Accessibility designer: Visualizing usability for the blind

Abstract

These days, accessibility-related regulations and guidelines have been accelerating the improvement of Web accessibility. One of the accelerating factors is the development and deployment of accessibility evaluation tools for authoring time and repair time. They mainly focus on creating compliant Web sites by analyzing the HTML syntax of pages, and report that pages are compliant when there are no syntactical errors. However, such compliant pages are often not truly usable by blind users. This is because current evaluation tools merely check if the HTML tags are appropriately used to be compliant with regulations and guidelines. It would be better if such tools paid more attention to real usability, especially on time-oriented usability factors, such as the speed to reach target content, the ease of understanding the page structure, and the navigability, in order to help Web designers to create not simply compliant pages but also usable pages for the blind. Therefore, we decided to develop Accessibility Designer (aDesigner), which has capabilities to visualize blind users' usability by using colors and gradations. The visualization function allows Web designers to grasp the weak points in their pages, and to recognize how accessible or inaccessible their pages are at a glance. In this paper, after reviewing the related work, we describe our approach to visualize blind users' usability followed by an overview of Accessibility Designer. We then report on our evaluations of real Web sites using Accessibility Designer. After discussing the results, we conclude the paper. Copyright 2004 ACM.