FROM WEB 1.0 TO WEB 2.0 AND BEYOND: IS THE WEB BECOMING MORE ACCESSIBLE FOR PEOPLE WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS? Hend S. Al-Khalifa1 and AbdulMalik S. Al-Salman 2 Abstract During the past five years, many dramatic changes have occurred on the Web. New services have been announced, new interfaces have been developed and the Web is approaching to be the new platform for many applications. Wikis, RSS feeds, Blogs to name just a few, are dubs of new Web applications (also know as Web 2.0) that sighted people are experimenting and enjoying nowadays. However, the question we want to address is: How these new applications and changes are going to affect on how visually impaired people access them? This paper aims to provide information about the tools, services, projects, and research that are taking place nowadays on the Web and the Semantic Web to make the Web more accessible for visually impaired people. Also, the authors will present a pilot experiment to check the accessibility of some Web 2.0 services.
1.
Introduction
The World Wide Web (WWW) is the largest information database humans have ever invented. People can find different kinds of information (e.g. news, research papers, quotes, etc.) that they can acquire and manipulate. But, as the WWW evolves and gets more advanced, new services and applications become more complicated. Therefore, the question that arises is: can people with visual impairments access information as easy as their sighted counterparts? Accessibility, by definition, is the ability to access information on the web by everyone. Visually Impaired People (VIP) include those who are blind or have a low vision. They should have an equal opportunity to access the different resources on the Web as their peers do. To talk about the different services and research in the WWW, three terminologies need to be defined first; these are Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and the Semantic Web. Web 1.0 or the World Wide Web (WWW), “is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).”3 This is the general definition of the WWW that also applies to Web 2.0 and to the Semantic Web, but what distinguishes Web 1.0 or the old Web from the other two is that, the Web was conceived as a read media. In other words, people were not able to publish anything on the web without the knowledge of HTML, and the content of the Web was merely static pages. That is to say, the Web was primarily confined with the expertise of web developers and web designers. The next logical shift was to make the Web more dynamic. This era was sometimes denoted as Web 1.5, where web page content was generated dynamically from databases. Then, a new concept has appeared on the Web that changed how people interact with it. This concept is named the read/write Web; it is when the 1 Learning Technologies Research group, Southampton University, UK.
[email protected] 2 Computer Science Dept.,King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
[email protected] 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
Web becomes more a platform than a media. Web 2.0 1 is the candidate name for this era of the Web. Even though a clear definition of the term is not present yet, Web 2.0 can be distinguished by its main technologies such as weblogs (blogs), RSS feeds, Ajax, Wiki, etc. Also, Web 2.0 is best known for its social aspect due to the increase use of social networks and social software. However, neither Web 1.0 nor Web 2.0 in general sense is enough for the machines to understand the information on the Web. Therefore, the Semantic Web (SW) is a complement and extension for the current Web and it is not considered as an evolution or a competitor. The SW was defined by its creator Tim Berners-Lee [1] as "… an extension of the current web in which information is given a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." To sum up, the Web for sighted people as well as VIP is constituted of all the three dimensions (i.e. Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web), and to show how VIP can benefit from the multi nature of the Web this paper is organized as follows. Section gives some insight about the current accessibility barriers and proposed solutions. Section 3 discusses the three main Web accessibility concerns which are: 1) Contemporary tools to improve accessibility, 2) Services devoted for VIP, and 3) The current research and projects carried out in Web (1.0/2.0) and the SW. Section 4 demonstrates a pilot test carried out by the authors to test the accessibility of some Web 2.0 services. Finally, the paper finishes with some concluding remarks.
2.
