thesis up on the web (fwd)

This might be of interest to the education and outreach group.

Cheers

Chaals

Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe         fax(france): +33 4 92 38 78 22
 Post:   21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia    or
 W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 11:16:27 +1100
From: Kathryn Ann Clancy <kac@deakin.edu.au>
To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: thesis up on the web
Resent-Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 19:16:35 -0500 (EST)
Resent-From: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org


I have recently undertaken and completed an honours thesis in the area of Web
accessibility and thought that it might be of interest to the people on this
mailing list.

The Abstract is as follows:
The World Wide Web has opened up many doors for people with disabilities.
However advances in technology, such as multimedia and graphic intensive
Web sites, are now starting to erode these benefits of the World Wide Web for
people with disabilities. Primarily this is due to designers creating their Web
sites in such a fashion which does not make them accessible to people with
disabilities.

Research to date has not specifically examined the factors that impede and
propel an organisation to adopt Web accessibility. Therefore, the primary
objective of this research study is to identify these factors.
A single case study of Web accessibility was adopted. The case study
involves focusing on a Government organisation that develops Web sites
aimed at an educational audience.

An analysis of the case was accomplished and a series of recommendations
were generated as the findings. The results of the research demonstrated that
the case study organisation has many issues that impede and propel the
adoption of Web accessibility within the organisation. Many of these issues
were not mentioned in the existing literature and as a result a set of
recommendations to overcome the factors impeding the adoption of Web
accessibility were identified and discussed.

In summary, this thesis investigates the reasons behind the failure to adopt
Web accessibility and a series of recommendations specifically intended for
the case study organisation were developed.

The whole article can be found at
http://www.flatface.net/~browncouch/bit/upload/thesiskat.pdf

I know this is in pdf at the moment, I intend to change this to HTML asap, but
I'm currently working, unfortunately in an area where my web accessibility
knowledge is not being used!

--Kat

Kathryn Clancy
BIT Honours
0425796383
http://www.deakin.edu.au/~kac

Received on Wednesday, 21 January 2004 21:06:58 UTC