Testing the Accessibility of Web 2.0
From: University of Southampton (ECS) - 10/27/2009
By: Joyce Lewis

The University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science
(ECS) is launching a study that will explore how well people with
disabilities can access Web services such as blogs, wikis, and social
networking sites. The study, led by Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan in ECS'
Learning Societies Lab, is based on an accessibility toolkit that will enable
users to test the accessibility of Web 2.0 services. The accessibility tools
were developed as a result of the LexDis project, which identified strategies
learners can use to enhance their e-learning experience. Part of the toolkit,
Web2Access, provides an online checking system for any interactive Web-based
service such as Facebook. Another key feature of the accessibility kit is
Study Bar, which can work with all browsers and reads text out loud, spell
checks, provides a dictionary, and can enlarge or change text fonts and
colors to make text more readable. "We developed it because nowadays users
contribute as well as read information and so you cannot just click on a
button to see if Web sites are accessible and easy to use," Draffan says.
Wald says it is the first time that there has been a systematic way to
evaluate and provide the results of accessibility testing of Web services. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/about/news/2782

Links:
Mike Wald
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/mw

Learning Societies Lab
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/postgraduate/pgstudy/researchareas/ecs/ecs_research_learning_societies_lab.html

Study Bar
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/research/projects/703
http://access.ecs.soton.ac.uk/blog/category/studybar/

LexDis
http://www.lexdis.org/project/

Web2Access
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/research/projects/699