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

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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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  1. Chitkara University Institute of Engineering and Technology, Chitkara University, Rajpura, Punjab, India

    S. Meenakshi & Anshu Singla

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Meenakshi, S., Singla, A. A novel heuristic method for quantitative assessment of web accessibility for colorblind. Univ Access Inf Soc (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-023-01006-w

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