The paper describes the necessity of website design accessibility. Two websites are designed containing different Tab and Picture settings. One of them is with larger Tabs and Pictures which will be more vulnerable to eye sight and easy to be accessed quickly even by people with bad control over mouse, on the other hand one have normal Tabs and Pictures standardized settings in use today. Different people respond differently to both designs and time regarding information access is noted down for both designs. Hypothetically it is assumed that website with larger size of Tabs and Pictures will be more accessible to people.

Accessibility is an important standard needed to be taken care with in website design for the disable people as well as for normal people. Accessibility is such a vast feature accommodating community with its virtuous concept, but here regarding simplicity of experiment we are concerned about increasing accessibility regarding human abilities like hand movement and eye sight. A website has to be designed in such a way that people with bad eye sight or with a poor mouse handling also can use and access the information of their interest easily by spending less time and energy.

According to zeldman [10] common perception about accessibility is that it’s a virtuous concept only to help people with disabilities. But the fact is opposite to that, accessibility is actually about making our web content more usable not only for people with any disability as well as for whole community by taking device independency and concept of making websites more interactive globally. Most of the people think that taking accessibility into consideration will be a negative push to their creativity and will reduce their work range. Even though keeping focus over web standards there is no guarantee that any website developed will exactly full fill the criteria which is defined by standards. But still it’s really important morally to make websites more and more accessible with a responsible approach to serve global community and to show special devotion to people in need.

Related Research

Accessibility is all about increasing efficiency of web content for whole [1] community especially for people with physical disabilities, like limited ability for hand movement which can cause difficulty in mouse handling, visual weakness, contrast or colour sensitivity which can cause less susceptible behaviour to small links and tabs. Today accessibility is not all [9] about achieved over wide PC screens; it also goes well along compact devices like PDAs, mobile phones and touch screen applications.

It is really difficult to [9] differentiate accessibility from usability usually because accessibility is visualized as a sub branch of usability criteria. Properly accessibility is defined as accommodating web content users at broader range. To evaluate accessibility W3c [2] have defined guidelines which allow to judge accessibility of a website by building some simulation software. The developed software works on the bases of W3c accessibility guidelines for example Cynthia [4].

Another method is HagáQuê [5] simulation test which was not also designed for users with disabilities; these aspects were also improved in redesign session of this accessibility simulation. The new version was added with some big TAB size and keyboard shortcuts to increase visibility using W3C/WCAG guidelines [2].

Accessibility user test [9] is the method to judge accessibility of any web content used in this experiment with complexity elimination. It was a simulation test over software for web content but for this experiment simple website content is designed. It has the same advantages and disadvantages of usability user tests. But the difference between both is that usability issues require simple user selection criteria but in the case of accessibility user selection criteria needs to be more potential. As accessibility is not just about normal users, it is a web standard in order to help the design of web content accessible by people with disabilities. That is why user selection criteria need to include users with disability to really judge the effectiveness of accessibility criteria.

Most of the web content generated today is according to the standards of Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) [3] from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [2] and Section 508 U.S. Law [8].

Figure 1. Website with Small Tabs and Pictures settings

Research Methods

The accessibility user test research method [9]

Participants

Experiment is performed taking 9 participants, some of them were professional users and some of them were with weak eye sight but one of them was with bad mouse movement.

Equipment

To check web design accessibility there is a need to build the web content suited to this experiment. So for this purpose dream weaver is used to built two websites full filling the requirements. One website [7] is designed with larger Tabs and Pictures settings considering this would be more accessible, tried to make it more susceptible to the people with bad eye sight, on the other hand another website [6] is generated with the standard Tabs and Pictures settings used normally by developers as standard. To read out the text zooming options are available for users with less eye sight. Informatoion presented over websites is about hobo symbols, these symbols are being used for path guidance for hobos.

The experiment needed some proper guidance for the user to the procedure and material used in the experiment. Two simple questionniares generated about hobo content and every user have to answer that simple questionaire as much as time he needs for each format. The user are being tested over similar computer equipment to maintain the relevancy and consistency for time readings. Morover users are provided peaceful noise free enviorment to concentrate over the experimental procedure. As far as questionares was completed for both formats readings for time taken by each user noted down. Every user is being interviewed as post experiment procedure to get proper knowledge about there physical abilities especially about their eye sight and mouse handling capabilities. Completely disabled or users with extremly weak eye sights are not included in experiment.

Figure 2. Website with larger Tabs and Pictures settings

Procedure

Two simple questionnaires generated for the information presented over websites consisting of five questions about hobo symbolic guidance. Each user has to answer each of the questions after start of timer. User has to identify the symbol and then has to search the answer present in the answer section by matching number given to each symbol. Time is being noted for each format in seconds. Maximum time limit defined for users to identify symbols was referred as 2 minutes.

