Assuring accessibility during web localisation. An empirical investigation on the achievement of appropriate text alternatives for images

This thesis sets out to investigate the role of localisers in the achievement of more accessible multilingual websites for blind users, placing special emphasis on ways to assure access to images in the localised web product. Our work is motivated by the little discussion that there has been thus far in prior work about accessibility within the context of the multilingual Web and the scant attention paid up to the present by both web localisation practitioners and scholars to the needs of disabled people in the target audience. In addition, our interest in the particular case of images is driven by the obstacles still encountered by web professionals, both in monolingual and multilingual websites, to produce high quality text alternatives, namely the limited guidance that exists to assist them in their formulation, and the poor support offered by web accessibility evaluation (WAE) tools for image accessibility assessment, especially with regard to linguistic checks.