Assessing the Accessibility and Usability of Web Archives for Blind Users

Web archives play a crucial role in preserving the digital history of the internet, given the inherent volatility of websites that constantly undergo modifications, content updates, and migrations, or even cease to exist altogether. Web archives ensure that present and historical web information will be available in the future for researchers, historians, students, corporations, and general public. Given their importance, it is essential for web archives to be equally accessible to everyone, including those with visual disabilities. In the absence of a prior in-depth investigation in this regard, this paper examines the status-quo accessibility and usability of five popular web archives for people who are blind. Specifically, we analyzed reports generated by an automated accessibility checker tool and also collected feedback from a user study with 10 blind screen reader users. The analysis of accessibility reports revealed issues that were common across the different archives, including a lack of text alternatives for images and the absence of proper aria labels. The user study showed that blind users struggled to do even basic search tasks to locate desired mementos or snapshots of websites saved in the archives. The participants also explicitly indicated that they found it strenuous to interact with web archives. Informed by these findings, we provide accessibility design suggestions for archives’ web developers and assistive technology developers.