Takagi, H., Asakawa, C., Fukuda, K., & Maeda, J. (2004). Accessibility designer: Visualizing Usability for the Blind. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 6th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility. Retrieved from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1028630.1028662

This purpose of this study is to develop software for improving web usability and blind user’s productivity called Accessibility Designer. The authors describe the factors that become problems beyond the software development which are accessibility checker, requirement of guidelines compliance, and syntactic checking of web page. For overcoming the problems, the author develop a new software that has three fundamental features: background color pattern for presenting reaching time to each part a web page, color filling analysis for indicating accessibility particular area of a web page, and visual layout analysis using text information that generated by standard screen reader. This new software is expected to improve usability of a web page.

In the use, the author found that the background-color-based analysis has the power to reveal several problems such as availability and appropriateness skip-links navigator, availability and appropriateness of  headings usage, and content order. The result of the analysis will contribute to development of web design that may decrease the time and cost maintenance, determine web usability even for high level accessibility, achieve real accessible and usable website by focusing on the user experience and actual productivity.

Even tough this article is technical oriented and focus on usability for user with visual impaired, but it has valuable knowledge for improving accessibility and usability of information displayed on a web page.