Literature Reviews

Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.

• How Much Does Expertise Matter? A Barrier Walkthrough Study with Experts and Non-Experts

  Yeliz Yesilada, Giorgio Brajnik, Simon Harper (2009) — Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '09)

  This paper investigates whether expertise matters in manual web accessibility evaluation by comparing results from 19 expert and 51 non-expert judges using the Barrier Walkthrough (BW) method. The BW method is an analytical technique based on heurist…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • barrier walkthrough
  • WCAG
  • evaluator effect
  • expertise
  • accessibility testing
  • research methodology

• Testability and Validity of WCAG 2.0: The Expertise Effect

  Giorgio Brajnik, Yeliz Yesilada, Simon Harper (2010) — Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper investigates the testability and validity of WCAG 2.0 success criteria through an empirical study with 22 accessibility experts and 27 non-experts (university students with 14 hours of accessibility training). Participants evaluated all 61…

  • WCAG 2.0
  • web accessibility
  • conformance review
  • evaluator effect
  • accessibility audit
  • guidelines
  • expertise
  • evaluation methodology

• Is Accessibility Conformance an Elusive Property? A Study of Validity and Reliability of WCAG 2.0

  Giorgio Brajnik, Yeliz Yesilada, Simon Harper (2012) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This landmark study investigates whether WCAG 2.0's definition of "Reliably Human Testable"—that at least 80% of knowledgeable evaluators would agree on an audit conclusion—is actually achievable in practice. The researchers recruited 25 experienced …

  • WCAG
  • conformance testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • evaluator effect
  • reliability
  • validity
  • expert review

• Measuring and comparing the reliability of the structured walkthrough evaluation method with novices and experts

  Christopher Bailey, Elaine Pearson, Voula Gkatzidou (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper investigates the reliability of the Structured Walkthrough evaluation method — a systematic approach to manual accessibility evaluation embedded in the Accessibility Evaluation Assistant (AEA) tool. The AEA contains 48 accessibility heuris…

  • accessibility testing
  • web accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG compliance
  • evaluator effect
  • accessibility education
  • heuristic evaluation