Experiences from declarative markup to improve the accessibility of HTML

Abstract

Producing accessible content for the Web is a rather complex task. Standards, rules and principles that offer largely useful recommendations for accessible content do indeed exist, but they are not adequately enforced and supported by actual implementations. It is fairly frequent for content authors to produce material that ends up not being accessible without even noticing it, even when using additional tools and services. Yet, most of the existing recommendations for accessible web resources center around the addition of reasonably simple markup with a clear declarative purpose in their design. How therefore is it possible that producing truly accessible content is such a rare occurrence? In this paper, we posit that an important justification of this, in addition to well-known lack of interest and lack of awareness, is the difficulty of evaluating and perceiving the correctness or wrongness of the generated assistive markup by non-disabled content authors and tool designers. Designers have serious difficulties when evaluating the effectiveness and correctness of the accessibility of their works, and existing tools do little or nothing to reduce the "handicap". Under these assumptions, we aim to describe an innovative approach based on declarative markup to improve the design and evaluation the accessibility of web pages. In particular, our strategy encompasses the combined usage of a declarative framework of accessible web components, capable of enforcing best-practices and conformance to accessibility standards, as well as automated tools to test for the accessibility of web content and, in addition, a new approach to manual tools to let developers and content creators examine visually the accessibility issues so that they can make sense of their impact on people with disabilities.

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