markel vigo
I am interested in the human factors that influence the interaction of people on the World Wide Web. My current research is focused on the coping strategies that users adopt when they encounter problems on the Web. To do so, I am exploring the similarities between edge-interaction cases and the problematic interactions faced by people with disabilities on the Web. You can check the progress of the research on the COPE project website.
I got my PhD in Computer Science at the University of the Basque Country on web accessibility assessment, focusing on evaluation and measurement. I am active in the web information access domain through the W4A Steering Committee and the W3C RDWG. The W3C Research Report on Web Accessibility Metrics is one of our latest efforts in injecting research outcomes into standardisation bodies.
Research Associate
CONTACT
markel . vigo at manchester . ac . uk
+44 (0) 161 275 7821
LF1 Kilburn Building
School of Computer Science
M13 9PL, Manchester (UK)
PAPERS — See all publications
Evaluating Accessibility-in-Use
10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, W4A 2013.
In order to overcome the limitations of conformance testing and catch the problems that emerge during the interaction we propose a user-interaction-driven method to automatically report accessibility problems. To do so, we isolate the problematic situations faced by users and the tactics employed in such situations. Then, we design and deploy algorithms to automatically detect the exhibition of these tactics and consequently detect problematic situations.
10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, W4A 2013.
We investigate the effectiveness of 6 state-of-the-art tools by analysing their coverage, completeness and correctness with regard to WCAG 2.0 conformance. We corroborate that relying on automated tests alone has negative effects and can have undesirable consequences. Relying on just automated tests entails that 1 of 2 success criteria will not even be analysed and among those analysed, only 4 out of 10 will be caught at the further risk of generating false positives.
ACM Web Science, WebScience 2013.
Identifying coping strategies is a challenging task: coping occurs seldom and when it happens, coping is not always overtly manifested. We propose a method that transfers the coping strategies employed by groups of users that cope frequently and overtly, such as people with disabilities, to broader populations. We discover that different populations do not only face the same problems, but also exhibit similar strategies to tackle them.
24th ACM Conference of Hypertext and Social Media, Hypertext 2013.
Little is known about the navigation tactics employed by screen reader users when they face problematic situations on the Web. We identify the navigation coping tactics screen reader users exhibit on the Web and we find that especially in problematic situations user navigation is not driven by information scent or utility, but by the need of increasing autonomy and the need of escaping from the current web patch.