Multilingual Website Assessment for Accessibility: a Survey on Current Practices

The accessibility degree achieved in a monolingual website may vary throughout the localization process, when it is made multilingual. This paper overviews the results of a survey conducted with the aim of exploring current practices followed when specifically assessing multilingual websites for accessibility. Respondents (N=67) were web accessibility experts with at least two years of experience in the field. While our work does not return conclusive results, findings suggest that multilingual website assessment practices, as they stand today, do not follow a standardized pattern, and time spent on textual and culture-related elements, which still remain key information assets within a webpage, is considerably low. The study also sheds light on the need of localization-related knowledge and know-how to successfully achieve accessible websites where more than one language version is available