Reliability Aware Web Accessibility Experience Metric

Web accessibility metrics can measure the accessibility levels of websites. Although many metrics with different motivations have been proposed, current metrics are limited in their applicability when considering user experience. This study proposes Reliability Aware Web Accessibility Experience Metric (RA-WAEM), a novel Web accessibility metric which considers the user experience of people with disabilities and their reliability in objectively assessing the severity of accessibility barriers. We present an optimization algorithm based on Expectation Maximization to derive the parameters of RA-WAEM efficiently. Moreover, we conduct an extensive accessibility study on 46 websites with 323,098 Web pages and collect the user experience of 122 people. An evaluation on this dataset shows that RA-WAEM outperforms state of the art accessibility metrics in reflecting the user experience.