Study To Promote Awareness Of Web Accessibility In China

Web accessibility is an important but ignored topic in China. Seldom web companies implement accessible features to their websites. Very few researches on web accessibility have been carried out. No relevant policy or promoting organization can be found. This unawareness of web accessibility is the starting point of my research.The objective of this research is to promote awareness of web accessibility in China. We suppose to achieve this by following three steps: 1) accessibility evaluation of Chinese website, 2) accessibility awareness survey among people related to web development, 3) development of promoting website and experiment to test its effectivenessIn the first step, we sampled 38 most popular Chinese websites from different categories and evaluated them with the help of an online automated evaluation tool HERA 2.1. The result revealed generally poor accessibility of Chinese website. None of the 38 homepages passed WCAG 1.0 level A compliance, while most of the websites violated very basic checkpoints. In the cross-section evaluation, we surprisingly discovered that the most inaccessible category is e-government. We assume this is due to the lack of policies. In the cross-country comparison, we evaluated respectively 5 websites from 4 countries. Result indicated that U.K. had better web accessibility than other three countries, followed by Japan and U.S.In the second step, we carried out an online survey among people related to web development. Result indicated very poor web accessibility awareness, people were neither aware of accessibility guidelines nor did they adopt accessibility methods in their projects. We also discovered that participants of design and product positions were significantly more aware of accessibility information than participants of technical positions.Based on the result of previous two steps and the theoretical model, we developed an accessibility promoting site. The website is supposed to help people understand the difficulties of different web users to recognize the importance of web accessibility and to learn practical accessibility tips.30 participants of two groups participated the experiment to test the promoting site. Significant positive effects were found in 4 aspects:disabled people and use of internet, perceived cost, accessibility knowledge, self efficacy.Theoretical and empirical findings of the research provide a foundation for the promotion of web accessibility awareness. Suggestions about promoting content and methods are proposed upon the findings.