Assessing the Accessibility of Web Archives

Abstract

Web archives are essential resources that capture and preserve highly ephemeral and ever-growing online digital content so that this information is available in the future for researchers, historians, students, corporations, and the general public. Yet, little is known regarding the accessibility of these archives for people with disabilities, especially those with visual impairments. Web archives such as the Wayback Machine have been primarily tailored for visual interaction, and therefore they are unlikely to gel with the interaction methods used by people with visual disabilities, as has been observed in the case of other web applications such as e-commerce, productivity tools, and social media. As a consequence, there is likely a significant disparity in the extent to which sighted and visually-impaired people are able to reap the benefits of web archives. To bridge this knowledge gap, we investigated in-depth the specific accessibility issues faced by blind screen reader users while interacting with web archives. In this poster, we will describe our investigation process as well as our findings.

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