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Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World

This page provides access to a paper on "Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World" which was accepted for the Seventh International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility. The W4A 2010 conference had the theme "Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?".

Prize

This paper won the John M Slatin Award for the Best Communications Paper at W4A 2010 - see the accompanying blog post.

Materials

Paper

This paper is available from Opus, the University of Bath institutional repository.

Preprint
[About] - [PDF format] - [MS Word format] - [HTML format] - [EPub format]
Publishers copy
[Remote copy] - ACM Digital Library

Accompanying Slides

Accompanying Presentation
Presentation given by David Sloan: [Slideshare]
Related Blog Post
[Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World], UK Web Focus blog, 10 May 2010

 

Citation Details

Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World, Kelly, B., Lewthwaite, S. and Sloan, D. W4A2010, April 26-27, 2010, Raleigh, USA. Co-Located with the 19th International World Wide Web Conference. Copyright 2010 ACM ISBN: 978-1-4503-0045-2
DOI: 10.1145/1805986.1805992
<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1805986.1805992>
Also available at <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/w4a-2010/>.

Author Details

The co-authors of this paper are:

Brian Kelly was the lead author. You can view Brian's Google+ page. His email address is currently b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk

ABSTRACT

The need for developing countries to consider appropriate strategies for enhancing access to networked resources by disabled people provides an opportunity to assess the merits and limitations of the approaches which have been taken in western countries. This paper reviews the limitations of dependence on a constrained technical definition of accessibility, and builds on previous work which developed a holistic approach to Web accessibility and a generic model to assist policy makers in understanding the complexities of addressing Web accessibility. We explore how such approaches can be deployed by practitioners and developers with responsibilities for the deployment of Web services within the context of limited resources, flawed technologies, conflicting priorities and debates within disability studies on the nature of disability.

A pragmatic framework is presented which supports promotion of digital accessibility within a wider social inclusion context. It learns from past difficulties and aims to assist policy makers and practitioners across the world in decision-making when seeking to deploy accessible Web-based services within the context of limited resources, conflicting priorities and the limitations of technical accessibility guidelines.

Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.2 [User Interfaces - Evaluation/methodology];
K.4.2 [Social Issues - Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities]
General Terms
Measurement, Documentation, Human Factors.
Keywords
Web accessibility, disabled people, policy, social inclusion, guidelines, disability studies