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Information Technologies for Visually Impaired People
Automatic Adaptation to the WAI Standard
Juan Manuel Fernández-Ramírez, Vicenç Soler-Ruiz, Jordi Roig de Zárate
Today it is hard to find a website that meets World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. These standards are intended
to help users access all the information available on the website in a user-friendly manner. It is even harder to find sites
that meet the standards for people with disabilities. These standards, published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI),
improve access to the information in a website for those with disabilities and also for those without. In an attempt to
change this situation, we have created the Automatic Conversion Tool for an Accessible Web (ACTAW), a tool which
automatically adapts Web pages to WAI standards.
Keywords: HTML, WAI, WCAG, Web Accessibility.
1 Introduction
As things stand today, the needs of people with disabilities
are not taken into account by software and website developers.
This makes it really difficult for these people to
integrate into the job market and to access all the information
available on the Web. The way software and websites
are designed today, much of the great potential afforded by
the Web as an instrument of integration and standardization
is lost. The Automatic Conversion Tool for an Accessible
Web (ACTAW) offers a new approach to the problem of
Web accessibility and tries to make the largest possible
number of Web pages accessible to users with disabilities.
A set of standards to ensure the correct development of
all the elements involved in Web browsing does exist. These
standards have been drawn up by the World Accessibility
Initiative (WAI) [2] which forms part of the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) [1]. In this article we will focus on
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG) [3]
which provides guidelines to follow for accessible website
design and implementation. This set of standards defines a
number of points to which website developers should pay
special attention to ensure that their websites’ content is
accessible to everyone.
The W3C is an organization whose mission is to lead
the Web to its full potential. This organization draws up
standards for the various technologies used in the Web. In
particular, it specifies the grammar of HTML, the most commonly
used language on the Web. This grammar is the basic
standard for this language, although it is rarely used properly.
This makes it even more difficult to achieve Web accessibility,
since if Web designers are not capable of following
the basic rules of the language they use, they are
unlikely to follow recommendations to make their designs
accessible.
Meanwhile, it is often the case that websites are designed
with specific browsers in mind which may not implement
HTML grammar properly [5]. This situation means that the
presentation of a website may vary greatly depending on
the browser used.
Authors
Juan Manuel Fernández-Ramírez is an IT engineer and has
been a lecturer in the Department of Microelectronics and
Electronic Systems of the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
(UAB) since 2006. He forms part of the Biomedical Applications
Group of the UAB where he researches in the field of personal
autonomy, specializing in e-integration. He is currently heading
the ACTAW project. .
Vicenç Soler-Ruiz is a Doctor of Computer Engineering and
has been a lecturer in the Department of Microelectronics and
Electronic Systems of the UAB since 1997. As a researcher he
belongs to the Biomedical Applications Group of the UAB where
he researches into learning from imbalanced datasets and the
development of applications for personal autonomy. He has been
involved in a number of different projects at both a national and
European level. .
Jordi Roig de Zárate is a Doctor of Computer Engineering
and has been an associate professor in the Department of
Microelectronics and Electronic Systems of the Universidad
Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) since 1986. He is a member of
the Biomedical Applications Group of the UAB, within which
he heads research into applications for personal autonomy and
assistive technologies. He has been involved in various projects
at both a national and European level, including the BrailleDesk
keyboard and ACTAW projects. .
The infrequent use of proper HTML grammar is to a
large extent due to this habit of designing websites for a
particular browser, since Web pages so created are only
checked with that browser and are not checked with the
W3C validation system [4]. Add to this the fact that today’s
Web editors and browsers add their own tags and attributes
and it is easy to see how when we try to include another
feature, such as accessibility, proper website development
becomes a very complicated proposition.
The application presented in this article attempts to solve
this problem by analysing and modifying a website’s
XHTML/HTML code so that it meets the WAI standard. It
also analyses the presentation of the Web page, i.e. the vari-
72 UPGRADE Vol. VIII, No. 2, April 2007 © Novática