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Tools for an Innovative Approach to Web Accessibility

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Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Novel Design Approaches and Technologies (HCII 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13308))

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Abstract

Standards, guidelines and many support resources to help developers create accessible websites and applications are widely available. Yet, the majority of web content available on the Internet still exhibits critical accessibility issues.

While some factors leading to this situation (such as a general lack of interest by stakeholders) cannot be controlled, we argue that there is room for improvements to the current situation from a technical point of view. In fact, we argue that:

  • Creating truly accessible content still requires highly specialized knowledge often unavailable among web developers and content authors.

  • Existing tools do little or nothing to let non-disabled people perceive accessibility issues in their code and their impact on people with disabilities.

  • Accessibility is not enforced at the implementation level by existing web technologies and user agents.

Therefore, we propose a threefold approach to rethink web accessibility from the ground up, creating:

  • Saharian, an innovative manual testing tool that can map accessibility issues to concepts that developers are already familiar with.

  • AX, a declarative framework of web components capable of enforcing the generation of accessible markup as much as possible.

  • A11A, a categorized, structured repository of accessibility-related resources currently available on the Internet.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Vincenzo Rubano, Fabio Vitali & Chantal Lengua

Authors
  1. Vincenzo Rubano
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  2. Fabio Vitali
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  3. Chantal Lengua
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Correspondence to Chantal Lengua .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece

    Margherita Antona

  2. University of Crete and Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece

    Constantine Stephanidis

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Rubano, V., Vitali, F., Lengua, C. (2022). Tools for an Innovative Approach to Web Accessibility. In: Antona, M., Stephanidis, C. (eds) Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Novel Design Approaches and Technologies. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13308. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05028-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05028-2_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-05027-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-05028-2

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