WAL: A Tool for Diagnosing Accessibility Issues and Evolving Legacy Web Systems at Runtime

The vast majority of pages available on the Web are developed under the tacit assumption that the final user will not have any kind of disability. Thus, accessibility aspects are not contemplated in their development process. As a consequence, many users encounter interaction barriers and cannot access much of the content in the Web. But the improvement of Websites can be challenging due to their high complexity and lack of documentation, the impossibility of accessing the source code, the use of out-of-dated technologies, and the fact that development teams are often unaware of accessibility rules. To mitigate this problem, this paper proposes a tool, called Website Accessibility Layer (WAL), which aims at both inserting accessibility features into existing Web pages at runtime and diagnosing accessibility issues through a dynamic source code analysis. The current version of the tool contributes to the accessibility of users with visual impairment, dyslexia, and reading difficulties, with respect to 13 Web page resources. The proposal has been validated by being applied to 40 widely accessed Websites with satisfactory results, proving the feasibility of the solution. Furthermore, real users also evaluated positively the benefits brought by the tool to their daily work activities.