With the rise of the Web's pervasiveness in our societies, it became imperative to ensure that the Web is accessible and inclusive, as the harm of digital exclusion to an individual or community now has a much higher impact.
The Web remains largely inaccessible, displaying that current and past approaches have not successfully created and fostered a healthy and accessible Web. As such, the HCI community must explore novel radical approaches beyond guidelines that will support the Web's current and future complexity and create global strategies to tackle the current accessibility crisis. This workshop aims to bring together researchers, developers, and industry members interested in web accessibility to explore novel approaches to web accessibility through brainstorming sessions and group discussions.
This workshop will be held entirely in person and last 6 hours. To participate, prepare a 2 to 4-page position paper, provocation, pictorial, or podcast exploring novel approaches to web accessibility. Possible submission topics include, but are not limited to, Intervention Scale: Global, National, Regional; Concept Borrowing; Citizen-Led AI and Web Accessibility; Monitoring and Predicting for Accessible Web Futures.
In the first round, submissions will be assessed based relevancy for web accessibility and how provocative and novel the proposed approach is, followed by a second round in which potential participants will rate the most interesting submissions. Upon acceptance, all submissions will be made public and hosted on the workshop website. At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop, and all participants must register for the workshop.
The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers, developers and industry members interested in exploring novel and radical approaches to web accessibility. This workshop is a first step in exploring approaches that advance our understanding of web accessibility beyond accessibility guideline assessments. The goals of this workshop are the following:
Identify new approaches for tackling the current and future inaccessibility on the Web. We are interested in understanding the gaps the proposed new approaches will tackle and the possible challenges they will face.
Propose a novel view of Web Accessibility. In this workshop, we aim to engage in a blue skies exploration of what a new Web Accessibility field would look like and what its objectives and global strategies should be.
Revitalise Web Accessibility as a research field. Research around web accessibility has been dwindling for the past few years. With this workshop, we aim to build a community of researchers, developers, industry members, and policymakers who will actively engage in Web Accessibility research beyond this workshop.
One of the core design principles of the World Wide Web, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is ensuring that the Web can enable communication, commerce and opportunities to share knowledge to all people, independently of their culture, language, location and disabilities. Over the last two decades, the way we interact with the Web and the number of people accessing the Web has changed radically. The number of people accessing the Web worldwide has grown exponentially, with 4.70 billion people having frequent access to the Web[1]. With this growth, the population accessing the Web is now diversified, with people of different backgrounds, cultures, and geographic locations having access to the same shared Web. Simultaneously, trends show increased digitalisation of services and information, making particular services and information only accessible through the Web. This was in part propelled by the pervasiveness of mobile technology, allowing ubiquitous access to the Web, and the COVID-19 pandemic which accelerated both digital transformation of services and the number of people accessing the Web.
The Web has become an essential part of mainstream life, permeating various aspects of our lives, from changing the way people communicate and work; to how people interact with medical services and government. With the increased pervasiveness of the Web in our societies, it is of utmost most importance to ensure that the Web is accessible and inclusive to all, as the perceived harm of digital exclusion to an individual or community will now have a greater impact than ever before. Ensuring that the Web is accessible will lead to a healthier Internet. Internet Health, at its core, aims to ensure that the design principles of the Web are respected in its ever-changing ecosystem by providing ways to measure and understand the current and future state of the Web and its surrounding ecosystem.
In order to tackle the difficulties faced by people with disabilities when using the Web, the W3C established the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). WAI's primary focus is improving the accessibility of the Web through the creation of guidelines, tools, and processes that allow developers and policymakers to make the Web accessible to everyone. The most influential guidelines developed by the WAI are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), as they have provided the foundations for much of the web accessibility field today. WCAG provides a set of recommendations on how to make pages on the Web more accessible for people with disabilities. Over the years, multiple versions of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have been published, refining the guidelines to respond to changes in the Web and aiming to ensure that the Web is more accessible to every internet user. At the time of writing, the W3C recommends using WCAG 2.2., with version 3.0 in an early draft stage.
Despite the widespread availability of guidelines for the past 20 years, their success in contributing to the creation of a more accessible Web has been relatively low, with studies showing websites from distinct contexts still failing at the most basic level of accessibility [4, 6, 11, 16]. Moreover, as shown by the yearly accessibility reports by WebAIM, accessibility remains one of the most significant limitation factors to internet access and inclusion, with the reports showing a consistent year-by-year low level of accessibility in the top million of most accessed websites. In the 2024 report, 95.9% of home pages of the top million most accessed pages still contain at least one accessibility barrier, displaying that the adoption of WCAG guidelines is still far from satisfactory [2].
Much of the research around the reason for such low adoption of the guidelines focuses on examining the stakeholders involved in the creation of the Web, attributing it to developers lack of skill and education on web accessibility [7, 10, 15] and unawareness of accessibility standards [5, 14], as well as companies making web accessibility low priority [13, 17, 23]. The few improvements of web accessibility that were found are not related to an uptake in the following WCAG guidelines but instead attributed to the adoption of novel technologies and trends on the Web that, as a side effect, improved web accessibility [20]. Similarly, recent work has found statistical evidence that certain web technologies seem to lead to better accessibility and that it is possible to select technologies within the same categories to improve accessibility [9, 18].
