RobAcc/EIAO Tromsø : Introduction

European Internet Accessibility Observatory

EIAO Kickoff meeting in Grimstad

The EIAO is a project financed by the EU 6th framework programme (Information Society Technologies). A goal is to assess the accessibility of web-sites in Europe. This is motivated by a need for public services on the internet, which works well for all citizens, including people with various needs or disabilities.

The EIAO will develop a framework for automated measurement of web accessibility. This includes finding good metrics for accessibility, as well as automatic measurement and analysis methods. The project will use the methods to collect data on how european public services on the web performs wrt. accessibility, and plans to publish accessibility rankings, trends etc.

RobAcc architecture

The University of Tromsø team will be involved in the development and specification of web-accessibility metrics, and in developing RobAcc which is the main measurement instrument for EIAO. This is essentially a web-robot which do various accessibility tests on a large set of websites, and which involves storing the results in a datawarehouse (database) for analysis.

RobAcc will be the basis for experiments on how to realise various measurement techniques for the accessibility metrics. The project aim to define an open and extensible architecture in which the different measurement techniques can be realised as pluggable software components. The Tromsø team will investigate distribution and interoperability between RobAcc components.

People

The RobAcc-Tromsø team is located at the department of Computer Science, and involves the following staff:

Øyvind Hanssen, associate prof. (local coordinator)
Gunnar Hartvigsen, professor
Randi Karlsen, associate prof.
Ragnhild Varmedal, scientific programmer.
Geir Egil Myhre, scientific programmer.