AccessBot – Assisted Assessment of Web Accessibility

Santos, Tânia Isabel Gomes Frazão Pina

http://hdl.handle.net/10451/48353

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Authors

Santos, Tânia Isabel Gomes Frazão Pina

Advisor(s)

Duarte, Carlos Alberto Pacheco dos Anjos, 1972-

Abstract(s)

Nowadays, the World Wide Web is a necessity, and its content should be available to everyone. People with different types of disabilities have different needs in using the web and access the content. Developers should fulfill these needs by making websites accessible. Alongside this premise, worldwide government directives oblige public and private sector websites and apps to meet accessibility requirements. To achieve a determined level of accessibility conformance, developers should follow the WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and use automatic testing tools to evaluate their websites. However, while creating an accessible website, they may find difficulties that make this a laborious process. After studying and comparing eight of the most well-known accessibility evaluation extensions for the Chrome web browser, I found that these difficulties arise from various factors. These are subjective guidelines interpretations and implementations, automatic testing tools that provide limited coverage of the success criteria, different results displayed for the same website, and some guidelines are not tested automatically, meaning developers should perform manual testing. After analyzing these results, this project, with the name AccessBot, tries to cover the automatic accessibility evaluation gaps. It is an assisted validation tool using the open-source QualWeb accessibility evaluation. AccessBot is a browser extension for Chrome. Being a chrome extension makes it easy to access, install, and use by developers and more accessible to the general public. Its implementation aims to help users by visually identifying the problem, and performing a step-by-step guided evaluation, complementing the automatic evaluation done by QualWeb. The accessibility testing considers the test rules developed by the ACT-Rules Community, which makes an effort to create detailed descriptions of WCAG.