Determination and evaluation of Web accessibility

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative
technology in widespread use today; however,
access to the web and its many applications cannot be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses a variety of concerns ranging from societal, political, and economic to individual, physical, and
intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus, there are many perspectives from which web accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better
understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility framework is proposed using as its base a layered evaluation framework from Computer Supported Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard, ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is employed in recognition of the collaborative nature
of the web and its importance in facilitating
communication. The latter is employed to refine and extend the technical issues and to highlight the need for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of
the web developer and maintainer as well as the web user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility framework is to provide web developers and maintainers with a practical basis for considering web accessibility through the development of a set of accessibility factors associated with each identified layer.

Citation:
Boldyreff, C. (2002) ‘Determination and evaluation of Web accessibility’ in: 11th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE 2002), 10-12 June 2002, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. IEEE Computer Society 2002, pp.35-40.