Evaluation of guidelines for designing accessible Web content

This study evaluates the Web Content Accessibility (WCA) guidelines, developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The first aim of this study was to investigate whether the Guidelines can be used effectively by Web page authors. To this end students of HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) used the Guidelines to adapt Web pages. The second aim of the study was to examine whether pages developed using the Guidelines are accessible to visually impaired people. In order to achieve this visually impaired Web users assessed the accessibility of the pages developed by the Web page authors. The study found some difficulties in the use of the Guidelines that were similar to those identified by previous research. There were unexpected results regarding the accessbility of certain HTML elements.