Web Accessibility: a Blind Look at the ''Pompeii Website''

Francesco Scariolo Memoria di Licenza 3 0. Executive summary and structure 0.1. Executive summary Web accessibility has been analyzed focusing on the blind user according to the current international standards. After a wide-ranging look at the web accessibility in general and the methods that blind people utilize to surf the web, a collection of heuristics of different institutions has been defined. The elaboration of these guidelines through a communicative perspective provided a list of heuristics ordered by technical heuristics (referring to technical errors that can be easily removed following the instruction of checklists) and communicative heuristics (referring to logical and structural problems at a higher level of the communication). The case study’s website has been analyzed (www.pompeiisites.org) and blind users have been tested both to get in touch with the problem and to analyze new accessibility heuristics. As result of these two analyses, six new accessibility heuristics emerged: 1) Structure lists in a hierarchical way This will reduce the access time to an item in a list. 2) Translate the corporate identity This will help communicators to transmit the corporate identity of a company 3) “Rheme first” as general rule (in labels, alt tags and headings) Applying the linguistic principle of theme-rheme, stressing on the rheme will sensibly reduce the skipping time when reading labels, alt tags and headings. 4) Alternative text building This will help the web content creator to create smart alternative texts. 5) Navigate sections through links This is an extension of a WED guideline that gives the possibility to the user to navigate into sections not only with headings, but also using links. 6) Change language during the navigation This will eliminate the problem of returning on the first page to only change the language of it. In addition, the inspection of the Pompeii website revealed fourteen problems. All of these problems were individually analyzed with the heuristics defined in this study in order to generate fourteen solutions.