Accessibility by Demonstration: Enabling End Users to Guide Developers to Web Accessibility Solutions

Few web developers have been explicitly trained to create accessible web pages, and are unlikely to recognize subtle accessibility and usability concerns that disabled people face. Evaluating web pages with assistive technology can reveal problems, but this software takes time to install and its complexity can be overwhelming. To address these problems, we introduce a new approach for accessibility evaluation called Accessibility by Demonstration (ABD). ABD lets assistive technology users retroactively record accessibility problems at the time they experience them as human-readable macros and easily send those recordings and the software necessary to replay them to others. This paper describes an implementation of ABD as an extension to the WebAnywhere screen reader, and presents an evaluation with 15 web developers not experienced with accessibility showing that interacting with these recordings helped them understand and fix some subtle accessibility problems better than existing tools.