Social4all: Definition of specific adaptations in Web applications to improve accessibility

Abstract

Web accessibility guidelines help developers to create websites which can more easily be used by people with different limitations. The principles and techniques of accessibility focus on the suitable use of standard Web components, alternative methods to present information, and alternatives to facilitate user interaction. Currently, the biggest part in creating accessible websites is played by Web developers, because they manage the page code. Unfortunately, there are millions of websites which do not follow accessibility guidelines, as this usually requires great effort and knowledge of accessibility issues. This research aims to create a platform, based on a novel approach, which allows a set of accessibility problems to be solved without modifying the original page code. The proposed platform is able to analyse websites and detect many accessibility problems automatically; after this, a guided assistant is used to offer adequate solutions to each detected problem. The assistant tries to abstract references to Web implementation issues and to explain every accessibility problem in an understandable way for non-technical people. This new approach could be useful to improve the level of accessibility of many websites for people besides Web developers.