Web Accessibility of Mobile and Desktop Representations

This paper presents an experimental study designed to understand the accessibility differences between the desktop and mobile representations of a Web page. We performed an automatic evaluation of both representations of the home pages of 474 Web sites, using the QualWeb evaluator. We also categorized the pages according to their building methodology to understand its impact on the accessibility quality. The results show that, even if there are differences in the pages of the two delivery contexts, there are no substantial differences in the accessibility quality between both representations. An interesting result emerged when looking specifically at the building methodology of the pages. Mobile representations have better accessibility quality when developed following the non-dedicated pages building methodology. Looking at the problems of each building methodology, we were able to suggest accessibility improvements to developers/designers of Web pages.