An Analysis of Personalized Web Accessibility

This paper presents an experimental study designed to un­ derstand the differences of performing personalized Web ac­ cessibility evaluations or generic evaluations. We used the WaaT evaluator, which can perform personalized WCAG 2.0 based evaluation. We claim that these tools can be used by an individual to understand if a page is accessible to himself, before wasting time browsing its content. Our study shows that there are considerable differences between the generic and the personalized evaluation results. It also shows that the number of barriers found in accessing pages is in average considerably lower for users with upper limb and cognitive impairments than for those with vision and hearing impairments. Finally, we argue that com­ mon accessibility evaluation metrics are inadequate to un­ derstand the differences between these user perspectives of the same page. For a particular metric, we show that score differences are diminished and sometimes even mislead the perception of the accessibility quality.