All participants were guided about the hobo symbols presented over websites and the procedure how they have to perform their task. It was confirmed that the users with bad eye sight and bad hand movement were asked about their comfort with equipment. Extremely disabled users are not included in this experiment because of simplicity of experiment.

As HagáQuê simulation test was not firstly designed for users with disabilities, these aspects were also improved in redesign session of this accessibility simulation [9]. The new version was added with some big TAB size and keyboard shortcuts to increase visibility using W3C/WCAG guidelines.

The experiment performed in this paper does not include potential users as compared to software accessibility user test because of taking the simplicity of the experiment in consideration but hopefully the results will lead us to figure out accessibility of web content generated specifically for this experiment. Some of the users included in this experiment are daily routine web users, included some of less experience ones with bad mouse movement and weak eye sights.

Sample questionnaire given to the users is given below:

Identify the hobo symbols mentioned below and write down the purpose for which they are being used:

What does following symbols mean?

Same kind of questionnaire was being generated for the other format of web design but the different symbols were included in that one.

Results

The time taken with both website designs is illustrated and presented in the table below in seconds:

Table .1 Time Taken with Both Designs

Users

Small Tab Setting

(sec)

Large Tab Setting

(sec)

1

90

70

2

83

68

3

87

70

4

89

72

5

80

69

6

71

55

7

73

57

8

77

59

9

72

54

Graph below shows the response of the 9 users to both designs as time taken in seconds to solve the questionnaires designed for both website formats. The graph shows the comparison between the time readings taken in seconds which is dependent variable presented at Y-axis and users taken as constant quantity with the X-axis. Trends show that the website with larger Tab and Picture settings was more accessible than the website design with smaller Tab and Picture settings. Because clearly users had taken more time in solving questionnaire for smaller Tab settings than they had taken for larger Tab settings.

Figure 3: Graph presenting comparisons for user interaction with both designs.

From graphical trends proves that web content with large Tab and Picture settings helped users to answers questions in less time so this kind of website material is more accessible to users equally despite effected by their physical abilities.

CONCLUSION

The experimental procedure undergoes with accessibility evaluation of different types of websites, one with large Tab and Picture settings and the other with normalized standard settings. User abilities were put to test for both websites through presenting the two simple questionnaires written separately for both websites. It is concluded that larger Tab and Picture settings are more vulnerable to weak eye sight and bad hand movement, in other words it is more accessible way to present the content over website. It is observed that the proposed experimental procedure was successful with assumptions. Related work was carried out in context with automated accessibility tools and validators for user analysis but due to simplicity of experiment appropriate website content was generated for convenience.

REFERENCES

1. Bergman, E. and Johnson, E. Towards Accessible Human-Computer Interaction, in Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 5, Nielsen, J. (ed.). Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, NJ, 1995.

2. Chisholm, W.; Vanderheiden and G. Jacobs, I. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ Accessed on 21/01/2011.

3. Colwell, C. and Petrie, H. Evaluation of Guidelines for Designing Accessible Web Content, in Proceedings of the INTERACT’99 Workshop: Making Designers Aware of Existing Guidelines for Accessibility (Edinburgh, Scotland, August 30 – September 3, 1999), ACM Press, New York, NY, 1999, 11-13.

4. Cynthia Says Portal. http://www.cynthiasays.com Accessed on 21/01/2011.

5. HagáQuê. http://www.nied.unicamp.br/~hagaque/index-enUS.html Accessed on 19/01/2011.

6. Hobo Signs, Testing Web Accessibility with Large and Small Objects, (Small Objects) http://www.computerselection.co.uk

7. Hobo Signs, Testing Web Accessibility with Large and Small Objects, (Large Objects) http://www.fastfitblackburn.co.uk

8. Section 508: The road to accessibility. http://www.section508.gov Accessed on 16/01/2011.

9. Tanaka, E. H., S, et al. (2005). Comparing accessibility evaluation and usability evaluation in HagáQu&ecirc. Proceedings of the 2005 Latin American conference on Human-computer interaction. Cuernavaca, Mexico, ACM: 139-147.

10. (Zeldman and Marcotte, 2010)

22. Zeldman J & Marcotte E (2010) Designing with Web standards, Berkeley, Calif. : New Riders, c2010.

3rd ed. / Jeffrey Zeldman with Ethan Marcotte.

Article name: The Necessity Of Web Design Accessibility Computer Science essay, research paper, dissertation

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