WEB ACCESSIBILITY

Portuguese Web Accesibility with WCAG-1.0 and WCAG-2.0

Ramiro Gonçalves, José Martins, Jorge Pereira and Henrique Mamede

Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Vila Real, Portugal

Universidade Aberta, Lisboa, Portugal

Keywords: Accessibility, W3C, Recommendations, Society, Disability, Equality.

Abstract: Web accessibility is growing in importance as each day goes by. Alongside with this growth, also the need

of access to web resources, by those with some sort of disability, is increasing. The web is very important

for spreading information and for the interaction between the various society elements. Given this, it’s

mandatory that the web presents itself as a totally accessible resource, so that it can help the disable citizens

in their integration within the society. This obligation should be even bigger for the enterprises because, in

their majority, the web is used as a marketing and business platform. This document is meant to be a

position paper regarding the comparison of results between web accessibility evaluations of the Portuguese

websites using version 1 and version 2 of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

1 INTRODUCTION

According to Ban Ki-Moon, it’s internationally

consensual that the Information and communications

technologies have a central role to play in the quest

for development, dignity and peace (Ki-Moon,

2007).

The ICT have become indispensable for the

social and economical evolution of society. As a

result of this, one of the social factors to be

considered is the accessibility to all available

resources, including those made available by the

Web. According to Tim Berners-Lee the power of

the web is the possibility of access to all available

resources by everyone and its universality (Out-Law,

2006).

As we can see in the W3C recommendations,

also this entity considers web accessibility as a

decisive factor for the integration of the disabled

citizens within the society (W3C, 2005). This is

more importante if we consider the existence of 37

million disable european citizens that need to be

granted access to all available resources (EU,

2002a).

The ICT offer great potential to citizens with

mental and physical disabilities. Through the use of

these technologies they can be better integrated in

society. It is however necessary to increase efforts to

adapt the technology to certain groups of people

with disabilities (Wenner, 2005).

After our work and studies in 2009, regarding the

1000 biggest Portuguese enterprises and their

accessibility levels (WCAG 1.0), we plan to achieve

a new study regarding the same universe, but for the

WCAG 2.0 standards.

2 WEB ACCESSIBILITY

CONCEPTS AND CONCERNS

The term accessibility can easily be defined has the

possibility of disabled people interact with a

product, resource, service or activity has normal

people would. In what concerns the ICT, we can

define accessibility as the creation of interfaces that

are perceived, operable and easy to understand for

people with a wide range of features. This includes

all deficiencies, functional limitations, including a

visual impairment, hearing, physical, cognitive and

neurological. In this set should also be included

conditions of temporary incapacity, such as the loss

of glasses or the breaking of an arm. Beyond this,

accessibility also makes the products more

accessible to people who do not have any kind of

disability (W3C 2008a).

248

GonÃ

galves R., Martins J., Pereira J. and Mamede H.

WEB ACCESSIBILITY - Portuguese Web Accesibility with WCAG-1.0 and WCAG-2.0.

DOI: 10.5220/0002858702480251

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technology (WEBIST 2010), page

ISBN: 978-989-674-025-2

According to Jim Thatcher and Shawn Henry, web

accessibility goal consists in providing everyone

with some sort of disability the ability to perceive,

understand, navigate and interact with the Web, even

if they have visual, hearing, physical, cognitive,

speech or neurological impairment (Thatcher,

Henry et al. 2006).

A websites’ accessibility level is largely based

on four factors:

• The information presented by the website,

including text, images, forms, sounds, etc. (web

content);

• Web browsers, media players, etc. (User

Agents);

• The users knowledge, experiences and in some

cases, adaptive strategies;

• Screen readers, alternative keyboards, scanning

software (Assistive Technologies).

According to W3C, the accessibility of web content

is largely determined by the developers accessibility

knowledge, skill and effort, by the authoring tools

support for creating accessible content, and by the

evaluation tools that will allow a validation of the

accessibility levels presented by the created web

content (Brewer, 2006).

