Evaluating the effectiveness of accessible websites for deaf users

Accessibility is a concept that refers to providing the required affordance to users with some kind of disability, or even without it, to use a website. Taking into account this goal, we can find two perspectives, those proposed by government laws, such as the section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act or the European Accessibility Act, and those recommendations proposed by consortia like the World Wide Web Consortium, which through the Web Accessibility Initiative proposes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. In general, laws or recommendations, define the good practices to make a website and their content accessible. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the accessibility of websites with deaf users. The evaluation consists of the accomplishment of a set of tasks by deaf users in four websites. The natural hypothesis should be that the use of accessibility guidelines improve the user performance to achieve a task in websites that followed the guidelines. As a result, by observing interactions and listen to the comments of deaf users suggests that the content and the design of the web pages affect the success rate of the tasks. This content is affected more with regard to the level of their second language, in this case Spanish.