The Web-interface availability model for people with disabilities

Abstract

Today there is a situation in which customers reveal a great interest in ensuring the availability of the contents of the Website, as this allows expanding the target audience. The extension of the audience is supposed to be due to the possibility of inter-action between groups of users with disabilities with a Web interface. At the same time, the quality of this interaction depends on the level of accessibility of the Website interface. The transition to Websites that have an average or even high level of accessibility is carried out through the implementation of solutions, most of which are clearly standardized. However, choosing a solution to move to a new level of accessibility of the Website’s interface, developers are faced with the following problem: a lack of understanding of various types of violations related to the health of users leads to the fact that, as a result of development, a product is released onto the market that is still not available for certain user groups. This mainly concerns people who have cognitive impairment. To solve this problem, it was proposed to build a Web-based accessibility model that takes into account the main types of user health prob-lems, and also follows the recommendations of the WCAG 2.0 standard. At the first stage, an accessibility model was formulated, called the classic. The components of the classic accessibility model were determined by analyzing existing Websites. To increase the level of accessibility, an expanded accessibility model was developed. The implementation of this model allows us to ensure, in addi-tion to improving the quality of interaction between users with disabilities with the Web interface, also improving the user’s percep-tion of the information posted on the Website. The testing of the Website, implemented on the basis of the expanded accessibility model, was carried out at Odessa National Polytechnic University. For the experiment, a group of thirty students was formed. More than twenty-five percent of students were people with disabilities. As a result of the experiment, it was proved that the implementa-tion of the expanded accessibility model allows to increase the quantitative indicators of the following parameters of the Website interface: the quality of user interaction with the web interface and the quality of user perception of the information presented on the Website. Based on the results obtained, a conclusion was made about increasing the level of accessibility of the Web interface by twenty percent.