The Use of Guidelines to Automatically Verify Web Accessibility

Accessibility is one of the key challenges that the Internet must currently face to guarantee universal inclusion. Accessible Web design requires knowledge and experience from the designer, who can be assisted by the use of broadly accepted guidelines. Nevertheless, guideline application may not be obvious, and many designers may lack experience to use them. The difficulty increases because, as the research on accessibility is progressing, existing sets of guidelines are updated and new sets are proposed by diverse institutions. Therefore, the availability of tools to evaluate accessibility, and eventually repair the detected bugs, is crucial. This paper presents a tool — EvalIris — developed to automatically check the accessibility of Websites using sets of guidelines that, by means of a well-defined XML structure, can be easily replaced or updated