Accessibility Barriers and Proposed Solutions
Many countries have setup a set of regulations and rules to make the Web more accessible for people with disability. For example, in the US, there is civil rights legislation, like the American's with Disabilities Act, the Reauthorized Rehabilitation Act, the Telecommunications Act. They came out of the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Education2 . Also, the U.S. government has Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act that requires all federal agencies’ services to be accessible to people with disabilities. In the UK, there is the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)3 , and in Europe, the EU has promoted for the eAccessibility4 initiative. In Canada, there is CLF for the Internet and Accessibility5 . Also in Japan there is Japan Standards Association6 . Moreover, the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has proposed a set of guidelines for accessing the web under the name Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)7 and this initiative has published the Web Content Accessibility Guideline 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) 8 . A newer version of WCAG, WCAG 2.0 9 , is proposed but not yet approved by W3C. Despite all the efforts to setup these guidelines, regulations and developed instructions for web developers such as [2], the Web is becoming more visual, and accessibility barriers are exponentially growing. These include the use of tables, forms, plug- ins, Java applets, flash movies and scripting languages such as JavaScript. Therefore, some solutions have been proposed to 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 2 http://www.webaim.org/ 3http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/uk-website-legal-requirements.shtml 4 http://europa.eu.int/information_society/policy/accessibility/com_ea_2005/index_en.htm 5 http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/clf-nsi/inter/inter-01-tb_e.asp 6http://www.webstore.jsa.or.jp/webstore/Com/FlowControl.jsp?lang=en&bunsyoId=JIS+X+83413%3A2004&dantaiCd=JIS&status=1&pageNo=0 7 http://www.w3.org/WAI/ 8 http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ 9 http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
overcome each aspect of these barriers. For instance, in the case of tables and forms many guidelines have been proposed like the one published by WebAIM for tables and forms 1 accessibility. In another solution for tables, Yesilada et al. [3] introduced a small table browser called EVITA (Enabling Visually Impaired Table Access) that enables non-visual table browsing and reading in an analogous manner to the print medium. They also produced a second approach, which provides a table line riser to transform tables into a form such that screen readers can easily read them. Another problem is specifying how a web document is to be presented on different media including assistive technologies devices such as speech synthesizers, and Braille devices. This can be overcome by the W3C (7 Media types) specification. The proposed specification states how to use media dependent cascading style sheets (CSS) 2 when creating web pages. In flash movies there have been many recommendations for creating accessible content, one of them was proposed by Macromedia Company3 and another by WebAIM4 . Also, there has been successful use of accessible flash movies like the flash game created by Nomensa for the RNIB5 . For Java Applets, IBM has produced a set of accessib ility guidelines for Java 6 . By the same token WebAIM proposed a guideline for accessible JavaScripts7 . Moreover, another way to look at the solutions for web accessibility problems is by categorizing them into four categories [4]. The first solution is by using a conventional web browser and a screen reader (e.g. MS-IE with JAWS). The second solution is by utilizing the accessibility features of HTML and existing web clients. The third solution is by using proxy servers to convert web page HTML into a more accessible format (e.g. WBI8 ). The final solution is to use a dedicated web browser (e.g. IBM’s Home Page Reader).
3.
Tools, Services, Research and Projects
In the last five years, there have been tremendous breakthroughs to harness the Web for VI people. New tools, services, projects and research were devoted to improve Web accessibility. In this section we will shed some light on the latest tools, services, projects and research on the Web (i.e., Web1.0/2.0 and the Semantic Web). 3.1
Tools
Although awareness of web accessibility has progressively increased in the past years, many web developers are still unsure about how to evaluate their web sites. Developers need more advance tools to simulate different kinds of disabilities so they can help them understand and experience real VIP needs. This will aid the developers adhere to Web accessibility regulations and guidelines. A set of useful tools can be found in a compiled report [5] produced by W3C. One of these tools is desktop software called the aDesigner 9 simulator from IBM. This tool simulates how low- vision and blind people view a web page. The tool help web developers experience, not only by voice, but also by seeing how a web page will be read by a screen reader. Another handy web-based tool for 1 http://www.webaim.org/techniques/ 2 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/media.html 3 http://www.macromedia.com/resources/accessibility/ 4 http://webaim.org/techniques/flash/ 5 http://rnibblinddate.nomensa.com/start_flash.html 6 http://www-306.ibm.com/able/guidelines/java/accessjava.html 7 http://www.webaim.org/techniques/javascript/ 8 http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/wbi/ 9 http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/adesigner
