Reading 9

Villegas, E., Sorribas, X., Pifarr, M., & Fonseca, D. (2009). Improving the design of accessible web pages through a study of user experience in order to define requirements. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGMM international workshop on Media studies and implementations that help improving access to disabled users. Retrieved from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1631097.1631099
The authors’ purpose is to compare the two study phases of web accessibility that are based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 which level AA (double A) is a level acceptance in Spanish Law. The first phase is analyzing several Spanish AA-certified websites in order to collect the pattern of user accessibility defined by user (people with disabilities) requirements. Result from the first phased becomes guidance for group task-based test in second phase for determining the satisfactory of accessibility a web page creation.

This study found that obtaining an accessible experience in the first step leads to the creation of a web page with real accessibility which is not only compliance with the WCAG guidelines, but also “a requirement to provide the user with a satisfactory user experience and to enable the user to work autonomously” (p.5).

Although this study is only involved 12 students with disability, but this article is a good example for creating and analyzing web page that accessible for person with disabilities. Perhaps world class study involved various type students with disabilities would be better to evaluate the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the result might give some recommendation the web builders to create the real accessible websites.

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