Abstract
With the growth of e-services in the past two decades, the concept of web accessibility has been given attention to ensure that every individual can benefit from these services without any barriers. Web accessibility is considered one of the main factors that should be taken into consideration while developing webpages. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) have been developed to guide web developers to ensure that web contents are accessible for all users, especially disabled users. Many automatic tools have been developed to check the compliance of websites with accessibility guidelines such as WCAG 2.0 and to help web developers and content creators with designing webpages without barriers for disabled people. Despite the popularity of accessibility evaluation tools in practice, there is no systematic way to compare the performance of web accessibility evaluators. This paper first presents two novel frameworks. The first one is proposed to compare the performance of web accessibility evaluation tools in detecting web accessibility issues based on WCAG 2.0. The second framework is utilized to evaluate webpages in meeting these guidelines. Six homepages of Saudi universities were chosen as case studies to substantiate the concept of the proposed frameworks. Furthermore, two popular web accessibility evaluators, Wave and SiteImprove, are selected to compare their performance. The outcomes of studies conducted using the first proposed framework showed that SiteImprove outperformed WAVE. According to the outcomes of the studies conducted, we can conclude that web administrators would benefit from the first framework in selecting an appropriate tool based on its performance to evaluate their websites based on accessibility criteria and guidelines. Moreover, the findings of the studies conducted using the second proposed framework showed that the homepage of Taibah University is more accessible than the homepages of other Saudi universities. Based on the findings of this study, the second framework can be used by web administrators and developers to measure the accessibility of their websites. This paper also discusses the most common accessibility issues reported by WAVE and SiteImprove.
Highlights
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) [1] were developed to provide recommendations and guidance for creating accessible web content to meet the needs of different disabled users
In order to establish a systematic method for comparing the performance of accessibility evaluation tools, this study proposed a framework to compare the performance of web-accessibility checkers
WAVE and SiteImprove were selected as they are well-known tools and utilized to substantiate the concepts of the proposed frameworks
Summary
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) [1] were developed to provide recommendations and guidance for creating accessible web content to meet the needs of different disabled users. One of the most common approaches is to examine the web accessibility of a webpage using automatic evaluation tools These tools can be called web accessibility checkers, and the terms are used interchangeably in this paper. With the development of WCAG 2.0, various automated web accessibility evaluation tools have been widely used to determine to what extent a specific webpage meets accessibility guidelines, especially WCAG 2.0.
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