graphic designers is Vischeck 1 . This tool simulates color-blind vision and works as a plug- in for Photoshop. In addition, there is an online tool called Colorblind Web Page Filter2 that exposes a web page to a set of coverage filters to experience the different kinds of color blindness. Moreover, there is a set of extensions that can be used with Mozilla Firefox browser to test websites accessibility. Among these extensions is Fangs 3 , an open source extension. Fangs creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by a screen reader. Another Firefox extension is FoxyVoice 4 . This extension provides text-to-speech functionality using Microsoft Win32 Speech API (SAPI). In addition, there are toolbars like WAVE5 and NILS accessibility toolbar 6 that can be integrated into Internet Explorer (IE). As well, for Firefox there is a Web Developer Extension Toolbar7 which Lauke [6] has tested thoroughly. Finally, WAIZilla 8 is a tool to produce a cross platform web site accessibility testing. These toolbars allow Web developers to view their content in several different modes and simulate the experience of users with different types of disabilities. On the other hand, there are tools designed to be used by VIP. Among them is the WebbIE 9 browser that is based on MS-IE. It runs simultaneously with MS-IE and re-presents all the information in a web page in text to make it easy for a screen reader to read web content. Furthermore, there are two useful software packages that come with WebbIE which are AccessibleRSS and AccessiblePodcatcher. AccessibleRSS is an accessible application that accesses RSS feeds; and Accessible Podcatcher is an application that accesses and fetches Podcasts from the Web. Tactile web browser [7] is another recently developed tool that uses a tactile interface to browse and interact with web pages. It uses a transformation schema to render web pages on a tactile graphics display. Bitmap images and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) can be explored in a special mode. Mathematical expressions encoded in the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) are transformed into LaTeX or into a notation for visually disabled people. The web browser supports voice output to read text paragraphs and to provide feedback on interactions to the users. In addition, Yu et al. [8] have developed a content-aware Web browser plug- in coupled with audio haptic tools. The functionality of this technique is described by its authors as follows “when a user’s cursor is in close proximity to a region of interest on a Web page, e.g., a hyperlink or image. By rendering the spatial visual information using multimodal interfaces, users are not only informed of these regions of interest, but are also guided to them using audio and haptics” [8: p.8]. Finally, there has been a consortium of people interested in Web accessibility, called Web Accessibility Tools Consortium [WAT-C] 10 . The consortium provides a collection of free tools to assist both developers and designers in the development and testing of accessible web content. 1 http://www.vischeck.com/ 2 http://colorfilter.wickline.org/ 3 http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?2004/11/22/8-fangs-release-05 4 http://foxyvoice.kenche.info/ 5 http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2004/proceedings/245.htm 6 http://www.nils .org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/ 7 http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/ 8 http://waizilla.mozdev.org/ 9 http://www.webbie.org.uk/ 10 http://www.wat-c.org/
3.2 Services There are services (free and/or paid) that can enhance the accessibility of some aspects of the Web. In the field of corporate and personal websites, Browsealoud 1 is a service that reads aloud the actual content on a site, highlighting the text as it reads. VIP can download a plug- in to listen to a website’s content that displays the Browsealoud icon. It is a subscription-based service to speech enable website content, thus Internet based companies have to pay an annual charge to speechenable their web site. In the field of Speech search engines, a report by BBC news, entitled “Speech takes on search engines”, mentioned that there is a search engine called Speegle 2 that can read out the results of a query. The search engine uses PanaVox3 technology which takes web text and converts it into synthesized speech [9]. Using the same technology the company has launched a new feed reader called Speakwire 4 that converts RSS feeds into audio. In the filed of CAPTCHA 5 , VIP suffer a lot from CAPTCHA used by major companies like Google, Yahoo and MSN, but there is a trend in converting CAPTCHA into voice enabled like what AOL has done. Also, there are many documents that discuss this issue in detail like [10] and [11]. In the field of web-based screen readers, Readerbot 6 reads the content of a web page without the need for a dedicated screen reader installed in someone’s computer. In the field of blogs, Talkr7 is a service that converts blog posts into audio files. VIP can use this service to convert their favorite blogs posts into audio. 3.3