2.1 Regulations and World Perspective

According to the World Health Organization -

WHO, 10% of the world’s population suffers from

some form of disability. This number clearly shows

the existing need for health and rehabilitation

services. As a way to disseminate and create

awareness of this reality, the WHO created an action

plan called “Disability and Rehabilitation Action-

Plan 2006-2010” (WHO, 2006).

In 2001, a demographic study named “Censos

2002 – População residente com deficiência segundo

o grau de incapacidade e sexo” was performed by

the Portuguese National Institute of Statistics – INE.

According to the results of the study, there were

634,000 Portuguese citizens with some kind of

disability (INE, 2002).

The first time web accessibility became a matter

of concern in the European Union was in September

2001 through a communication made by the

European Commission to the European Council, to

the European Parliament, to the Social and

Economical Committee and to the Regions

Committee. This communication was a result of the

wide scope of the “eEurope 2002” action-plan which

was approved in the Feira’s European Council (EU,

2002b). After 2001, and as web accessibility

importance was growing, the European Commission

launched the “eEurope 2005” action-plan. This

plan’s goal was the creation of modern public

websites and the creation of a dynamic environment

for e-business through an enormous offering of

broadband access with competitive prices and

through a secure infrastructure for information (EU,

2003).

Web content accessibility has been a priority for

various world entities, such as the W3C consortium

which in 1999 created the World Accessibility

Initiative – WAI. This initiative was created with the

aim of being a parallel organization to the W3C and

its mission was to develop guidelines that would be

understood as the international standards for web

accessibility; as well as to develop support materials

for a better understanding and development of web

accessibility, and to develop new resources through

international cooperation (W3C, 2008a).

Since the year 1999 WAI has been aiming for the

increase of web content accessibility by creating

several tools that facilitate this. An example of those

tools is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

These guidelines are an explicative document of

how to create web content so that it can be accessed

by anyone, including those who have some sort of

disability. According to these same guidelines, web

content is all the information within a web page or

web application. These accessibility guidelines are

characterized by three main aspects, the guideline

checkpoints, the priority levels (level 1, level 2 and

level 3) and the conformance levels (level A, level

AA and level AAA) (W3C, 2008b). The priority

level 1 checkpoints are those that, according to the

W3C, must be implemented so that a website can be

accessible to the majority of users. Priority level 2

checkpoints are those that should be implemented

because they bring a great improvement to the

overall accessibility and usability of a given website.

The priority level 3 checkpoints are those that may

be implemented so that the entire website can be

accessible by all users (W3C, 2008a). The

conformance levels can be characterized as the

“level of accessibility” presented by a website. If a

website implements all priority level 1 accessibility

checkpoints, then it has the conformance level A. If

a given website presents all the priority level 1 and

priority level 2 accessibility checkpoints covered,

than it has the conformance level AA. By

implementing all the priority level 1, 2 and 3

WEB ACCESSIBILITY - Portuguese Web Accesibility with WCAG-1.0 and WCAG-2.0

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accessibility checkpoints a website has the

conformance level AAA (W3C, 2008b).

2.2 The Importance of Accessible ICT

Given the fact that ICT helps to stimulate enterprise

competitiveness and citizens’ quality of life, the

European Union should take all the opportunities

that these technologies have to offer (EU 2005).

ICT currently has a very high penetration rate in the

Portuguese enterprise market. The Agency for the

Society of Knowledge confirms this statement in the

analysis made of the inquiry conducted by the

Portuguese National Institute of Statistics, according

to which 95% of the enterprises with ten or more

employees use computers, 84% of them use e-mail

and 83% have Internet access. For medium-size

enterprises (50 to 249 employees) these three

indicators have the value of 99%. For big enterprises

(250 or more employees) the three indicators all

have a value of 100% [10, 21].

Currently in Portugal, there are about 400000

employees in enterprises directly related to ICT.

