research-article

A novel heuristic method for quantitative assessment of web accessibility for colorblind

Authors:

Anshu SinglaAuthors Info & Claims

Universal Access in the Information Society, Volume 23, Issue 4

Pages 1957 - 1977

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-023-01006-w

Published: 19 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

The International Telecommunication Union has estimated that more than half of the world’s population use the Internet and access the hosted websites for various purposes like business, education, and social networking. These websites need to be accessible to people with visual impairments like color blindness. Thus, the design of such websites needs to follow certain web accessibility guidelines considering the accessibility for the colorblind. In this study, the authors have proposed a novel heuristic method to evaluate the compliance to the web accessibility guidelines provided by WCAG through a web accessibility score. This score is arrived at by evaluating the web design compliance to these mentioned guidelines based on a well-defined set of heuristics. As part of the experiment, websites from four categories were evaluated using the proposed method and the web accessibility score of the websites was arrived at with respect to color blindness disability. The results confirm the applicability of the proposed method to evaluate the websites for accessibility to colorblind people. The important research contributions are as follows: (a) a web accessibility score that helps to quantify the compliance to WCAG guidelines for color blindness by a web site; (b) a compilation of WCAG guidelines for web designers to design websites complying to accessibility for colorblind; (c) the proposed novel method would be further useful to check web accessibility compliance for users with other disabilities and give an indication of inclusivity for them; and (d) the novel heuristic method includes tool evaluation and manual observation ensuring maximum coverage for web accessibility guidelines. This quantification of web accessibility can support web accessibility experts for an opinion and help in providing a score for measuring web accessibility.

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Cited By

Salton BDall Agnol ANervis Lda Silva TSilveira M(2024)Optimizing manual web accessibility evaluation through a specialized toolProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702049(1-12)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3702038.3702049

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A novel heuristic method for quantitative assessment of web accessibility for colorblind

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cover image Universal Access in the Information Society

Universal Access in the Information Society Volume 23, Issue 4

Nov 2024

472 pages

EISSN:1615-5297

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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

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Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 19 June 2023

Accepted: 09 June 2023

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Cited By

Salton BDall Agnol ANervis Lda Silva TSilveira M(2024)Optimizing manual web accessibility evaluation through a specialized toolProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702049(1-12)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3702038.3702049

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