A method and system is provided for testing and analyzing websites via a test-enabled web browser. In the representative embodiment a user controls a test-enabled web browser via a set of pull-down menus, thereby choosing between alternative testing and analysis functional capabilities, selecting files in which to store recordings (scripts), choosing files into which to place test results and messages, and setting various parameters that affect how the testing and analysis functions are performed. When the user requests it, the representative embodiment provides for deep recording of user interactions as they relate to a specific web page currently on display in the browser view area, for extracting key information from the current web page sufficient to validate that a future playback does or does not produce the same effects on the chosen website page, for playing back a prior recording to confirm that a website page continues to pass the user-defined tests, and for providing detailed analyses based on the specific contents of the current website page. The general result of systematic use of the test-enabled browser on websites is improved content quality, demonstrated website server behavior for deep tests, quicker delivery by the website server, and better serviceability for e-business.

Method and system for testing websites

Disability studies and assistive technology are two related fields that have long shared common goals - understanding the experience of disability and identifying and addressing relevant issues. Despite these common goals, there are some important differences in what professionals in these fields consider problems, perhaps related to the lack of connection between the fields. To help bridge this gap, we review some of the key literature in disability studies. We present case studies of two research projects in assistive technology and discuss how the field of disability studies influenced that work, led us to identify new or different problems relevant to the field of assistive technology, and helped us to think in new ways about the research process and its impact on the experiences of individuals who live with disability. We also discuss how the field of disability studies has influenced our teaching and highlight some of the key publications and publication venues from which our community may want to draw more deeply in the future.

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Disability studies as a source of critical inquiry for the field of assistive technology

Text entry has never been so important as it is today. This is in large part due to the phenomenal, relatively recent success of mobile computing, text messaging on mobile phones, and the proliferation of small devices like the Blackberry and Palm Pilot. Compared with the recent past, when text entry was primarily through the standard "qwerty" keyboard, people today use a diverse array of devices with the number and variety of such devices ever increasing. 

The variety is not just in the devices, but also in the technologies used: Entry modalities have become more varied and include speech recognition and synthesis, handwriting recognition, and even eye-tracking using image processing on web-cams. Statistical language modeling has advanced greatly in the past ten years and so therein is potential to facilitate and improve text entry--increasingly, the way people communicate. 

This book consists of four parts, and covers these areas: Guidelines for Designing Better Entry Systems (including research methodologies, measurement, and language modelling); Devices and Modalities; Languages of the world and entry systems in those languages; and variety in users and their difficulties with text entry--and the possible design and guideline solutions for those individual user groups.

This book covers different aspects of text entry systems and offers prospective researchers and developers

* global guidelines for conducting research on text entry, in terms of design strategy, evaluation methodology, and requirements; 

* history and current state of the art of entry systems, including coverage of recent research topics;

* specific guidelines for designing entry systems for a specific target, depending on devices, modalities, language, and different physical conditions of users

Text Entry Systems: Mobility, Accessibility, Universality

L ABSTIL4CT The widespread and increasing advent of multimedia technologies means that there must be a departure from the viewpoint that users expect a Quality of Service (QoS) which will only satisfy them perceptually. What should be expected of multimedia clips is that the QoS with which they are shown is such that it will enable the users to assimilate and understand the informational content of such clips. In this paper we present experimental resuks Iiiking users’ understanding and perception of multimedia ctips with the presentation QoS. Results show that the quality of video clips can be severely degraded without the user having to perceive any significant 10ss of informational content 1.1

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QoS impact on user perception and understanding of multimedia video clips

The use of web accessibility evaluation tools is a widespread practice. Evaluation tools are heavily employed as they help in reducing the burden of identifying accessibility barriers. However, an over-reliance on automated tests often leads to setting aside further testing that entails expert evaluation and user tests. In this paper we empirically show the capabilities of current automated evaluation tools. To do so, we investigate the effectiveness of 6 state-of-the-art tools by analysing their coverage, completeness and correctness with regard to WCAG 2.0 conformance. We corroborate that relying on automated tests alone has negative effects and can have undesirable consequences. Coverage is very narrow as, at most, 50% of the success criteria are covered. Similarly, completeness ranges between 14% and 38%; however, some of the tools that exhibit higher completeness scores produce lower correctness scores (66-71%) due to the fact that catching as many violations as possible can lead to an increase in false positives. Therefore, relying on just automated tests entails that 1 of 2 success criteria will not even be analysed and among those analysed, only 4 out of 10 will be caught at the further risk of generating false positives.

