A student group named incluSITE is working on a project to increase web accessibility for users with visual impairments. At the CodeAda hackathon hosted by Women in Computer Science (WCS) last October, they leveraged the WAVE API to identify web accessibility issues in high-traffic federal websites; in their research, they found 965 individual web accessibility issues over 224 federal websites. As they continue this project in the DevAda program, they are interested in learning more about web accessibility. Their current goals are to develop a database of website accessibility statistics and provide alternatives to inaccessible sites. In the long run, they hope to create a tool that can improve a website's accessibility by automating some tasks like adding captions and ARIA.
They will join Explore with Hadi this month to get some insight on their project and currently available technologies for making websites screen reader friendly. Join us for a chat with a group of students seeking to help make the web more accessible!
Meeting Notes
Topic 1: incluSITE discussion
- incluSITE is focused on user-facing tools; not as many of those as tools for developers
- More empowering for users
- See a need that’s not being filled
- Accessibility overlays
- Challenges
- ARIA requires manual programming in about 80% of cases
- ARIA can also stamp out other text/descriptions on a site. That can lead to things being MORE obtuse/confusing for people using assistive technology that if the ARIA wasn't added (depending on usage).
- From the APG: No ARIA is better than Bad ARIA. Read this before using any ARIA.
- Some stats on automated tools, as well (From 2017, but not *much* has changed):
- Relevant existing projects:
- SkipTo.JS
- Various accessibility overlays
- Additional info:
- ARIA Authoring Practices Guide | APG | WAI | W3C
- The Information Accessibility Design and Policy (IADP) courses might be of interest to group members and give some more skills/tools for you.
- Evaluating inaccessible content
- For seeing what linearization looks like, you might be able to try Firefox's reading mode, or for the truest experience, turn off styles (with Firefox): Alt-View-Page Style-No Styles
- If you want to see the least accessible web page in existence for something you could test your system against- What we tested - GDS accessibility team
- Accessibility Testing with the NVDA Screenreader - NVDA for sighted folks from Deque
- DHS Trusted Tester program
- False positives:
- Can detect structure, not meaning
- Accessibility is much more about the context of everything, versus the presence of something.
- Functional Accessibility
- Technically Accessible < Functionally Accessible < User-Friendly (vs. hostile).
- If everything that's keyboard accessible is, but it takes 80 tab presses to get there, that's not very functional or friendly.
- Analogy: technically you can install a refrigerator so close to your oven that you can't open either the fridge door or the oven door. Functionally, your homeowner won't be happy.
- Resources for testing functional accessibility with users
- Knowbility (paid consultancy)
- Recommendation: if you are looking for people independently, try to make sure to compensate people for their time and expertise (trained or lived).
- UX Lunch Club (Meetup)
- Accessibility mailing list
- Tools:
- Axe-core - Keith recommends for its rulesets
- From Deque, a well renowned accessibility testing firm
- axe: Accessibility Testing Tools and Software
- axe-core Documentation | Deque
- axe DevTools Chrome plugin
- axe DevTools Firefox plugin
- Chrome uses axe in its built in Lighthouse tests
- Guide to getting started at axe-con | Deque: axe-Con coming up next week
- Much of the same info as WAVE, but less false positives
- WAVE
- WAVE API is good, but the Axe-Core ruleset is better
- WAVE has a history of being pretty inaccurate. It has gotten better! But that's its reputation
- Mark McCarthy: I would also be aware that most tools throw false positives AND false negatives pretty routinely. Not that you shouldn't use them necessarily, but be wary and careful of results.
- If already pretty entrenched in WAVE API, don't need to switch to axe; if not, may wish to switch to axe
- Axe-core - Keith recommends for its rulesets
Topic 2: AI + accessibility
- Hadi: thoughts on AI for accessibility? Optimistic?
- Keith: optimistic, generative AI aims to find context
- Dena: both hopeful and uncertain. Automated captioning better than it used to be. Implicit bias still an issue
- Algorithms of Oppression (by Safiya Noble - a UIUC alum!) is a great book about implicit bias that's still quite relevant.
- Weapons of Math Destruction
- Michael: both optimistic and apprehensive
- Axe DevTools Pro is using AI: axe DevTools: Your AI Partner for Digital Accessibility Testing
- Leslie: seeing improvement in Copilot’s automated captions in Teams