Research and Projects
In this section, we will cast some light on the ongoing projects and research in the field of Web accessibility for VIP. 3.3.1
Web 1.0
The accessibility of the WWW can be measured using different techniques. One technique may handle one aspect of accessibility (e.g. alt text accessibility), while others may rely on WAI measurements to provide a thorough evaluation of the intended site. Despite the difference in the evaluation techniques, we are going to outline the research and projects done in Web 1.0 based on the sector it is tackling (e.g. corporate, educational, government, etc.) For Corporate websites: Asakawa [12] conducted many researches to measure the accessibility of the web. One of his studies was about the use of alt texts with images on a set of corporate web sites. The study shows that the number of images without alt texts has decreased in 2001. That was due to US Section 508 becoming effective in that year. In 2004, private companies started inserting alt texts, this movement helped in decreasing the number of images without alt text to (7%) of the total images used in the sample web sites. The test conclude that “The use of images has increased steadily, but the ratio for missing alt texts has been decreasing quite consistently among these test 1 http://www.browsealoud.com/home.asp 2 http://www.speegle.co.uk/ 3 http://panavox.panaserve.net/ 4 http://www.speakwire.com/ 5 CAPTCHA is a fuzzy image displayed when registering on email services or posting comments on web blogs. It is used to alleviate the spread of spam by stopping bots from automatically registering or posting comments (http://www.captcha.net/). 6 http://www.readerbot.com. 7 http://www.talkr.com/
sites since 2000. This indicates that the Web accessibility is improving drastically.” [12: p.3]. In addition, Loiacono et al. [13] have performed a test on a sample of 45 top online product/service Web sites divided into eight sectors: search engines, apparel/beauty, automotive, hardware manufacturers, finance, multi-category commerce, travel, and ISPs. The results showed that many of the top brands and channels in the seven sectors and top ISPs tested are not accessible. As for WAI Priority1 barriers, only seven out of 44 (15.9 %) were accessible. For Educational websites: Alexander [14] performed an accessibility test on 45 Australian tertiary education web sites. The results show that 98 percent of Australian university web sites failed to meet the most basic standards for web accessibility. In the US, Stephanie Hackett and Bambang Parmanto [15] used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to study a sample of higher education websites in the period between 1997-2002. Their findings were “Higher education web sites become progressively inaccessible as complexity increases” [15: p.281]. In the UK, Sloan et al. [16] have carried out an accessibility audit for 11 UK higher education web sites. The research resulted in a methodology of auditing web sites based on their specific types of resources. Furthermore they reported that subject sites were reasonably accessible. Also it is good to mention that some learning management systems (LMS) like WebCT1 are adhering to accessibility guidelines (i.e. section 508). For library web sites as being part of the educational web sites, Stewart et al. [17] have carried out a research on the accessibility of online libraries. The research evaluated 37 databases for functionality when used along with adaptive software. Their findings can be stated as follows "while most indexes and databases are now largely compliant with common accessibility standards and permit the performance of common search tasks, their actual user-friendliness for people with disabilities tends to be low." [17: p.265]. For health web sites: Kurniawan et al. [18] have done a research on aging/health-related web sites, and their main research question was "Do aging/health-related web sites of different natures (i.e. commercial, educational, governmental and organizational) differ in their accessibility and usability?" The results of the research revealed that 52% of governmental web sites have the highest compliance with WCAG 1.0. For Governmental websites: For instance, the UK cabinet office has recently produced a report [19] about the accessibility of 436 government service websites. It found that 97% of official websites across the EU are inaccessible for disabled users in some way and 70% fail completely. In addition, Choudrie et al. [20] have done an evaluative study of a cross-section of e-Government portals using a common set of performance metrics and Web diagnostic engines. Results show “that significant work still needs to be undertaken in order to make the portals examples of ‘best practice’ eGovernment services” [20: p.105]. Andrew Potter also [21] has evaluated the level of accessibility of selected state of Alabama government web sites. He found that the level of accessibility has improved significantly from previous research; this was due to the adoption of standards at the federal level. Finally, it is good to know that there is an online white paper entitled “Accessibility & Usability for e-Government” that can be used to guide web developers when building e-government web sites [22]. 3.3.2
