Web Accessibility - Automatic/Manual Evaluation and Authoring Tools (original) (raw)

Comparing Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools and Evaluating the Accessibility of Webpages: Proposed Frameworks

Information, 2020

With the growth of e-services in the past two decades, the concept of web accessibility has been given attention to ensure that every individual can benefit from these services without any barriers. Web accessibility is considered one of the main factors that should be taken into consideration while developing webpages. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) have been developed to guide web developers to ensure that web contents are accessible for all users, especially disabled users. Many automatic tools have been developed to check the compliance of websites with accessibility guidelines such as WCAG 2.0 and to help web developers and content creators with designing webpages without barriers for disabled people. Despite the popularity of accessibility evaluation tools in practice, there is no systematic way to compare the performance of web accessibility evaluators. This paper first presents two novel frameworks. The first one is proposed to compare the performance of...

An investigation of tool support for accessibility assessment throughout the development process of Web sites

This paper investigates the support given by currently available tools for taking care of accessibility at different phases of the development process. At first, we provide a detailed classification of accessibility guidelines according to several levels of automation. Then we analyze which kind of automated inspection is supported by currently available tools for building Web sites. Lately, by the means of a case study we try to assess the possibility of fixing accessibility problems at early phases of the development process. Our results provide insights for improving current available tools towards taking accessibility into account at all phases of development process of Web sites.

Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools: A Survey and Some Improvements

Electronic notes in …, 2006

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from W3C consist of a set of 65 checkpoints or specifications that Web pages should accomplish in order to be accessible to people with disabilities or using alternative browsers. Many of these 65 checkpoints can only be checked by a human operator, thus implying a very high cost for full evaluation. However, some checkpoints can be automatically evaluated, thus spotting accessibility barriers in a very effective manner. Well known tools like Bobby, Tawdis or WebXACT evaluate Web ...

Towards Automated Web Accessibility Evaluation: A Comparative Study

International Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science, 2017

With each passing day, the Web is becoming increasingly important in our lives. Hence, the need of making it more accessible to everyone, especially for the disabled and elderly spurred a great interest in automated tools, the total registered number of which has been continuously increasing and reached from forty-five software bids in 2014 to ninety-three in 2017. The purpose of this empirical research is to assess and compare eight popular and free online automated Web accessibility evaluation tools (AWAETs) such as AChecker, Cynthia Says, EIII Checker, MAUVE, SortSite, TAW, Tenon and WAVE with regard to the WCAG 2.0 conformance. As a result, significant differences were observed in terms of tool's coverage (a maximum of 32.4%), completeness (ranges between 10% and 59%), correctness (an average of 70.7%), specificity (reaches 32%), inter-reliability (lies between 1.56% and 18.32%) and intra-reliability (the acceptable score), validity, efficiency and capacity. These eight criteria can help to determine a new role played by modern AWAETs as dependent methods in Web accessibility evaluation. Moreover, consequences of relying on AWAETs alone are quantified and concluded that applying such approaches is a great mistake since subjective and less frequent objective success criteria (SC) failed to be automated. However, using a good combination of AWAETs is highly recommended as overall results in all the mentioned quality criteria are maximized and tools could definitely validate and complete each other. Ultimately, integrating automated methods with the others is ideal and preferably at an early stage of the website development life cycle. The study also provides potential accessibility barriers that make websites inaccessible, challenges AWAETs are currently facing, nineteen pros and fourteen cons and fifteen improvement recommendations for the existing and next generation of AWAETs. Fundamentally, achieving the objectives of this study was possible due to the elaboration and implementation of a new five-phased methodology named as-5PhM-for-AWAEMs‖ for successful selection, evaluation and/or comparison of AWAEMs. In addition to providing detailed descriptions of the estimation process, this methodology represents eleven key criteria for effective selection of suitable AWAEMs and necessary numbers of web pages and expert evaluators for acceptable, normal or ideal assessment.

Web accessibility: evaluation of a website with different semi-automatic evaluation tools

Work (Reading, Mass.), 2012

It is essential that access to information must to be universal given the importance of having a truly global Internet. This study proposes to evaluate a government website with two semiautomatic accessibility evaluation tools. The results have demonstrated that the use of more than one semi-automatic assessment tool can provide enhanced results. The differences in results and presentation in the reports generated by the two tools indicate that there is more complete results by combining tests with different accessibility evaluation tools.

User-tailored web accessibility evaluations

2007

Abstract This paper presents a framework and system to evaluate the accessibility of web pages according to the individual requirements of users with disabilities. These requirements not only consist of users' abilities, but also users' assistive technologies and the delivery context. In order to ascertain interoperability with other software components, user requirements are specified taking advantage of the extensibility of the W3C CC/PP recommendation and other feature-specification vocabularies.

On web accessibility evaluation environments

2011

Abstract Modern Web sites leverage several techniques (eg DOM manipulation) that allow for the injection of new content into their Web pages (eg, AJAX), as well as manipulation of the HTML DOM tree. This has the consequence that the Web pages that are presented to users (ie, browser environment) are different from the original structure and content that is transmitted through HTTP communication (ie, command line environment).

AccessWeb Barometer - A Web Accessibility Evaluation and Analysis Platform

2015

The constant evolution of all Web related technologies, and the considerable adoption of these everyday life, has brought to the discussion table the ability of these Web technologies and Web contents to become accessible to all, including those with some sort of disability. During the past years, a research project has been executed in order to, not only give the Web accessibility topic more visibility within our society, but also to achieve indicators on the levels of accessibility presented by privately held company websites. Considering the growing need to rapidly achieve Web accessibility indicators, whose complexity has significantly increased, the research team inherent to the referred project developed a software platform, entitled accessibility evaluations to multiple websites in simultaneous. It also has the ability to analyze and publish the results inherent to those evaluations, and to allow its users to create their own analysis and dashboards. In this paper, we present...

WAccess -- A Web Accessibility Tool based on WCAG 2.2, 2.1 and 2.0 Guidelines

2021

The vision of providing access to all web content equally for all users makes web accessibility a fundamental goal of today’s internet. Web accessibility is the practice of removing barriers from websites that could hinder functionality for users with various disabilities. Web accessibility is measured against the accessibility guidelines such as WCAG, GIGW, and so on. WCAG 2.2 is the latest set of guidelines for web accessibility that helps in making websites accessible. The web accessibility tools available in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), only conform up to WCAG 2.1 guidelines, while no tools exist for the latest set of guidelines. Despite the availability of several tools to check the conformity of websites with WCAG 2.1 guidelines, there is a scarcity of tools that are both open source and scalable. To support automated accessibility evaluation of numerous websites against WCAG 2.2, 2.1, and 2.0 we present a tool, WAccess. WAccess highlights violations of 13 guidelines f...