Daisuke Sato
Hironobu Takagi
Masatomo Kobayashi
Shinya Kawanaka
Abstract
The Web is becoming a platform for daily activities and is expanding the opportunities for collaboration among people all over the world. The effects of these innovations are seen not only in major Web services such as wikis and social networking services but also in accessibility services. Collaborative accessibility improvement has great potential to make the Web more adaptive. Screen reader users, developers, site owners, and any Web volunteers who want to help the users are invited into the activities to improve accessibility in a timely manner. The Social Accessibility Project is an experimental service for a new needs-driven improvement model based on collaborative metadata authoring technologies. In 20 months, about 19,000 pieces of metadata were created for more than 3,000 Web pages through collaboration based on 355 requests submitted from users. We encountered many challenges as we sought to create a new mainstream approach and created distinctive features in new user interfaces to address some of these challenges. Although the new features increased user participation, serious issues remain. The productivity of the volunteers exceeded our expectations, but we found large and important problems in the users’ lack of awareness of their own accessibility problems. This is a critical problem for sustaining the active use of the service, because about 70% of the improvement starts with a request from a user. Helping users with visual impairments understand the actual issues is a crucial and challenging topic, and will lead to improved accessibility. We first introduce examples of collaboration, analyze several kinds of statistics on the activities of the users and volunteers of the pilot service, and then discuss our findings and challenges. Five future foci are considered: site-wide metadata authoring, encouraging active participation by users, quality management for the created metadata, metadata for dynamic HTML applications, and collaborations with site owners.
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Index Terms
- Exploratory Analysis of Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement
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Reviews
George Popescu
Beginning with naming some of the most important advantages of Internet usability, this paper focuses on accessibility for users and groups of users in terms of remote collaboration. The results center on the authors' Social Accessibility Project, through which they have collected important feedback from users over the years, and have defined collaborative accessibility improvements for disabled or elderly people accessing the Web. Two key underlying technologies to the authors' approach are metadata-based transcoding and metadata authoring. With the help of the Social Accessibility Project, site owners can make their Web pages more accessible without changing the content, by using external metadata. The authors present limitations and challenges encountered in the search for standardization models. Related work includes: Bookshare, which helps blind people access collaboratively scanned documents; Helen, a Web site that offers rating features to blind users; and Google Image Labeler, which aims to precisely label objects inside images. Apart from the technical details of how the platform works, the authors present some interesting use cases. Three success stories are offered: fixing information overload on a hospital's Web page; correcting the interface design of a radio station Web site; and identifying and fixing accessibility issues on a local foundation's Web site. Online Computing Reviews Service
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