A Design Guideline to Overcome Web Accessibility Issues Challenged by Visually Impaired Community in Sri Lanka

Visual-impaired communities are one of the hindrances groups to accessing web content access in the world. The obstacles encountered by this community in their current practices and to develop best practice guidelines to overcome the digital divide in Sri Lanka become gap filling of this domain. A preliminary survey indicated five main problems including access limited by the impairment, usability issues due to lack of design, unavailability of visually impaired-friendly applications, lack of communication, and web navigation issues are the most dominant pertaining issues. To overcome those issues, solutions are tested and validated using the Design Science approach. Result Indicate that significant factors need to be incorporated, ensuring keyboard-friendly websites, easy accessibility and support with semantic annotation by adding alternative text for images. Furthermore, use headers to structure the content correctly, design all forms to support accessibility in mind including Content developing and designing, navigation, the best colour combination, Pre-recorded video with the audio facilities, braille support on the web, the designing option has no significant impact on visually impaired web users. Introducing a rating widget option to a website identifies the level of accessibility features availability facilitates, thereby overcoming the disability digital divide. The results further conclude that a significant difference exists in websites, with and without the involvement of the visually impaired community. Semantic web and semantic annotations of the context of page elements, content serialization, and navigation by special keyboard commands are also highly influencing the effective use of the web and increasing the satisfaction level in the website accessing process.