User-generated content (UGC) has become prevalent on the Web. It is not created by professional developers, but by prosumers: basic web users that also produce their own content. Thus, they lack any background, training, wherewithal, awareness and accountability regarding accessibility. We have extracted from top-used UGC sites a set of best practices to improve accessibility of UGC, focusing on the role the community itself plays in ensuring it. As we have merely compiled best practices, authoring tools and web content guidelines have not been redefined, but rather referenced and instantiated by UGC-specific recommendations.

This paper reports key findings of a 3-year ethnographical study of the everyday interactions of older people with the web. The data consisted of in-situ observations and conversations with 388 older people while using myriads of web and computer technologies daily. The results revealed that the accessibility barriers that had a more negative effect on the daily interactions of older people with the web were due to their difficulties in remembering steps, understanding web and computer jargon and using the mouse, despite their willingness to use it. These obstacles were much more important than those caused by their difficulties perceiving visual information, understanding icons and using the keyboard. The prioritization of barriers was explained by two key aspects in ageing with new technologies, independency and inclusiveness, and a desired condition of web (user) interfaces, consistency in terminology. These results suggest that these three aspects should be considered carefully in enhancing web accessibility for older people, as well as allowing us to grasp older people's everyday web accessibility barriers. The paper discusses possible ways of making use of these findings to make the web more accessible to older people.

This paper presents a modelling framework, Web Interaction Environments, to express the synergies and differences of audiences, in order to study universal usability of the Web. Based on this framework, we have expressed the implicit model of WCAG and developed an experimental study to assess the Web accessibility quality of Wikipedia at a macro scale. This has resulted on finding out that template mechanisms such as those provided by Wikipedia lower the burden of producing accessible contents, but provide no guarantee that hyperlinking to external websites maintain accessibility quality. We discuss the black-boxed nature of guidelines such as WCAG and how formalising audiences helps leveraging universal usability studies of the Web at macro scales.

Web Compliance Engineering is a new field within Web Engineering that deals with the increasing complexity of Internet applications, the wide variety of mobile devices, the richer user interfaces coming out of Web 2.0 and the quality assurance processes for non-uniform policy environments worldwide. Considering these issues from the perspective of Web accessibility, the borders of its traditional components [6] are blurred as users become content providers. We present in this paper a Web compliance framework developed to support both users and application developers to create accessible content for Rich Internet Applications. This framework is an evolution of traditional evaluation tools aimed at supporting compliance as a quality process, which ensures its successful implementation in production environments.

Task completion times of sighted and blind users were measured with two kinds of Web sites: sites marked up appropriately with heading elements and sites with the same visual appearance but with no heading elements marked up. The experiment was carried out with user agents that could navigate through heading elements. The results showed that 1) task completion time was reduced by as much as one half with marked up heading elements, 2) the benefits of markup on task completion time were greater for blind users, and 3) the overall difference in response time between sighted and blind users diminished with sites that were appropriately marked up.

Numerical information is often presented in graphs to take advantage of the human ability to quickly find visual patterns. Unfortunately, this medium is problematic for people who are blind or otherwise visually-impaired. To provide accessibility to graphs published in The Daily (Statistics Canada's main dissemination venue), we have developed iGraph, a system that provides short verbal descriptions of the information depicted in graphs and a way of also interacting with graphical information.

This paper describes HearSay, a non-visual Web browser, featuring context-directed browsing, a unique and innovative Web accessibility feature, and an extensible VoiceXML dialog interface. The browser provides most of the standard browsing functionalities, including flexible navigation and form-filling. The paper also outlines future work aiming to make the Web more accessible for individuals with visual impairments.

This paper examines the degree of overlap between good design for physical ease of access on the Web in general, and design for physical ease of use on the mobile Web. There are marked differences in the basic interaction techniques used and usability issues experienced. As a group, people with physical impairments tend to have a broader range of needs. These differences impact Web page design in various ways. Problems can be addressed in a unified way by designing for device independence. At least for physical ease of access, a unified set of mobile/accessibility best practice guidelines would be mutually beneficial. This approach may be helpful in preventing fragmentation of the Web.

The goal of this project is to make the Web more accessible by providing some of the features naturally available to sighted users to users with visual impairments. These features are direct access and gestalt understanding, which can emerge from simplification and summarization. Simplification is achieved by retaining sections of the web page that are considered important while removing the clutter. The purpose of summarization is to provide the users with a preview of the web page. Simplification and summarization are implemented as a "guide dog" that helps users navigate the entire web site.