Evaluating the Effectiveness of Accessible web Sites for Deaf users

The accessibility is a concept that refers to providing the required affordance to users with some kind of disability to use a website. Taking into account this goal, we can find two perspectives, those proposed by government laws such as the section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act or the European Accessibility Act. On the other hand, those recommendations proposed by consortia like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which through the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) proposes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). In general, laws or recommendations, define the good practices to make a website and their content accessible. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the accessibility with deaf users. The evaluation consists of the accomplishment of a set of tasks by deaf users in four websites. The natural hypothesis states that the accessibility should exhibit better performance in websites that followed the guidelines. As a result, by observing interactions and listen to the comments of deaf user, it suggests that the content and the information architecture of the web pages affect the completion rate of the tasks. This content affects more in regarding with the level of their second language, in this case Spanish, as well as distribution proposed by the information architecture of each website.