Governments have been investing considerable resources into making their services to citizens available through the Internet. However, people face barriers when accessing these e-services. Barriers affect people with disabilities to a greater extent. Taking into account the accessibility-in-use in addition to the required standards while designing these services would mitigate some of these issues. In this work, five e-services from the Spanish government were selected from among the most used ones and tested with fifteen participants, of whom ten participants belong to the group of people with low vision. Different qualitative and quantitative measures were analyzed to determine whether participants with low vision had more difficulties performing the tasks and to identify the design issues required to achieve improvement. The results highlighted some issues to be incorporated into the complexity and cognitive accessibility evaluations of e-services to anticipate difficulties (e.g., error prompting/prevention mechanisms). In addition, contributions to existing accessibility standards are proposed to be considered in the design of the e-services.

Ubiquitous environments have considerable potential to provide services supporting daily activities (using public transportation to and from workplace, using ATM machines, selecting and purchasing goods in ticketing or vending machines, etc.) in order to assist people with disabilities. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous service providers generally supply generic user interfaces which are not usually accessible for all potential end users. In this article, a case study to verify the adequacy of the user interfaces automatically generated by the Egoki system for two supporting ubiquitous services adapted to young adults with moderate intellectual disabilities was presented. The task completion times and the level of assistance required by participants when using the interfaces were analyzed. Participants were able to access services through a tablet and successfully complete the tasks, regardless of their level of expertise and familiarity with the service. Moreover, results indicate that their performance and confidence improved with practice, as they required fewer direct verbal and pointer cues to accomplish tasks. By applying observational methods during the experimental sessions, several potential improvements for the automated interface generation process were also detected.

Web accessibility evaluation requires tests to be carried out with real users with disabilities performing real tasks or activities. To recruit an appropriate group of users and to observe their performance in the real world is difficult. For this reason we have developed RemoTest, a platform that assists researchers designing experiments, conducting remote and in-situ experimental sessions and analyzing the data gathered while the users are accessing the Web. Although this tool is oriented to experimenters, it is necessary to check whether the evaluation environments created by RemoTest are accessible or not to the users that participate in the tests. To this end, we conducted formal in-situ evaluations with 36 users with diverse characteristics. For this assessment, the participants were asked to install the platform, to fill in some automatically created questionnaires and to carry out several web navigation tasks. From the data gathered we analyzed the ease of the installation process, the accessibility of the automatically generated questionnaires, and user satisfaction. The results revealed the suitability of the platform for conducting inclusive experiments both in remote and in-situ contexts and provided guidelines on how the experiments should be set out.

People with motor impairments (MI) may face accessibility barriers when using computers due to their health conditions and therefore need to use alternative devices to a standard mouse for pointing and clicking in graphical user interfaces (GUI). In this study with users of different pointing devices, we evaluate 2 virtual cursors (the novel cross cursor and the standard area cursor) implemented for assisting link selection on the Web by reducing respectively cursor displacement and the precision required. Both cursor adaptations were developed for this work based on previous research, and have been compared with the original unassisted cursor in a web-based study with fifteen regular computer users applying their usual pointing device. Nine participants with MIs participated, including 4 using keyboards as an alternative pointing device, 4 joystick users and 1 trackball user. Six participants without MIs also participated in the study applying a standard mouse to complete the same experimental tasks. User interactions with the pointing device, as well as subjective assessments about the usability of the cursor variants tested were gathered from study participants. An in-depth analysis of point and click trajectories showed that virtual cursors improved the effectiveness and efficiency of most participants with MIs in link selection. Subjective assessments about cursor variants tested showed that a majority of participants with MIs generally preferred one of either the two virtual cursors to the original one for web navigation.

People with disabilities frequently use the Internet to perform a variety of common activities; however, they may often encounter aggravated accessibility barriers when using mobile devices to access the Web. In order to alleviate the problems faced by this group when using mobile devices, we have extended a previously developed transcoding-based system that adapts non-accessible web pages to the needs of specific users in order to enhance their accessibility. In this version, we included new adaptation techniques gathered from the literature in order to apply transcoding techniques to mobile devices. The enhanced system was evaluated with eight users with reduced mobility using tablets. The exploratory study suggests that alternative interaction methods such as the ones named ‘end tap’ and ‘steady tap’ are beneficial for some participants with reduced mobility, dexterity or strength in the upper limbs. Other results show that six of the eight users preferred the adapted version with enlarged interaction elements which required less physical effort, even if this adaptation increases the size of the page with the disadvantages associated with such a change.

Using standard keyboard for pointing and clicking interactions seems to be an affordable option for people who have difficulties handling a standard mouse due to a lack of dexterity or temporal disability conditions. The keypad mouse uses discrete input based on keystrokes to perform cursor movements. This distinctive feature along with others related to cursor motion behavior, make the keypad mouse a unique pointing interface when compared with alternatives. We have carried out a study with expert users of different pointing devices. Results of the study revealed significant differences in the performance values among participants in the three groups. Direction on aimed cursor movements proved to be a crucial factor to be taken into account for keyboard-only users. The findings presented in this paper have a broad application when it comes to designing effective predictive models as well as to proposing design guidelines, novel interaction techniques and adaptation techniques for this collective.

Egoki is an automatic generator of accessible user interfaces designed to allow people with disabilities to access supportive ubiquitous services. Egoki follows a model-based approach and selects suitable interaction resources and modalities depending on users' capabilities. A proof-of-concept prototype evaluation was conducted with accessibility experts and participants in two different scenarios: one devoted to blind people and the other to people with cognitive impairments. Two services were developed for each scenario: a service for selecting the menu for lunch and a bus schedule service. The tailored user interfaces automatically generated for both scenarios were evaluated by accessibility experts following a barrier walkthrough method. In addition, a user evaluation was performed with eleven participants (two blind participants and nine participants with cognitive impairments). Observational methods were employed during the evaluation sessions where participants were asked to perform several tasks. The results revealed that the tailored user interfaces automatically generated by Egoki were operable and accessible and that all of the participants were able to complete the proposed tasks.

Compliance to accessibility standards does not guarantee a satisfying user experience on the Web. Both unmet content and functionality expectations have been identified as central factors on the lack of coverage shown by guidelines. We expand on this by examining the role played by subjective dimensions, and particularly expectations, on the perception that users have on web accessibility. We conducted a study with 11 blind users to explore how these expectations shape the perception of web accessibility. Our preliminary findings corroborate that expectations can affect the perception of web accessibility. Additionally, we find that expectations on the Web are built up on previous experiences and prejudices. What is more, we reveal that these expectations are not only shaped by previous Web usage, but also by real life experiences. Our outcomes suggest that user expectations should be considered in user tests.