Is your web page accessible?: a comparative study of methods for assessing web page accessibility for the blind

  • Authors:

  • Jennifer Mankoff;Holly Fait;Tu Tran

  • Affiliations:

  • CMU, Pittsburgh, PA;Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA;UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Web access for users with disabilities is an important goal and challenging problem for web content developers and designers. This paper presents a comparison of different methods for finding accessibility problems affecting users who are blind. Our comparison focuses on techniques that might be of use to Web developers without accessibility experience, a large and important group that represents a major source of inaccessible pages. We compare a laboratory study with blind users to an automated tool, expert review by web designers with and without a screen reader, and remote testing by blind users. Multiple developers, using a screen reader, were most consistently successful at finding most classes of problems, and tended to find about 50% of known problems. Surprisingly, a remote study with blind users was one of the least effective methods. All of the techniques, however, had different, complementary strengths and weaknesses.