LREC 2014 Proceedings

Summary of the paper

Title	Applying Accessibility-Oriented Controlled Language (CL) Rules to Improve Appropriateness of Text Alternatives for Images: an Exploratory Study
Authors	Silvia Rodríguez Vázquez, Pierrette Bouillon and Anton Bolfing
Abstract	At present, inappropriate text alternatives for images in the Web continue to pose web accessibility barriers for people with special needs. Although research efforts have been devoted to define how to write text equivalents for visual content in websites, existing guidelines often lack direct linguistic-oriented recommendations. Similarly, most web accessibility evaluation tools just provide users with an automated functionality to check the presence of text alternatives within the element, rather than a platform to verify their content. This paper presents an overview of the findings from an exploratory study carried out to investigate if the appropriateness level of text alternatives for images in French can be improved when applying controlled language (CL) rules. Results gathered suggest that using accessibility-oriented alt style rules can have a significant impact on text alternatives’ appropriateness. Although more data would be needed to draw further conclusions about our proposal, this preliminary study already offers an interest insight into the potential use of CL checkers such as Acrolinx for language-based web accessibility evaluation.
Topics	Authoring Tools, Multilinguality
Full paper	Applying Accessibility-Oriented Controlled Language (CL) Rules to Improve Appropriateness of Text Alternatives for Images: an Exploratory Study
Bibtex	@InProceedings{RODRGUEZVZQUEZ14.640, author = {Silvia Rodríguez Vázquez and Pierrette Bouillon and Anton Bolfing}, title = {Applying Accessibility-Oriented Controlled Language (CL) Rules to Improve Appropriateness of Text Alternatives for Images: an Exploratory Study}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)}, year = {2014}, month = {may}, date = {26-31}, address = {Reykjavik, Iceland}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Hrafn Loftsson and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-8-4}, language = {english} }