Benchmarking web accessibility evaluation tools: measuring the harm of sole reliance on automated tests

These days, accessibility-related regulations and guidelines have been accelerating the improvement of Web accessibility. One of the accelerating factors is the development and deployment of accessibility evaluation tools for authoring time and repair time. They mainly focus on creating compliant Web sites by analyzing the HTML syntax of pages, and report that pages are compliant when there are no syntactical errors. However, such compliant pages are often not truly usable by blind users. This is because current evaluation tools merely check if the HTML tags are appropriately used to be compliant with regulations and guidelines. It would be better if such tools paid more attention to real usability, especially on time-oriented usability factors, such as the speed to reach target content, the ease of understanding the page structure, and the navigability, in order to help Web designers to create not simply compliant pages but also usable pages for the blind. Therefore, we decided to develop Accessibility Designer (aDesigner), which has capabilities to visualize blind users' usability by using colors and gradations. The visualization function allows Web designers to grasp the weak points in their pages, and to recognize how accessible or inaccessible their pages are at a glance. In this paper, after reviewing the related work, we describe our approach to visualize blind users' usability followed by an overview of Accessibility Designer. We then report on our evaluations of real Web sites using Accessibility Designer. After discussing the results, we conclude the paper.

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Accessibility designer: visualizing usability for the blind

Various accessibility activities are improving blind access to the increasingly indispensable WWW. These approaches use various metrics to measure the Web's accessibility. “Ease of navigation” (navigability) is one of the crucial factors for blind usability, especially for complicated webpages used in portals and online shopping sites. However, it is difficult for automatic checking tools to evaluate the navigation capabilities even for a single webpage. Navigability issues for complete Web applications are still far beyond their capabilities.This study aims at obtaining quantitative results about the current accessibility status of real world Web applications, and analyzes real users' behavior on such websites. In Study 1, an automatic analysis method for webpage navigability is introduced, and then a broad survey using this method for 30 international online shopping sites is described. The next study (Study 2) focuses on a fine-grained analysis of real users' behavior on some of these online shopping sites. We modified a voice browser to record each user's actions and the information presented to that user. We conducted user testing on existing sites with this tool. We also developed an analysis and visualization method for the recorded information. The results showed us that users strongly depend on scanning navigation instead of logical navigation. A landmark-oriented navigation model was proposed based on the results. Finally, we discuss future possibilities for improving navigability, including proposals for voice browsers.

Analysis of navigability of Web applications for improving blind usability

The Web has become a new information resource for the blind. However, Web accessibility is becoming worse, since page authors tend to care only for the visual appearance. We have developed an Accessibility Transcoding System to solve this problem. This system has the ability to transcode complete pages on annotated sites into totally accessible pages without changing the original pages. However, site-wide annotation authoring is an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. This prevented us from applying our transcoding system to a wide variety of sites. In order to overcome this difficulty, we developed a new algorithm, "Dynamic Annotation Matching". By utilizing this algorithm, our transcoding system can automatically determine appropriate annotations based on each page's layout. We also developed a site-wide annotation-authoring tool, "Site Pattern Analyzer." We evaluated the feasibility of creating site-wide annotations by using the algorithm and the tool, and report on our success here.

Site-wide annotation: reconstructing existing pages to be accessible

In this paper, we present a method of QoS mapping between user’s preference on video quality and a required bandwidth to transport the video across the network. We first investigate the mapping method from QoS parameters to the required bandwidth on the network. For this purpose, we assume that the underlying network supports some bandwidth allocation mechanism, such as DBR service class in ATM, RSVP, IPv6 and so on. Then, for given QoS parameters in terms of spatial, SNR, and timely resolutions, the required bandwidth to support the MPEG-2 video transmission is determined by analyzing the traced MPEG-2 streams. We next consider the mapping method between QoS parameters and the user’s perceived video quality, which is quantified by MOS (Mean Opinion Score) evaluation. Based on the above results, we discuss a systematic method to estimate the required bandwidth to guarantee user’s preference on video quality.

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QoS Mapping between User’s Preference and Bandwidth Control for Video Transport

A method that enables a tester to efficiently perform confirmation behavior of a Web page that utilizes DHTML or difference in behavior of the Web page among various browsers, or assignment of information relating to accessibility of the Web page or verification of the information. A method is provided that analyzes change in a Web page by determining states that can dynamically occur in response to an external event in a Web page that utilizes DHTML by analyzing at least one of DOM, style information for when rendered on a browser, input data from a user, and the value of a global variable in JAVA®SCRIPT, storing data that can identify each of the states, identifying state transition between the stored states, and reproducing the stored states.

Kentarou Fukuda

Papers

Accessibility designer: visualizing usability for the blind

Analysis of navigability of Web applications for improving blind usability

Site-wide annotation: reconstructing existing pages to be accessible

QoS Mapping between User’s Preference and Bandwidth Control for Video Transport

Method for analyzing state transition in web page