Improving web accessibility

Abstract

An increasing number of websites are designed to be accessible to people with disabilities. Web page evaluation systems are needed to evaluate the accessibility of these websites. Such evaluation is important so that website administrators can change their websites so people with disabilities would be able to use their web pages. Currently, existing evaluation systems produce varying results and such results are not always useful for website administrators. This variation leads to uncertainty in specifying the degree of compliance of web pages to predefined guidelines. In this paper, open-source web accessibility evaluation tools are reviewed. AChecker, a system that evaluates web page compliance with WCAG 2.0, is identified as the best available. After analyzing AChecker, it is found to have three types of deficiencies: unclear comments, redundancy of errors reporting and lack of automatic or semi-automatic repair. We present in this paper, an interactive evaluation tool (IWAET) that we developed based on AChecker. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are used to evaluate the usability of this system. The study involved a group of web developers with no accessibility knowledge and with varying levels of programming experience. IWAET is compared to AChecker and the results of the evaluation show clearly the superiority of the new system compared to the currently available systems. © Research India Publications.