The Semantic Web
Since the first appearance of the Semantic Web in late 1998, many accessibility researches and projects were carried out. For instance, Salampasis et al. [23] have developed an application 1 http://www.webct.com/accessibility/viewpage?name=accessibility_508
framework that uses metadata in web pages to enhance VIP’s access to the WWW. The framework consists of three software tools, an ontology editor for metadata creation, an annotation tool for metadata annotation of web pages, and a voice web browser called the SeEBrowser browser (Semantically Enhanced Browser), which is a specialized voice web browser based on the Demosthenes text-to-speech system. The experiment conducted on the framework [24] pointed out the usefulness of the used annotation to easy the browsing of websites by VIP. Kottapally et al. [25] have developed a software agent to assist visually impaired users in navigating complex Web pages (e.g., tables, frame structures). The system relies on an explicit encoding of the navigational structure of the document and on the use of planning technology to assist users in simple and complex query-answering tasks. The system analyzes incoming documents, and interacts with the user via keyboard as an input and aural as an output. HearSay [26] is a system for browsing hypertext Web documents via audio. The system is based on automatically creating audio browsable content from hypertext Web documents. It combines two technologies: automatic partitioning of Web documents through tightly coupled structural and semantic analysis, which transforms raw HTML documents into semantic structures; and VoiceXML to represent voice dialogs automatically created from the XML output of partitioning. Furthermore, Harper et al. [27] have developed a system that allows semantics-based triage, which means prioritized removal of unnecessary information from the presentation of a web site, to make the interaction of VIP with that site more productive. The system uses a lightweight markup language to give a semantically rich web page. Also, Lorenz et al. [28] have proposed a system that allows blind people to access graphical web resource using semantics. The system enables the blinds to search and retrieve graphical information in RDF(S) representation from the semantic web. Additionally, Regina M. Mathis [29] is running a project to create a global ontology for Constraint Scalable Vector Graphics (CSVG) graphics written in OWL. The CSVG ontology will allow the intended meaning of the graphic to be captured and annotated in varying levels of abstraction. Finally, Yesilada et al. [30] have designed a system that enhances the mobility of visually impaired Web travelers by annotating pages with a travel ontology that aims to encapsulate rich structural and navigational knowledge. The system, called ‘Dante’, is a semi-automated tool that aims to analyze web pages and extract travel objects, discover their roles, annotate them with travel ontology, and transform pages based on the annotations to enhance the provided mobility support. Plessers et al. [31] have combined the Dante approach with web design method, WSDM, to fully automate the generation of the semantic annotation for VIP. The system can automatically produce ±70% of the Dante concept annotation without any effort of the web designer. 3.3.3
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 or the read/write Web consists of a set of new technologies that make the Web more like a platform. These technologies include Wikis, blogs, social bookmarking services, RSS feeds, etc. These technologies have not been evaluated thoroughly to check whether they are accessible by VIP. For instance, the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) has tested several blogging services [32] and RSS [33] feeds tools for accessibility. The result of the test shows that the most current blogging services are inaccessible due to minor problems such as not getting past the "name your blog" in blogger.com (a blog hosting service) or inaccessible combo-boxes in bloglines.com (a web-based RSS reader). These problems can be easily fixed using some basic web accessibility tips. For RSS readers, AFB found consistent problems across all the readers such as inaccessible installation procedures, menu bars that were difficult to navigate and the inability to view the list of subscriptions. To complement these tests AFB has set up some quick tips for bloggers to make their blogs more accessible for VIP [34]. While there have been a few researches to test the different
aspects of Web 2.0 technologies for their appropriateness for the use by VIP, further research needs to be carried out to test the wide variety of Web 2.0 services for accessibility issues. In the next section, the authors demonstrate a pilot test that they have carried out to check the accessibility of some Web 2.0 technologies.
4.
