Web accessibility snapshot: an effort to reveal coding guidelines conformance

Abstract

In the last decades, the Web has grown from dozens of webpages to the current 13.5 billion pages. This growth was not followed by a major conformance to markup coding guidelines. This impacts negatively the access of people with disabilities to the vast socio-economic-cultural transformations the Web engenders. For example, a form field without the proper label markup is an accessibility barrier for blind users. In this context, this work presents a study involving the Alexa.com's top 1,000 popular websites and a sample of random 1,000 websites to verify and contrast the conformance of these disjoint sets with the accessibility markup guidelines. The initiative proposed in this paper is the first iteration of the Web Accessibility Snapshot (WAS) project, which will from now on present regular updates on the numbers regarding the status of Web accessibility. With the presented results, one expects to support accessibility professionals, researchers, and practitioners by providing up-to-date information. Beyond that, we expect governments and other accessibility governance agency to consider the provided information when designing programs for fostering and enforcing the conformance to existing accessibility regulations and laws accordingly.