Disabilities Affect on Web Usage – Project topics materials

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Previous Study within the Domain

Another complex thing to measure is how accessible a website is. Infrastructure, guidelines and technology are all tools being used in a very non-standard way. This makes the whole industry of web development a pretty non-standarizational industry. However W3C have set up standards and guidelines, the adaption of those are extremely varying among websites. As long as people have free access to contribute to the world wide web, it is impossible for anyone to assure standards and guidelines are followed (Harper & Chen, 2012).
In Harper & Chen (2012)’s investigation, they built an accessible evaluation tool that measured 6.000 and their indications of adopted accessibility over a period of ten years. This is possible through Internet Archive which provides public access to collections of among other things, websites. Even though it has happened a lot within the industry since 2012, this was the latest evaluation of this kind of problem founded to get a somewhat good indicator of how extensive the range of “not-adapted-to-accessibility-websites” is. The result of Harper & Chen (2012)’s study may be discussed as it is hard to tell how disabled people actually perceives websites in their specific situation, but also because of their choice of method. They measured to what extent websites adopted accessibility guidelines through a Web robot, which is a software application that runs tasks over the internet. A brief summary on how the measurements of followed guidelines were executed as follows. The searched terms the Web robot they build looked for on websites were as follows:
● Hyper-links to validation sites
● Various image accreditation badges
● A combination of AAA, AA and A
● “The presence of the word ‘accessibility’—present anywhere within that last 100 characters of a page to account for statements and links to intra-site pages describing policy.”

They mention that the interest of the study was not about whether the guidelines were followed or not, since it is hard to measure adoption of accessibility automatically in large scale, but it rather gave an indication of how “trendy” it were to mention accessibility on websites. Harper & Chen (2012) summarizes it like this in the following quote:
“In this way, it could be said that this is an approach to measure how ‘trendy’ accessibility is or how accessibility aware the developers are, and if accessibility is important enough to consider notarising its presence on the page…” (Harper & Chen, 2012. p. 70) Harper & Chen (2012) gives their choice of method some more critique, but summarizes everything with interesting findings. It turned out that over a ten year period the terms connected to accessibility stated above increased over years. There were both top ranked websites on Alexa but also random picked websites included in the test.
This seems to be an a bit odd method of how to measure accessibility, but was the only one founded which addresses and concerns the same kind of questions as this study, about web agencies adaption of accessible web directives, does. It teaches us how complex it is to measure adoption of accessibility, that it however is an increasing trend of the usage of accessibility-words and that many factors can affect the result of such a study. Based on this knowledge and some other factors we have chosen qualitative data instead in order to get an indication of the situation today.

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1. Introduction
1.1 Background
1.2 Purpose and Research Questions
1.3 Delimitations
1.4 Outline
2. Theoretical Background
2.1 Web Development
2.1.1 Roles within web development
2.1.2 Technical terms
2.2 Usage of Internet in Sweden
2.3 Previous Study within the Domain
2.4 Disabilities Affect on Web Usage
2.5 Web Accessibility
2.6 Assistive Technology
2.7 Laws and Regulations
3. Method and Implementation
3.1 Research Design
3.1.1 Scientific approach
3.2 Data Collection
3.2.1 Choice of data collection method
3.3 Selection of Informants
3.4 Research Ethics
3.5 Method of Analysis
3.6 Reliability and Validity
4. Findings
4.1 Interviews
4.2 Summary of Interviews
5. Analysis
6. Discussion and Conclusions
6.1 Discussion of Method
6.2 Discussion of Findings
6.3 Conclusions
7. References
8. Appendices