skip to main content
research-article

Flexible Automatic Support for Web Accessibility Validation

Published: 18 June 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Automatic support for web accessibility validation needs to evolve for several reasons. The increasingly recognised importance of accessibility implies that various stakeholders, with different expertise, look at it from different viewpoints and have different requirements regarding the types of outputs they expect. The technologies used to support Web application access are evolving along with the associated accessibility guidelines. We present a novel tool that aims to provide flexible and open support for addressing such issues. We describe the design of its main features, including support for recent guidelines and tailored results presentations, and report on first technical and empirical validations that have provided positive feedback.

References

[1]
Abascal, J., Arrue, M., & Valencia, X. (2019). Tools for web accessibility evaluation. Web Accessibility (pp. 479--503). London: Springer.
[2]
Abduganiev, S. G. (2017). Towards automated web accessibility evaluation: a comparative study. Int. J. Inform. Technol. Comput. Sci, 9(9), 18--44.
[3]
Arrue, M., Vigo, M., & Abascal, J. (2008). Including heterogeneous Web accessibility guidelines in the development process. IFIP International Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 620--637). Berlin: Springer.
[4]
Ballantyne, M., Jha, A., Jacobsen, A., Hawker, J. S., & El-Glaly, Y. N. (2018). Study of Accessibility Guidelines of Mobile Applications. 17th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (pp. 305--315). ACM.
[5]
Beirekdar, A., Vanderdonckt, J., & Noirhomme-Fraiture, M. (2002). Kwaresmi--Knowledge-based Web Automated Evaluation with REconfigurable guidelineS optiMIzation. (Springer, Ed.) DSV-IS, 2545, 362--376.
[6]
Beirekdar A., Keita M., Noirhomme M., Randolet F., Vanderdonckt J., Mariage C. (2005) Flexible Reporting for Automated Usability and Accessibility Evaluation of Web Sites. In: Costabile M.F., Paternò F. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2005. INTERACT 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3585. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
[7]
Brajnik, G. (2004). Comparing accessibility evaluation tools: a method for tool effectiveness. Universal access in the information society, 3(3--4), 252--263.
[8]
Brajnik, G., & Vigo, M. (2019). Automatic Web Accessibility Metrics. Where we were and where we went. (Springer, Ed.) Web Accessibility, 505--521.
[9]
Consortium, W. W. (2018). Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. Retrieved from https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/
[10]
EU Commission. (2016, October 26). Directive (EU) 2016/2102 of the European Parliament and of the Council. Retrieved from https://eur-lex.europa.eu: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2016/2102/oj
[11]
Fernandes, N., Kaklanis, N., Votis, K., Tzovaras, D., & Carriço, L. (2014). An analysis of personalized web accessibility. Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (p. 19). ACM.
[12]
Fuertes, J. L., González, R., Gutiérrez, E., & Martínez, L. (2009). Hera-FFX: a Firefox add-on for semi-automatic web accessibility evaluation. Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A) (pp. 26--35). ACM.
[13]
Gay, G., & Li, C. Q. (2010). AChecker: open, interactive, customizable, web accessibility checking. Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A) (p. 23). ACM.
[14]
Gulliksen, J., Von Axelson, H., Persson, H., & Göransson, H. (2010). Accessibility and public policy in Sweden. Interactions, 17(3), 26--29.
[15]
Ivory, M. Y., & Hearst, M. A. (2001, December). State of the Rt in Automating Usability Evaluation of User Interfaces. ACM Computing Surveys, 33(4), 470--516.
[16]
Lazar, J., & Olalere, A. (2011). Investigation of best practices for maintaining section 508 Compliance in US federal web sites. International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 498--506). Berlin: Springer.
[17]
Aliaksei Miniukovich, Michele Scaltritti, Simone Sulpizio, and Antonella De Angeli. 2019. Guideline-Based Evaluation of Web Readability. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 508, 1--12.
[18]
Mirri, S., Muratori, L. A., & Salomoni, P. (2011). Monitoring accessibility: large scale evaluations at a geo political level. The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (pp. 163--170). New York: ACM.
[19]
Lourdes Moreno, Rodrigo Alarcon, Isabel Segura-Bedmar, and Paloma Martínez. 2019. Lexical simplification approach to support the accessibility guidelines. In Proceedings of the XX International Conference on Human Computer Interaction (Interaccion '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 14, 1--4.
[20]
Mucha, J., Snaprud, M., & Nietzio, A. (2016). Web page clustering for more efficient website accessibility evaluations. International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (pp. 259--266). Springer.
[21]
Jacob Nielsen, Success Rate: The Simplest Usability Metric, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/success-rate-the-simplest-usability-metric/
[22]
Nietzio, A., Eibegger, M., Goodwin, M., & Snaprud, M. (2011). Towards a score function for WCAG 2.0 benchmarking. Proceedings of W3C Online Symposium on Website Accessibility Metrics. Retrieved from https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2011/metrics/paper11
[23]
Paternò, F., & Schiavone, A. G. (2015). The role of tool support in public policies and accessibility. Interactions, 22(3), 60--63.
[24]
Power, C., Freire, A., Petrie, H., & Swallow, D. (2012). Guidelines are only half of the story: accessibility problems encountered by blind users on the web. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 433--442). ACM.
[25]
Schiavone, A. G., & Paternò, F. (2015). An extensible environment for guideline-based accessibility evaluation of dynamic Web applications. Universal access in the information society, 14(1), 111--132.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Combined accessibility validation and monitoring of web sites and PDF documentsUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-025-01194-7Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Towards Automated Accessibility Report Generation for Mobile AppsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/367496731:4(1-44)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
  • (2024)UML Profile to Model Accessible Web PagesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.340668812(77181-77213)Online publication date: 2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 4, Issue EICS
EICS
June 2020
534 pages
EISSN:2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3407187
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 June 2020
Online AM: 07 May 2020
Published in PACMHCI Volume 4, Issue EICS

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. automatic validation
  3. guidelines
  4. tailored presentation of validation results

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)47
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
Reflects downloads up to 16 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Combined accessibility validation and monitoring of web sites and PDF documentsUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-025-01194-7Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Towards Automated Accessibility Report Generation for Mobile AppsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/367496731:4(1-44)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
  • (2024)UML Profile to Model Accessible Web PagesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.340668812(77181-77213)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)An inclusive framework for automated web content accessibility evaluationUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-024-01164-5Online publication date: 25-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Starting well on design for accessibility: analysis of W3C's 167 accessibility evaluation tools for the design phaseProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3614474(1-7)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
  • (2023)The Transparency of Automatic Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools: Design Criteria, State of the Art, and User PerceptionACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/355697916:1(1-36)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Assistive-Technology Aided Manual Accessibility Testing in Mobile Apps, Powered by Record-and-ReplayProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580679(1-20)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Accessibility engineering in web evaluation process: a systematic literature reviewUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-023-00967-223:2(653-686)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
  • (2023)BellChat: An Inclusive Web Application for MessagingProceedings of Eighth International Congress on Information and Communication Technology10.1007/978-981-99-3043-2_35(455-465)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2023
  • (2022)An Assessment of Accessibility and Usability of Saudi Online FinTech Services for People with DisabilitiesComputational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine10.1155/2022/86108442022(1-9)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media