Enhancing Wikipedia editing with WAI-ARIA

Nowadays Web 2.0 applications allow anyone to create, share and edit on-line content, but accessibility and usability issues still exist. For instance, Wikipedia presents many difficulties for blind users, especially when they want to write or edit articles. In a previous stage of our study we proposed and discussed how to apply the W3C ARIA suite to simplify the Wikipedia editing page when interacting via screen reader. In this paper we present the results of a user test involving totally blind end-users as they interacted with both the original and the modified Wikipedia editing pages. Specifically, the purpose of the test was to compare the editing and formatting process for original and ARIA-implemented Wikipedia user interfaces, and to evaluate the improvements.