with Computers 3(2), 137–155 (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dubois, JC., Le Gall, Y., Martin, A. (2014). Designing a Belief Function-Based Accessibility Indicator to Improve Web Browsing for Disabled People. In: Cuzzolin, F. (eds) Belief Functions: Theory and Applications. BELIEF 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8764. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11191-9_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11191-9_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11190-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11191-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)