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Fri 2 May 2025 14:45 - 15:00 at 206 plus 208 - Human and Social 4 Chair(s): Liliana Pasquale

Website accessibility is essential for inclusiveness and regulatory compliance. Although third-party advertisements (ads) are a vital revenue source for free web services, they introduce significant accessibility challenges. Leasing a website’s space to ad-serving technologies like DoubleClick results in developers losing control over ad content accessibility. Even on highly accessible websites, third-party ads can undermine adherence to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We conduct the first-of-its-kind large-scale investigation of 430K website elements, including nearly 100K ad elements, to understand the accessibility of ads on websites. We seek to understand the prevalence of inaccessible ads and their overall impact on the accessibility of websites. Our findings show that 67% of websites experience increased accessibility violations due to ads, with common violations including Focus Visible (WCAG 2.4.7) and On Input (WCAG 3.2.2). Popular ad-serving technologies like Taboola, DoubleClick, and RevContent often serve ads that fail to comply with WCAG standards. Even when ads are WCAG compliant, 27% of them have alternative text in ad images that misrepresents information, potentially deceiving users. Manual inspection of a sample of these misleading ads revealed that user-identifiable data is collected on 94% of websites through interactions, such as hovering or pressing enter. Since users with disabilities often rely on tools like screen readers that require hover events to access website content, they have no choice but to compromise their privacy in order to navigate website ads. Based on our findings, we further dissect the root cause of these violations and provide design guidelines to both website developers and ad-serving technologies to achieve WCAG-compliant ad integration.

Fri 2 May

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

14:00 - 15:30
Human and Social 4Journal-first Papers / SE in Society (SEIS) / SE In Practice (SEIP) / Research Track at 206 plus 208
Chair(s): Liliana Pasquale University College Dublin & Lero
14:00
15m
Talk
Beyond the Comfort Zone: Emerging Solutions to Overcome Challenges in Integrating LLMs into Software Products
SE In Practice (SEIP)
Nadia Nahar Carnegie Mellon University, Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University, Jenna L. Butler Microsoft Research, Chris Parnin Microsoft, Thomas Zimmermann University of California, Irvine, Christian Bird Microsoft Research
14:15
15m
Talk
Follow-Up Attention: An Empirical Study of Developer and Neural Model Code Exploration
Journal-first Papers
Matteo Paltenghi University of Stuttgart, Rahul Pandita GitHub, Inc., Austin Henley Carnegie Mellon University, Albert Ziegler XBow
14:30
15m
Talk
Do Developers Adopt Green Architectural Tactics for ML-Enabled Systems? A Mining Software Repository StudyArtifact-ReusableArtifact-AvailableArtifact-Functional
SE in Society (SEIS)
Vincenzo De Martino University of Salerno, Silverio Martínez-Fernández UPC-BarcelonaTech, Fabio Palomba University of Salerno
Pre-print
14:45
15m
Talk
Accessibility Issues in Ad-Driven Web ApplicationsArtifact-FunctionalArtifact-AvailableArtifact-Reusable
Research Track
Abdul Haddi Amjad Virginia Tech, Muhammad Danish Virginia Tech, Bless Jah Virginia Tech, Muhammad Ali Gulzar Virginia Tech
15:00
15m
Talk
A Bot-based Approach to Manage Codes of Conduct in Open-Source Projects
SE in Society (SEIS)
Sergio Cobos IN3 - UOC, Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Pre-print
15:15
7m
Talk
Toward Effective Secure Code Reviews: An Empirical Study of Security-Related Coding WeaknessesSecurity
Journal-first Papers
Wachiraphan (Ping) Charoenwet University of Melbourne, Patanamon Thongtanunam University of Melbourne, Thuan Pham University of Melbourne, Christoph Treude Singapore Management University
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