Correlating navigation barriers on web 2.0 with accessibility guidelines

Abstract

The constant emergence of new resources and interaction possibilities brought by web 2.0 brings a constant urge of keeping in track how those new elements can affect the interaction of people with disabilities and how far current re-search has managed to address existing problems. This paper presents the results of an empirical study designed to gather navigation barriers affecting blind people when interacting with some widely used web widgets – such as Popup windows, Auto Suggest Lists, etc. The aim is to correlate those barriers with WCAG 2.0 and ARIA guidelines. From this point of view, it is possible to determine which barriers are being covered by current guide-lines and which ones are still on the wild. As conducting users’ evaluations are really costly, the more barriers can be eliminated beforehand, the more useful those sessions can be.