In summary, since its inception, web accessibility has been found to be a proactive/reactive dichotomy with WCAG as its backdrop. On the one hand, either the developer has the required knowledge to implement accessibility on a website throughout the software development cycle (proactive) or after the development, accessibility assessments are performed on the website, and accessibility barriers are fixed subsequently (reactive). Overall, current and past approaches have not been successful in creating and fostering a Web that is healthy, accessible, and concerned with the user experience of people with a diverse range of abilities and capabilities. As such, the HCI community must explore novel radical approaches beyond guidelines and education that will support the current and future complexity of the Web through the creation of global strategies to tackle the current accessibility crisis. We envision a step-change in the web accessibility field that will not only aim to create novel methodologies rooted in the concept of Internet Health, ensuring that new websites are accessible; but also stimulate radical large-scale interventions that seek to tackle the accessibility of existing websites. In order to promote the exploration of new futures for Web accessibility we have chosen the following four themes to prompt discussion during the workshop: Intervention Scale: Global, National, Regional; Concept Borrowing; Citizen-Led AI and Web Accessibility; Monitoring and Predicting for Accessible Web Futures.
Web Accessibility has historically relied exclusively on developers and companies good will to ensure the accessibility of their website, and thus the larger World Wide Web. However, in recent years; particularly in the public sector there has been a shift to create new legislation with the objective of increasing the accessibility of websites within the sector. Examples of such legislation include the Web Directive in the EU [22] and the Section 508 in the USA [8]. While this shift for compliance-driven approaches allows governments and organisations to be held accountable for the accessibility of their websites, that same legislation contains clauses that still allows web accessibility to be de-prioritised, i.e., 'disproportionate burden', while at the same time increasing the risk of shifting the primary motivation of ensuring accessibility from a genuine interest in inclusively through ethical design choices; to becoming a legal obligation propelled by fear of litigation. In this theme, we encourage participants to explore the future of web accessibility at different dimensions of society and the potential role of other stakeholders beyond the individual website developers or owners as we tackle the web accessibility crisis.
Borrowing concepts, theories and methodologies from other fields into web accessibility can help generate new insights and ways of thinking. In the mobile app accessibility field, Ross et al. [21] developed a conceptual framework inspired by epidemiology to identify how accessibility barriers could spread through the Android development ecosystem. According to the framework, accessibility barriers can be seen like diseases that infect a host (e.g. the app) through an infectious agent (e.g. UI component) that contains a determinant (the root cause of the accessibility barrier), that propagate through a transmission mechanism (e.g. a UI Library). This approach looks at the accessibility of an app as the product of its continued interaction with its surrounding environment (e.g. third-party libraries), acknowledging that it cannot be understood by looking at the app in isolation, showing the potential reach and impact of the libraries and third-party software we use to build software. In this theme we invite participants to explore how concepts, methodologies and approaches of other fields could be applied to web accessibility as a means to foster novel understandings and envision radically alternative approaches to improve internet health.
AI/ML has been used in various capacities in the accessibility field for a number of years. From teachable AI, which has allowed blind and low-vision people to train an application to find their belongings [19] and sound recogniser personalisation to assist people that are deaf or hard of hearing [12]. Within Web Accessibility, AI has been used for image and voice recognition to provide descriptions of images and automatic captioning of videos, as well as automatic information extraction from text, with the major drawback being the lack of accuracy and reliability [3]. With the advent of Generative AI and the democratisation of access to powerful AI for the general public, there is an increase potential for more citizen-led and grassroot applications of AI for Web Accessibility. We would like to encourage participants to envision novel web accessibility strategies and approaches that empower netizens to take action and influence the web accessibility ecosystems.
In the current Web ecosystem, tools for web accessibility focus mainly on supporting the automatic accessibility assessment of websites – In most cases this takes place after they have been built and deployed. Moreover, the dynamic nature of the web means that these measures are quickly out of date, making it challenging to capture a true representation of current web accessibility. In this theme, we want to explore novel tools for web accessibility that go beyond simply analysing a website's compliance level. Can we instead embrace more predictive approaches that consider the trends and innovations in web development to better anticipate and prepare for changes in web accessibility. If we want to create a more proactive ecosystem for web accessibility, then we need to design and develop novel tools and technologies that will action and function to predict and prevent accessibility barriers before they permeate through the web.
Luis Carvalho is a PhD student at Northumbria University. His PhD research focus on exploring the root causes of web accessibility barriers through an epidemiology lenses, with particular focus on the role third-party technologies play on the propagation of accessibility barriers in the web. Previously, he worked as a research assistant on the "Cue Band" project which aimed to provide an non-invasive treatment for diminishing drooling symptoms on people with Parkinson's via wearable technology and on the project "Enabling Ongoingness: Content Creation & Consumption in the New Digital Age" which explored how how we can create meaningful connections with people who have passed on or who are at the end of life through bespoke technology.
Anne Spencer Ross is an Assistant Professor at Bucknell University. Building on her epidemiology-inspired framework for digital accessibility, she is researching a range of social, technical, and organisational factors that impact software's accessibility. Her current research includes how small businesses and organisations manage their websites and social media. Positioned at an undergraduate, teaching-focused university, she is also exploring integrating accessibility concepts into computing curriculum.
Tiago Guerreiro is a Professor of Computer Science at Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa and a researcher at LASIGE where he leads the Tech&People Lab. His research is focused on improving accessibility and health, by working closely with the communities he works with, co-designing solutions, developing and assessing their impact in the wild, in carefully-designed deployments. He is Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing and was ASSETS 2020 General chair. He was the Web for All General and Program Chair, in 2016 and 2015, respectively, was Chair of the “Accessibility & Aging” Subcommittee for CHI 2019, among many other service roles. He was an invited expert supporting the European Commission in implementing the Web Accessibility Directive.
Kyle Montague is aProfessor at Northumbria University and leads the NorSC Research Group. His research spans a breadth of topics and domains with the unifying vision - to address critical social problems and challenges by designing and configuring digital technologies that empower individuals and marginalised communities. More specifically, his work seeks to democratise access to the tools and processes by which we provision technologies and services that shape society.
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