TITLE:
Accessibility Evaluation of Arabic E-Commerce Web Sites Using Automated Tools
AUTHORS:
Majed Alshamari
KEYWORDS:
Web Accessibility, E-Commerce, Automated Tools
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.9 No.9,
September
16,
2016
ABSTRACT: Disabled people encounter many barriers
while attempting to access the services on the web. Nevertheless, many tools,
which could help them to access the web, are available. E-commerce websites
have been also intensively and widely used. The e-commerce market in Saudi
Arabia will hit $13.3 billion by 2015. This huge investment requires e-commerce
websites to be accessible by different types of users. This paper explores the
tools that usually used by disabled users while using the web. It also
discusses a number of available tools that help designers, developers and
testers to assess web accessibility. It also evaluates the accessibility of 3
popular Arab e- commerce websites using 5 accessibility testing tools; namely
Achecker, TAW, Eval Access, MAUVE and FAE. This research has found that Most
accessibility guidelines are covered by Achecker tool. Navigation, readability,
input assistance and timing are the common found accessibility problems while
assessing the accessibility of the targeted websites. It has been also revealed
that HTML can influence accessibility evaluation as HTML errors are considered
as accessibility problems. It has been clearly observed that improvements are
needed for better web accessibility, although some tools did report a small number
of accessibility problems for some websites.