Applying Accessibility-Oriented Controlled Language (CL) Rules to Improve Appropriateness of Text Alternatives for Images: an Exploratory Study

Silvia Rodríguez Vázquez, Pierrette Bouillon, 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.
Anthology ID:
L14-1509
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
4139–4146
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/640_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Silvia Rodríguez Vázquez, Pierrette Bouillon, and Anton Bolfing. 2014. Applying Accessibility-Oriented Controlled Language (CL) Rules to Improve Appropriateness of Text Alternatives for Images: an Exploratory Study. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 4139–4146, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Applying Accessibility-Oriented Controlled Language (CL) Rules to Improve Appropriateness of Text Alternatives for Images: an Exploratory Study (Vázquez et al., LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/640_Paper.pdf