Investigating How HTML5 Improves Accessibility

Sammanfattning: Nowadays, a lot of activities such as social communications, educational courses, banking processes, different types of entertainment, online registrations and many more are done through Internet websites. Millions of users use these websites to maintain their daily needs. The challenge in front is that these websites are getting more and more complex, and the need to have well-designed websites becomes more important and at the same time more difficult. Knowledge of usability and accessibility according to the user needs can help designing more convenient while competent websites. It is essential to know that users with different levels of ability may visit a website. They should be able to easily interact with the website based on their abilities, likes and dislikes. Users usually leave the website early if they find it difficult to handle. They may look after easier and more practical solutions to do what they need to do. So it is somehow important to design websites by considering all levels of abilities and disabilities. Therefore, there are standards that must be followed by designers. Basically, usability experts define standards for making a website operational for a vast range of users by reducing the sources of complexity which potentially lead to a problem. Standards set by experts for accessibility aspects mainly focus on making a website more approachable to a bigger portion of users including users with disabilities. This thesis investigates the role of HTML5 markup language in improving the accessibility of the websites. To achieve that, the main factors of accessibility in designing websites are considered and based on that the evaluation has been performed. To gain more applicable results, this thesis concentrates on screen readers as a kind of assistive technologies. The results illustrate that HTML5 markup language can improve the accessibility of a website design. Currently, there are still some difficulties to overcome, for example, browsers lack support for HTML5 and the screen readers are not as effective as they are needed to be. This probably means that we still need more research to find optimal ways of constructing websites with a perfect accessibility and usability for screen readers.