Abstract
The Web is an increasingly important part of the world, serving as a means to shop, learn, stay up to date with current events, and connect with others. Individuals with disabilities face unique challenges when using the internet, however. Visual or auditory limitations can reduce individuals’ ability to read text or hear videos, making it difficult to parse important information and use many tools. Mobility issues can make navigating a page difficult without the help of voice controls. My research aims to understand ways to improve web accessibility through both technical and non-technical methods. My technical research project was updating the public-facing home page for a company to be more accessible, while balancing the need for visual appeal and performance. My STS project examined how accessibility standards could improve accessibility. I performed a Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) analysis of an update to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act to understand how it reflected different social groups’ needs as it was developed and what insight that can provide into understanding why it succeeds or fails to make government websites accessible.
In my technical research, I built an official website for Nationwide IT Services, a government contractor. The old website had a plethora of accessibility issues and was built using a technology that was not useful for NIS. Because government sites are held to certain accessibility standards, making the new site accessible without sacrificing visual appeal or loading times was essential for making a good impression on potential clients. My final design significantly improved the accessibility of the website, cutting the number of errors detected by automated testing across all pages from just over 25 per page on average to one total error across all 15 pages. I was also able to slightly improve the performance of the website, though room for improvement still exists. The results of this project highlight the effectiveness of the accessibility implementation and testing methods I used. The results also identified the largest room for performance improvement, that being the large, high-resolution pictures used as heroes for each page.
My STS research project involved performing a SCOT analysis of the most recent update to Section 508, looking at public comments to identify the opinions and desires of different social groups and examining documents written by the Access Board to see what influenced the final wording of the standards. Although government websites tend to be more accessible than private ones, they still have many accessibility issues. Previous iterations of Section 508 limited their accessibility requirements to ensure that the requirements they had were enforceable, so I expected to find a repetition of the same process, with ease of implementation, testing, and enforcement being prioritized over setting standards that made sites as accessible as possible. However, I instead found that the most recent update to Section 508 prioritizes inclusivity and accessibility, but accessibility issues continue to affect government websites. This led me to the conclusion that standards alone are not sufficient to increase the accessibility of the internet. There are barriers to overcome beyond improving the quality of accessibility standards, such as a lack of education and a lack of awareness about accessibility issues, their importance, and how to work towards solving them.
These two projects broadened my understanding of and perspective on the challenge of making the internet accessible. My STS research showed me the importance of the problem and the many challenges involved in reaching a solution. Working to achieve those same standards in my technical project, while also needing to balance aesthetics and speed, gave me practical experience with some of those same challenges. My STS research gave me an understanding of the importance of working on my technical project to the best of my abilities, and my technical research gave me a personal understanding of some of the development challenges in making websites accessible, and insight into how the process could be improved.
