EIAO-newsletter September 2006.
The EIAO-machinery speeds up
Our developers team has used the summer months and achieved a speed gain in the Observatory. The Crawler and Web Evaluation Modules (WAMs) of the Observatory has been tested in configurations with 200 times the original throughput, which is more than 2 times the required throughput to achieve 10.000 web sites monthly. Average time to assess one web site: 1.25 minutes. The major gains were achieved by improvements in the WAMs and through allowing parallel crawling and WAM processing.
123 European web sites evaluated
The first results are in! The 123 evaluated web sites originate from all member states in the EU and EFTA countries and include the prime minister office sites, national banks, national libraries, and selected sites among federal organisations such as president/monarchy, ministries, parliaments and national statistics agency.
None of the evaluated web sites comply completely with the checkpoints
Although the first EIAO tests only cover a subset of the full WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) checkpoints, none of the web sites comply completely with them. The most common barrier detected in the evaluated web sites is lack of style sheets used to control layout and presentation. Appropriate use of style sheets is essential to allow the users to adjust the appearance of a web page according to his or her needs, for example, to change the font size or background colour. The second most frequent barrier detected is missing equivalent alternatives to visual and/or auditory content. Problems may occur for users with e.g. screen readers when alternative text to non text elements are missing.
Among the most accessible web sites were www.althingi.is (Icelandic Parliament, Iceland) and www.bne.es (Biblioteca Nacional de España, Spain). Among the sites with most detected barriers were in www.msz.gov.pl, (Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, Poland) and www.llv.li (Landesverwaltung Liechenstein, Liechtenstein).
For more details on these results please refer to the EIAO papers to appear at Design for All and eChallenges conferences (for details see the section on upcoming events below). Selected and verified results can also be seen at http://eiao.net/results.
First user tests of EIAO user interface
The first prototype release of the EIAO user interface was evaluated by a group of usability experts, web developers and decision makers in August. Overall the Observatory was very well received and we gathered valuable feedback regarding further development of the interface and content of the Observatory. A final round of evaluation with a large group of stakeholders is expected to take place with the second release of the user interface due in early 2007.
Further developments
The development team is currently working on additional speed improvements, streamlining of the installation routines and fine tuning of the sampling of web pages from a website. At the same time, drawing on the feedback from the August user testing, a new design of the EIAO interface is being developed. Next release (due December 2006) will improve the initial interface features and offer a range of new functionality, including data on change of accessibility status over time. We also hope to open the December release to a general public
The Web-mining and Data Analysis course started
The course at AUC (Agder University College, Grimstad, Norway) linking the EIAO research to the teaching has now started for the fourth year and has been the most attractive elective course this semester. You can download videos and slides from the lectures at: http://eiao.net/webmining.
Upcoming presentations
ACM Ninth International Workshop on Data Warehousing and OLAP - DOLAP 2006, 10 November 2006, Arlington, VA, USA http://www.cs.uoi.gr/~dolap06/
Building a Web Warehouse for Accessibility Data Christian Thomsen and Torben Bach Pedersen, Aalborg University, Denmark
8th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DaWaK 2006), Krakow, Poland, 4 - 8 September 2006 http://www.dexa.org/dawakprogram
ETLDiff: A Semi-Automatic Framework for Regression Test of ETL Software Christian Thomsen and Torben Bach Pedersen, Aalborg University, Denmark
eChallenges 2006 – Barcelona 25 - 27 October 2006 http://www.echallenges.org/e2006
Automatic Benchmarking and Presentation of the First Results from the European Internet Accessibility Observatory Mikael Snaprud, Morten Goodwin Olsen, Agder University College and Finn Aslaksen, Vista Utredning AS
Recent Presentaions
United Nations Expert Group Meeting on E-Participation and E-Government, Budapest , Hungary, 27-28.July 2006 http://www.unpan.org/directory/conference/guest/browseoneconference.asp?conference_id=1960 The European Internet Accessibility Project Mikael Snaprud and Agata Sawicka, Agder University College
ICCHP , Linz, Austria, 12-14. July, 2006 http://www.icchp.org/content/view/34/67/
Interpreting Results from Large Scale Automatic Evaluation of Web Accessibility Christian Bühler, Helmut Heck, Olaf Perlick, Annika Nietzio, Forschungsinstitut Technologie-Behindertenhilfe (FTB) and Nils Ulltveit-Moe, Agder University College
A proposed architecture for large scale web assessment Mikael Snaprud, Nils Ulltveit-Moe, and Morten Goodwin Olsen, Agder University College, Anand Pillai, Spikesource India Pvt Ltd
The Role of Benchmarking in Concerted Actions to Increase Accessibility Finn Aslaksen, Vista Utredning AS, Frank Fardal, Norge.no and Mikael Snaprud, Agder University College
Modelling Accessibility Constraints Terje Gjøsæter, Jan Pettersen Nytun, Andreas Prinz, Mikael Snaprud and Merete Skjelten Tveit, Agder University College
FreePint online Journal, 24.August http://www.freepint.com/issues/240806.htm#feature
Positive Steps To Assessing, Monitoring and Comparing the Accessibility of Public Websites: Introducing The European Internet Accessibility Observatory Jenny Craven, Manchester Metropolitan University and Mikael Snaprud, Agder University College
International Design for All Conference on 13-15 September at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland http://dfasuomi.stakes.fi/EN/index.htm
European Internet Accessibility Observatory: let's make accessibility measurements, accessible to everyone! Accessible Presentation of Measurements from a Web Accessibility Observatory Patrizia Bertini, FBL, Italy and Terje Gjøsæter, Agder University College, Faculty of Technology, Grimstad, Norway
Early Results from Automatic Accessibility Benchmarking of Public European Web Sites from the European Internet Accessibility Observatory Nils Ulltveit-Moe, Mikael Snaprud, Morten Goodwin Olsen, Agder University College Annika Nietzio,Forschungsinstitut Technologie-Behindertenhilfe (FTB), and Christian Thomsen, Aalborg University,
