Accessibility of dynamic adaptive web TV applications

Abstract

In the last years, TVs have become platforms providing content and entertainment services, such as video on demand, interactive advertising or so-cial networking. Often, these services are Web based applications that run of connected TVs or set-top boxes. Given TV's wide reach, it is paramount TV applications are designed so that information can be perceived by everyone, i.e. should be accessible. These applications increasingly present dynamic aspects, which have been rendering traditional Web evaluation approaches obsolete. Additionally, TV based interaction has specificities that Web based evaluation is unable to cope with. In this paper, we present an automated accessibility evaluation framework to address these challenges. It is based on WCAG 2.0 and Digital TV guidelines. It supports evaluation of the code after browser processing and scanning the whole set of application states. It is capable of evaluating user interface adaptation based on selected user profiles. The paper also presents the evaluation results of three TV based applications according to the proposed framework, which allow a comparison of results of pre and post browser processing as well as pre and post adaptation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.