Beyond Conformance: The Role of Accessibility Evaluation Methods

The topic I want to address is the role that accessibility evaluation methods can play in helping the transition from accessibility viewed as standard conformance, to a user-centered accessibility. As we will see, this change sets additional requirements on how evaluations of websites should be carried out. This paper first discusses different problems that occur while dealing with accessibility. We will see that different people have radically different views of accessibility and how it should be assessed. The first requirement is a clear definition of what accessibility is and how it should be assessed. The accessibility model discussed in Section 2.1 has precisely this role. Several existing evaluation methods are then reviewed and discussed, a simple taxonomy is presented, and differences that occur when evaluating accessibility rather than usability are pinpointed.