2005 accessibility diagnosis on the government web sites in Taiwan, R.O.C.

• Authors: Yui-Liang Chen;Yen-Yu Chen;Monica Shao
• Venue: W4A '06 Proceedings of the 2006 international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A): Building the mobile web: rediscovering accessibility?
• Year: 2006

Improvement in web technology and services alone with diversity development has caused a high demand of Internet usage. New web technologies and equipment have opened infinite possibilities for global communication, but these possibilities are limited by various factors such as setting the browser version too high, causing limitations to lower version holders, or making faster speed hard-drives producing delays in lower speed hard-drives. However, the most severe factor limiting web communication's performing at full potential is accessibility for the both physically and mentally disabled.The Executive Yuan of the Taiwanese Government has recently pushed forward the idea of Web accessibility in Governments' websites. Assessment of 35 websites has shown to pass Priority 1 Level Validation (machine recognition/machine review), of which 28 reached the Conformance Level "A+." Apart from the checkpoint numbered 1.8 of machine recognition/machine review that had an increase in failed website percentage, the rest presented a decline in the number of failed websites, which suggested improvements in Web accessibility development in the year 2005. The most commonly seen checkpoint errors were similar in 2004 and 2005, and included checkpoint error numbered 5.5 (Provide summaries for tables), 10.6 (Do not use space to separate adjacent links), 4.3 (Identify the language of the text), 3.5 (Use relative sizing and positioning (% values) rather than absolute (pixels)), 3.3 (Use a public text identifier in a DOCTYPE statement), 1.1 (Provide a text equivalent for every image), and 9.3 (Make sure that event handlers do not require use of a mouse).Comparison between Freego and Bobby validation tools using the 58 checkpoints listed in the Web Accessibility Regulations have shown six checkpoints need to be revised. Five checkpoints were different in Priority Level setup, and one checkpoint numbered 9.3 (Make sure that event handlers do not require use of a mouse) was different in the calculation of number of errors. Apart from that, the 90 checkpoints listed in the Web Accessibility Regulations in Freego, none can be compared with checkpoint number 13.1 (Create link phrases that make sense when read out of context) in Bobby. With these results, it was clear that the Freego Validation Tool needs to be improved, and that Web Accessibility Regulations needs to be discussed further.