Querying Web Accessibility Knowledge from Web Graphs

Abstract

Web Accessibility is a hot topic today. Striving for social inclusion has resulted in the requirement of providing accessible content to all users. However, since each user is unique, and the Web evolves in a decentralized way, little or none is known about the shape of the Web’s accessibility on its own at a large scale, as well as from the point-of-view of each user. In this chapter the authors present the Web Accessibility Knowledge Framework as the foundation for specifying the relevant information about the accessibility of a Web page. This framework leverages Semantic Web technologies, side by side with audience modeling and accessibility metrics, as a way to study the Web as an entity with unique accessibility properties dependent from each user’s point of view. Through this framework, the authors envision a set of queries that can help harnessing and inferring this kind of knowledge from Web graphs.