This value, according to the objectives of the

Agency for the Society of Knowledge, will increase

by about 3%. Another value which, according to this

same Agency, will also increase in the future is the

number of people working with a computer in their

workplace. This will increase from 19% (in the year

2004) to around 40% (in the year 2012 (UMIC

2007)).

Due to this, it is extremely important that ICTs

become accessible to all, because if so, all those that

work, or that will work with them, can take

advantage of the benefits that they bring (W3C

2005).

The World Wide Consortium is currently present

in the World regulation of web accessibility, since

the 1.0 version of the guidelines for accessibility are

currently the standard used for the creation of rules

to encourage the creation of accessible Web content.

Although the directives of the W3c are widely

accepted as the standard to use, this same

consortium is developing a second version of the

guidelines for accessibility in order to define a new

set of criteria and techniques, appropriately adjusted

for the current technological level. According to the

recommendations of the W3C, the 2.0 version of the

directives for accessibility cover a larger number of

recommendations for creating more accessible Web

content. Following these guidelines will make web

content accessible to a larger number of people with

disabilities, including blindness or low vision,

deafness or hearing loss, learning disabilities,

cognitive limitations, restrictions of movement,

difficulties in speech, photosensitivity and

combinations of these. Following this new set of

directives, the final result will be Web content more

accessible to all user (W3C 2008b).

3 RELATIONS BETWEEN

WCAG1.0 AND WCAG 2.0

WCAG 2.0 applies more broadly to different types

of Web technologies and to more advanced

technologies. It is designed to apply as technologies

develop in the future.

The WCAG 2.0 requirements are more precisely

testable with automated testing and human

evaluation. This allows WCAG 2.0 to be more easily

used where specific requirements and conformance

testing are necessary, such as in design

specifications, purchasing, regulation, and

contractual agreements.

In WCAG 1.0, the situations for text alternatives

regarding multimedia content was defined for

specific situations. Now, in WCAG 2.0, all

multimedia content must have a text alternative,

except for specific situations, changing the default

principles. The uses of “programmatically

determined” situations are introduced for gained

control in content manipulation and interpretation.

In WCAG 2.0 is no longer needed to provide

summaries for tables or to provide abbreviations for

header labels.

The WCAG 2.0 standard has technology-

independent guidelines and success criteria without

the additional descriptions.

4 WORK PLAN

With this work we intend to achieve a comparison

between the accessibility results achieved by the

Portuguese websites while using the WCAG 1.0 and

the WCAG 2.0 evaluation standards. This

comparison will allow us to interact as a focus-group

and create a group of recommendations to that will,

hopefully, help improving the Portuguese web

accessibility levels.

Our work will be made in two separate stages.

The first stage will include the actual evaluation of

the target group websites, in which we will use the

TAW3 tool for the websites of the biggest

Portuguese Enterprises and SortSite tool for the

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250

Portuguese Public Purchasing Platforms websites.

This stage will provide the data required for the

second and last stage. In this last stage we will apply

a statistical treatment to the evaluation data,

followed by an analysis of these same results. This

analysis will allow us to compare the results

obtained with the one previously gathered (in which

we used the WCAG 1.0), and then proceed to a

focus-group discussion on what the resulting

recommendations should be, what is wrong with the

Portuguese websites and what can be done to

improve it.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Most Web sites that conform to WCAG 1.0 should

not require significant changes in order to conform

to WCAG 2.0, and some may not need any changes.

WCAG 2.0 builds on WCAG 1.0. The fundamental

issues of Web accessibility are the same, though

there are some differences in the approach and

requirements between WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0.

The accessibility work that was made for WCAG 1.0

will be useful for meeting WCAG 2.0. Sites that

meet WCAG 1.0 will already be a long way to

fulfilling WCAG 2.0. However, it does take some

time to understand the different approach in WCAG

2.0. WCAG 2.0 is backwards compatible with

WCAG 1.0 so you can update your Web site to meet

both WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0. (However, a site

that meets only WCAG 2.0 does not automatically

meet WCAG 1.0, because WCAG 2.0 is more

flexible in some areas.)

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