Techniques for the publication of accessible multimedia content on the Web (dataset)

Abstract

Nowadays, multimedia has become one of the most important sources of information and communication on the web. However, despite the current technological progress, people with disabilities and the elderly face difficulties during the access to multimedia on the web. In some cases, these difficulties are impossible to overcome and they are one of the fundamental causes of digital exclusion. Given the importance of this topic, several investigations about the accessibility problems of multimedia resources have been carried out. Some organizations have proposed certain standards to guide the creation and publication of accessible web content as well. Despite this, the authoring tools used in the process of publishing multimedia on the web do not offer all the accessibility features required. Authoring tools can also be used by people who do not have knowledge of web accessibility or programming, resulting in web publications lacking accessibility. This research proposes 278 novel techniques in order to guide authors, designers, programmers, and testers in the publication of accessible and inclusive multimedia on the web. These techniques are designed to guarantee the compliance of the recommended success criteria of Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 of the W3C. Moreover, these techniques can be used to evaluate the accessibility of the existing authoring tools used to create multimedia for the web. Additionally, we present 80 possible failures that can cause the non-fulfillment of ATAG 2.0. These failures are useful for authors to discern what to avoid and for evaluators to check whether a particular multimedia is accessible.