Toward better web accessibility

Abstract

Web page evaluation systems are needed to evaluate the accessibility of websites. Such evaluation is important so that website administrators can change their websites so people with disabilities would be able to use them. Currently, such systems produce varying results that are not always useful for website administrators. Moreover it is difficult to ascertain for sure to what degree the web pages conform to accessibility guidelines. In this paper, the current state of open-source web accessibility evaluation tools is reviewed. As a result, AChecker, a system that evaluates web page compliance with WCAG 2.0, is identified as the best available. Three types of deficiencies in AChecker are identified, unclear comments, redundancy of errors reporting and lack of automatic or semiautomatic repair. An interactive evaluation tool (IWAET) is developed based on AChecker. The usability of the new system is studied. The study involved a group of web developers with different levels of programming experience and no accessibility knowledge. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted in usability evaluation. The developed system is compared to AChecker. The results of the evaluation are presented which show clearly the superiority of the new system compared to the currently available systems.