Jenny%20Craven,%20Research%20Associate

1

• Jenny Craven, Research Associate
• CERLIM, Manchester Metropolitan Univ.
• j.craven_at_mmu.ac.uk
• The EIAO project is co-funded by the European
  Commission, under the IST contract
  2003-004526-STREP.

2
The European Internet Accessibility Observatory -
Scope

• Three year project Sept 2004 2007.
• Partners from 10 institutions across Europe.
• Developing reliable methods and tools for
  large-scale assessment of websites accessibility.
• Checking websites with the developed methods and
  tools.
• Making the results available at different levels.
• Helping stakeholder groups such as web masters
  and web designers to improve accessibility.
• Helping policy and decision makers to assess
  accessibility of websites.

3
Elements of EIAO

•  Web Accessibility Metrics (WAMs) based on the
  WCAG.
• An Internet robot (ROBACC) for automatic data
  collection on web accessibility.
• A data warehouse (ROBACC DW) providing online
  access accessibility data.

4
Involvement of users in the project

• User requirements for accessible web sites.
• Levels of awareness of accessibility issues.
• Levels of use relating to accessibility and web
  development.
• Opinions relating to Observatory features.
• Encourage a user-driven approach to the
  development of the European Internet
  Accessibility Observatory.

5
First findings End users.

• Problems identified
• Keyboard access.
• Lack of ALT text or poor use of ALT text.
• Page organisation.
• Site navigation.
• Mark up.
• Language.
• Multimedia.
• Downloading.
• Inability to personalise.

• How these relate to WCAG 1.0
• 9 Priority 1 checkpoints
• 11 Priority 3 checkpoints
• 21 Priority 2 checkpoints

6
First Findings Stakeholder Groups.

• Requirements
• Examples of best practice.
• Monitoring accessibility.
• Show errors AND how to fix them.
• Configurable levels of detail for assessments and
  reports.

• Issues raised
• Need for automated AND user testing.
• Limitations of automated testing.
• Reliability of results.
• Legal concerns over accessibility statements.

7
Future work

• Development of Observatory software based on end
  user and stakeholder requirements studies.
• Iterative feedback from users further
  development.
• Clustering with 2 other EU funded projects to
  develop a Unified Website Evaluation Methodology
  for the EU.
• Visit the website at www.eiao.net