A Design Guideline to Overcome Web Accessibility Issues Challenged by Visually Impaired Community in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Visual impaired community are the one of the hindrance groups of accessing web content access in the world. The obstacles encountered by this community in their current practices and to develop a best practice guideline to overcome the digital divide in Sri Lanka becomes gap filling of this domain. Preliminary survey indicated that five main problems including 1.) Access limited by the impairment, 2.) Usability issues due to lack of designing, 3.) Unavailability of visually impairedfriendly applications, 4.) Lack of communication, 5.) Web navigation issues are the most dominant pertaining issues. To overcome those issues, solutions are tested and validated with using Design Science approach. Purposive sampling method used and Interviews and questionnaires are used to extracted data. Content analysis also used to derive the result. Results are further validated with using expert opinion. Result Indicate that significant factors need to be incorporate are, ensuring a keyboardfriendly websites, easily accessibility and support with semantic annotation by adding alternative text for images. Furthermore, use headers to structure the content correctly, design all forms to support accessibility in mind including Content developing and designing, navigation, the best colour combination, Pre-recorded video with the audio facilities, braille support in web, the designing option has no significant impact on visually impaired web users. Introducing a rating widget option to a website identifies the level of accessibility features availability facilitates, thereby overcoming the disability digital divide. The results further conclude that a significant difference exists in websites, with and without the involvement of the visually impaired community. Semantic web and semantic annotations of the context of page elements, content serialisation, and navigation by special keyboard commands are also highly influencing the effective use of the web and increase the satisfaction level in the website accessing process.