Application of Alpert Scale to Set Priorities for Apply Accessibility Guidelines
Abstract
In a web environment few sites has accessible structure and content to all kinds of users. The suitability of these is necessary to promote an egalitarian environment. The WCAG 2.0 has established a set of guidelines that make the page accessible to any type of user, but did not define a procedure for implementing these. In this way, this paper presents a process containing five activities that help the developer during the adaptation of their websites for containing guidelines from WCAG 2.0. One activity of this process is the definition of the guidelines that should be implement first. This is accomplish by using the Alpert measurement scale
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Introduction
The web accessibility intends to enable the information to be present without losses to all users, regardless of their sensory or motor characteristics [21]. To perform the changes on page, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines established a set of guidelines that make a web page accessible [21].
However, the mechanism to adjust or build web pages based on these guidelines may become difficult in order to know where to start, what guidelines must be use and how these can be insert into a web page.
With the objective of assist the development of accessible pages, procedures have been created for applying these guidelines, for example, the Pantaneiro Framework [12] ACCESSA [6] Implementation of Guidelines Using Web Modeling Language [20] and PDWAU [7].
Those procedures have absences, such: supply of procedures for the application of guidelines, lack of uniformity to define how the adaptation of the page will be make and establish priorities for implementation of accessibility guidelines on a page. This paper proposes a process that features a set of five activities that help the developer during the adaptation of their websites to WCAG 2.0 Accessibility Guidelines. The main feature of the process is the identification of the priorities implementation from WCAG 2.0 guidelines in any web page in order to help developers define how to adapt their pages.
This paper is organize into ten sections. The first section describes the concepts related to web accessibility. The second section defines the WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines. The third section describes the procedures for the application of web accessibility in the literature. The fourth section explores the Measurement Scale of Attitudes. The fifth section analyzes the Measurement Scales of Attitudes.
The sixth section describes all the proposed process in this paper. The seventh section reports the implementation of accessibility guidelines based on the priorities set by the proposed process in FrameMK page. The eighth section provides an analysis between the procedures of literature and the proposed process. The ninth section describes the conclusions that are reach by this work and the researches that can be perform in the future. Finally, the last section expressed acknowledgment to funding agency that financed the research.
Conclusion
This paper presented a process based on priorities for implementation of the guidelines of WCAG 2.0, which uses five activities to define the requirements that must be met primarily, the related accessibility guidelines and implementation mechanisms of these guidelines on a web page.
The main contribution was the establishment of the priorities, defined by the result of the arithmetic average of the incidence in the country and the benefit to the company to meet the special needs, calculated for an Alpert measurement scale attitudes in three dimensions (Presence, Importance and Satisfaction).
The Alpert scale was choose for measuring the benefit to attend the special needs into three dimensions and use the result of the multiplication between the scale values to generate the final value of importance to the company.
As future works, we intend to establish a set of metrics to measure the actual contributions of the proposed process, applying the proposed process in enterprise environments to validate their activities and generate a computer system that implements the proposed process.