I. Introduction
1.2. Structure of the Dissertation
The second chapter of this dissertation will concentrate on establishing what web accessibility is. It will especially demonstrate that the belief of web users and web workers on the subject do not always prove to be true and are most of the time very incomplete. This chapter will be based on a survey conducted in June 2008.
The third chapter of the dissertation will try to explain the reasons why web accessibility should be implemented for a website. It will give an overview of the existing laws on the subject. It will also explain what benefits –as much for the company and developers as for the end users– can be expected from better website accessibility.
The fourth chapter will present the principal beneficiaries of web accessibility, from disable people to web crawlers, including aging people and children; it will explain the situations in which these users access the web. It will also present the specific hardware and software used by these users and will try to understand where and why accessibility problems occur.
As giving access to the content is not making the content accessible, the fifth chapter will concentrate on this content. It will firstly study how users process the content of a webpage and then focus on language, especially on the use of simplified well written language, and the reasons of its use. The chapter will also present alternative way of presenting the content of a webpage, either through an alternative medium (image, sound, or video) or through an alternative way of writing.
The sixth chapter will focus on how to implement accessibility to a website, from the choice of a methodology to the technical development, including the choice of technologies to be used, their advantages, and disadvantages. The chapter will digress a bit from the primary matter of the thesis: web accessibility, to study the use of HTML, web standards, and semantics to produce better websites.
The seventh chapter will study of few contentious questions such as how to combine web accessibility and security or advertisement; the chapter will also study the use of accesskeys which is controversial in the accessibility sphere. The chapter will also try to explain that implementing “accessible” solutions only in the view to implement a new functionality to a website does not always make a website more accessible.
The tenth chapter will explain why and how a website’s accessibility can be tested before the conclusion the dissertation.