It is important to understand that user experience is regarded differently by each audience, based on their (dis)abilities, constraints, and expectations.
When taking into account both usability and accessibility factors in an in- tegrated way, the notion of Universal Usability materialises. As described in
Shneiderman (2000), it is one of the key challenges for Web Science (Shneider- man,2007). This challenge is centred on exploring the accommodation of software (and their user interfaces, in particular) to both technology variety, user diversity and user knowledge, instead of providing a one-size-fits-all solution. Usability and accessibility are, therefore, the root for providing a high quality user experience in software, including the Web.
As explained, the user’s entry point of interacting with the Web is the browser. It is the browser’s responsibility to render the data transmitted by a Web server through the HTTP protocol (Fielding et al.,1998), and managing all interaction events triggered by users. This data, which ultimately composes a Web page – the front-end –, is defined through a mix of technologies interpreted by the browser, including HTML (Pemberton et al.,2002), CSS (Bos et al.,2007), and JavaScript and associated event models (Höhrmann et al., 2006).
These three technologies have a deep impact on all tasks performed over a Web front-end, since they dictate how information is presented to the user, as well as how it should be interacted. Therefore, the analysis of the quality of the Web from a universal usability perspective must take into account that these Web front-end technologies have to be analysed from the perspective of the specific characteristics of each target audience: users, devices, and environment. This fact has the consequence that, for users with disabilities, front-ends should comprise accessibility features so that content, navigation, and interaction are not hindered.
1.2
Problem
It has been recurrently observed that the expansion of the Web is going beyond the highest percentile of users and situations: unimpaired users interacting with the Web on a desktop computer (c.f. Harper & Yesilada(2008)). The spectrum of possibilities is opening the way to new interaction capabilities to consume and produce contents to the Web. The increasing diversity of users and devices,
1. INTRODUCTION
as well as of publishing, information sharing, and communication platforms is shaping the Web in multiple ways.
The introduction of end users as content producers brings another variable in what respects to the adequacy of Web pages to all users. Coping with such a rich, complex scenario is a big challenge for multidisciplinary Web development teams, including designers, usability and accessibility experts, and managers, besides developers.
However, as of now, teams typically lean towards providing a high user ex- perience to the aforementioned percentile, nothing else. Most of the times the target audiences for products and services put on the Web correspond to this. But, through the correct application of Web front-end technologies, a primary degree of user experience quality to users can be delivered. For instance, by carefully crafting CSS directives, Web front-ends can cope with different screen configurations.
But creating front-ends that afford the capability limitations of users with disabilities requires additional efforts from Web development teams. Thus, in an ideal scenario, when thinking of accessibility issues, teams can follow WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (Caldwell et al., 2008), a widely accepted standardisation effort on how to create accessible Web pages, as specified by the
World Wide Web Consortium1. By following these guidelines, teams can have a
certain degree of confidence that a single front-end can be perceived, interacted, and experienced both by unimpaired users and those with disabilities in a similar way. But, more often than not, teams do not have the expertise, motive, the right tools, or even time to cope with making Web sites accessible (Lopes et al.,
2010b).
All of the impedance between user needs and compliance from developers and designers raises a set of problems, synthesised as follows:
Problem: Developers and designers often lack the awareness and
skills to create accessible Web pages. As content production and con- sumption becomes richer, accessibility issues are increasingly prob- lematic. Currently, little is known about the corresponding impact
1http://www.w3.org/
1.2 Problem
on a large scale and how it relates with the microscopic perspectives of developers and designers.
This broad perspective emerging from large scale studies is fundamental to boost the aimed awareness and find focused and productive approaches for acces- sible Web development. Further subdividing this problem, more detailed issues arise, as follows.
1.2.1
Users and the Inaccessible Web
P1: It has been thoroughly studied, e.g., in Harper & Yesilada (2008), that a lot of content on the Web has accessibility barriers. However, how this lack of accessibility is spread on the Web has yet to be known.
1.2.2
Developers’ Unawareness
P2:Accessibility problems on the Web are often related to developers and design- ers’ unawareness or distorted understanding of accessibility and inclusive prac- tices.
1.2.3
End-user Content Production
P3: End-user content production on the Web (e.g., wikis, blogs) is often sup-
ported by content management systems (CMSes) that hide the complexity of Web technologies. However, that support is still no guarantee to deliver truthfully ac- cessible content.
1.2.4
Large-scale Accessibility Evaluation
P4: Accessibility evaluation is mostly applied in small scales (e.g., a single Web site) through manual or semi-automated procedures, since tools are targeted at developers and designers. This leads to a lack of adequacy from current evaluation methods to the complexity and scale of evaluating large portions of the Web.
1. INTRODUCTION