Web Accessibility Visualization and Evaluation Tool: A Designer.

Recently, the World Wide Web has become a new social infrastructure. The Web also has an important role as a new source of information for persons with disabilities or senior citizen, since they can get all kinds of information all by themselves through the Web. Accessibility-related regulations and guidelines are contributing to the steady improvement of Web accessibility. There are various evaluation tools, and they also help Web authors make their pages compliant with guidelines. However, their effects are limited because their syntactic checking is insufficient to evaluate the accessibility and usability of the Web pages. Therefore, we developed a disability visualizer“aDesigner”. It has functions to simulate two disabilities, low vision and blindness, and it can automatically detect usability problems. By using the usability evaluation functions of aDesigner, we summarize the historical transition of Web usability for blind people. © 2006, Japan Society for Software Science and Technology. All rights reserved.