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The use of guidelines to automatically verify Web accessibility

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Abstract

Accessibility is one of the key challenges that the Internet must currently face to guarantee universal inclusion. Accessible Web design requires knowledge and experience from the designer, who can be assisted by the use of broadly accepted guidelines. Nevertheless, guideline application may not be obvious, and many designers may lack experience to use them. The difficulty increases because, as the research on accessibility is progressing, existing sets of guidelines are updated and new sets are proposed by diverse institutions. Therefore, the availability of tools to evaluate accessibility, and eventually repair the detected bugs, is crucial. This paper presents a tool, EvalIris, developed to automatically check the accessibility of Websites using sets of guidelines that, by means of a well-defined XML structure, can be easily replaced or updated.

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Notes

  1. The Americans with Disabilities Act and Rehabilitation Act Amendments, Section 508 in USA; Australian Disability Discrimination Act in Australia; eEurope 2002: Accessibility of Public Web Sites and their Content in Europe; etc. For more information visit: http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/

  2. A more extensive discussion of automatic capture, analysis, and critique tools can be found in [16].

  3. Although we only refer here to tools developed to assist the review of guidelines, there are also tools that assist the analysis and critique of methods such as cognitive walkthrough or analytical modelling.

  4. A Web service is an application that allows for the making remote procedure calls (RPCs) in a distributed environment (a remote or local network) [13]. When a Web service receives a request, it performs its function and returns a response. Both the request and the response are usually formatted in XML, a portable data-interchange format [34], and are delivered over HTTP protocol.

  5. The current version of EvalIris, accessible at http://www.sc.ehu.es/acwbbpke/evaliris.html, contains, in its accessibility information database, all the checkpoints of WAI’s WCAG, conveniently formatted.

  6. IRIS Project Web site: http://www.iris-design4all.org/

  7. XML allows for extremely large flexibility when describing data format. Therefore, it is necessary to somehow define what element and attribute names are allowed to appear in a conforming document in order to make that document useful and easy to process. This element and attribute definition is approached by XML schemas. According to the definition given by the Web Consortium XML Schema Working Group [8, 34, 35], XML schemas provide means for defining the structure, content and semantics of XML documents.

  8. The results from this evaluation are available in: http://www.sc.ehu.es/acwbbpke/evaliris.html

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Acknowledgements

This work has been financed by the European Commission within the IST-2000-26211 IRIS project (Incorporating the Requirements of People with Special Needs or Impairments to Internet-based Systems and Services) developed by European Dynamics (GR), Fraunhofer for Institute Applied Information Technology (D), the University of the Aegean (GR), the University of the Basque Country-Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (E) and the ISdAC International Association (Information Society disAbilities Challenge) (B).

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  1. Laboratory of Human-Computer Interaction for Special Needs, University of the Basque Country-Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Manuel Lardizabal 1, E-20018 Donostia, Spain

    Julio Abascal, Myriam Arrue, Inmaculada Fajardo, Nestor Garay & Jorge Tomás

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  1. Julio Abascal
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  2. Myriam Arrue
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Correspondence to Julio Abascal.

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Abascal, J., Arrue, M., Fajardo, I. et al. The use of guidelines to automatically verify Web accessibility. Univ Access Inf Soc 3, 71–79 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-003-0069-3

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