How Accessible are Web 2.0 Technologies? A Pilot Test
In a pilot experiment done by the authors, to check the accessibility of some Web 2.0 technologies. A pilot test was carried out on the following web sites: Del.icio.us: the social bookmarking service, Start.com: an AJAX (asynchronies JavaScript and XML) portal from Microsoft, and Wikipedia.org: the Wiki encyclopedia. The experiment was preformed at the beginning of December 2005 in three phases, in a combination of automated and manual evaluation techniques. Notice that the experiment is highly dependent on the status of some web sites being tested at that time due to the dynamic nature of the web site (i.e. del.icio.us is updated approximately each second). In phase 1, the web sites were tested using many automated accessibility testing tools such as WebXACT1 , Cynthia 2 , Etre 3 , Wave 4 and TAW3 5 . Table 1 shows the accessibility of the sample web sites evaluated by the automated services. These services evaluate a web page based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 with the different priority levels. So, in our experiment for each priority level (1, 2, and 3), a statement indicating if the page met these priority requirements or not is outlined. If a site did not pass the accessibility test, the table states the number of errors it found denoted by E(number). The test did not take into consideration the warnings. Table 1 Summarizes the accessibility tests performed using the automated tools, “E” denotes an error and the number of errors between brackets Tools WebXACT Cynthia Etre TAW Pr# Pr# Pr# Pr# Pr# Pr# Pr# Pr# Pr# Pr# Pr# Pr# Websites E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) Del.icio.us E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) Start.com E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) E( ) en.wikipedia.org
In phase 2, the web sites were manually evaluated using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 checklist. This step is essential to supplement the automated process, since it cannot check all the accessibility issues. Therefore, the manual evaluation is essential to avoid falsepositives in the results. Table 2, summarizes the manual evaluation of the sample web sites. Table 2 Summarizes the manual accessibility tests using the WCAG 1.0 checklist WAI Priority Priority ( in total) Priority ( in total) Priority ( in total) Web site Del.icio.us E( ) E( ) E( ) Start.com E( ) E( ) E( ) en.wikipedia.org E( ) E( ) E( )
In phase 3, a blind user was asked to test the accessibility of the sample web sites. The subject is completely blind and was using JAWS 7.0 screen reader. In the first phase of the experiment, the subject was able to access the content of the websites without the need for a sighted help. In the 1 http://webxact.watchfire.com/ 2 http://www.contentquality.com/ 3 http://www.etre.com/tools/accessibilitycheck/ 4 http://wave.webaim.org/index.jsp 5 http://www.tawdis.net/taw3/cms/en
second phase of the experiment, the subject was asked to check out how these technologies can be easily manipulated. The subject reported the following findings: although the websites were read by the screen reader the order of the reading and some features are not accessible with out a mouse (e.g. drag and drop). Finally, the authors have tested the sites using Fang extension. The extension is very handy in emulating a screen reader output. Although the extension does not replace the actual procedures that were already performed to test the sample web sites, yet it gave the authors some essence on how a web site might looks like using a screen reader. When trying the extension on the social bookmark site del.icio.us, it looked chaotic and did not retain the document structure as a sighted user might interpret. On the other hand, Wikipedia has almost retained the document structure and the reading order was logical. Finally, while Start.com has maintained the reading order of the document, many features of the site (e.g. drag windows) could not be understood without seeing them.
5.
Discussion and Concluding Remarks
Although the pilot test did not explore all services and aspects of Web 2.0 technologies, the authors can conclude tha t not all Web 2.0 technologies were accessible via VIP. This drives the authors to propose the following recommendations: Ø Despite the intriguing functionality of del.icoi.us, this service failed to fulfill the functional requirements of some screen readers. This drives us to look more into the issue of tags accessibility1 . Ø Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, has also failed in the accessibility test. This implies that Wikis software needs to be improved to make them more accessible. Ø Finally, AJAX, as a player technology on most interactive Web 2.0 services, needs a lot of work to make it accessible. Because AJAX technology relies on JavaScript which means that most screen readers will hook in when trying to read a web site that uses AJAX. A set of proposals to overcome the hassle of using AJAX technology can be found at the University of Washington accessibility website 2 . In conclusion, this paper showed how the Web with its different aspects is not mature enough for VIP accessibility. Therefore, the need for extra efforts by researchers, web developers, governments and organizations is becoming essential with the current evolution of the Web. That is if we really want to reach the goal of making the Web appealing to VIP as it is now for sighted people.
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