Authoring WCAG2.0-compliant texts for the web through text readability visualization

Abstract

Texts on the web need to be readable in order to be accessible to a wide audience. WCAG2.0 states that tests should not exceed the reading level of upper secondary education. Several readability measures have been proposed over the last century. However, these measures give an accumulated measure of the text and do not help pinpoint specific problems in the text. This paper proposes a text visualization approach that emphasizes readability issues in texts. The texts are visualized in the textual domain. The intention of the visualization approach is to draw the attention of the author towards the aspects of the text that potentially are hard to read, allowing the author to revise the text and consequently making the text more readable.