Automated Evaluation of Web Usability and Accessibility by Guideline Review

Abstract

Abstract.A novel approach is presented for automatically evaluating of the usability and accessibility (U&A) of web sites by performing a static analysis of their HTML code against U&A guidelines. The approach relies on separating guidelines evaluation logic from the evaluation engine. Due to this separation, the whole evaluation process can be divided into two main phases: specifying formal guidelines and web page evaluation. In the first phase, the formal structure of a guideline is expressed in terms of Guideline Definition Language (GDL). In the second phase, the web page is parsed to identify its contents and structure and link them to relevant guidelines to be evaluated on the page parsed. This approach enables the simultaneous evaluation of multiple guidelines selected on demand from different sources. It also optimises evaluation by automatically identifying common sub-structures among structured guidelines. It also supports the expression, by evaluators with different usability practises, of alternative evaluation strategies.

Evaluation of web accessibility in China: changes from 2009 to 2013

“…The application of automatic accessibility evaluation tools during conformance evaluation reduces the subjectivity of the results. Studies have been carried out on developing automatic methods for web accessibility evaluation [22] and on how to interpret the results of automatic evaluation tools more effectively [23]. However, no evaluation tools can detect all accessibility problems automatically, and their judgment of accessibility problems may sometimes be incorrect.…”

Enhancing the Effectiveness of Usability Evaluation by Automated Heuristic Evaluation System

“…The study shows that enhancing the effectiveness of usability evaluation by automated Heuristic Evaluation System is feasible. Automation is one of the solutions to simplify our work but by adding more artificial intelligent [13] inside the system. The incorporation of artificial intelligent could be the future work to be carried out for the next version of an intelligent UMS (iUMS).…”

An Intelligent Framework for Website Usability

“…Thus, a thorough evaluation is necessary to ensure an acceptable level of usability is attained [35], which has been shown to increase sales [36], competitiveness [37], user throughput [38], and user satisfaction [37], whilst decreasing training budgets [39] and needs for user support [40]. There is a general consensus regarding the common activities involved in the process of UE [41][42][43], which are, namely, the following:…”

“…(ii) it is difficult to find usability experts [43,54,59] and users belonging to the target group of the system [37,58,59];…”