Monitoring Systems for Checking Websites on Accessibility

Abstract

Web accessibility monitoring systems support users in checking entire websites for accessibility issues. Although these tools can only check the compliance with some of the many success criteria of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, they can assist quality assurance personnel, web administrators and web authors to discover hotspots of barriers and overlooked accessibility issues in a continuous manner. These tools should be effective in identifying accessibility issues. Furthermore, they should motivate users, as this promotes employee productivity and increases interest in accessibility in general. In a comparative study, we applied four commercial monitoring systems on two of the Stuttgart Media University’s websites. The tools are: 1) The Accessibility module of Siteimprove from Siteimprove, 2) Pope Tech from Pope Tech, 3) WorldSpace Comply (now called axe Monitor) from Deque, and 4) ARC Monitoring from The Paciello Group. The criteria catalogue consists of functional criteria that we gleaned from literature and user experience criteria based on the User Experience Questionnaire. Based on a focus group consisting of experts of Stuttgart Media University, we derived individual weights for the criteria. The functional evaluation criteria are: Coverage of the website and the guidelines, completeness, correctness, support in locating errors, support for manual checks, degree of implementing gamification patterns, support for various input and report formats, and methodological support for the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology 1.0 and for the German procurement law for public authorities Barrierefreie Informationstechnik-Verordnung 2.0. For determination of the user experience criteria, we conducted exploratory think-aloud user tests (n = 15) using a coaching approach. Every participant tested all tools for 15 min (within-subject design). The participants completed post-test questionnaires, including the User Experience Questionnaire. According to our results, Siteimprove turned out to be the best tool for our purposes.

An Assessment of Accessibility and Usability of Saudi Online FinTech Services for People with Disabilities

“…Three online web accessibility evaluation tools were employed: MAUVE++ [32], Siteimprove [33], and WAVE [34]. These tools have seen wide use in the literature [35][36][37][38][39][40] and all of them are listed by the W3C as appropriate for evaluation against the WCAG 2.1 guidelines [15]. More than one tool was utilized so that the assessment would benefit from more features and functionality and the limitations of each tool might be offset [41].…”

Investigation of COVID-19 Vaccine Information Websites across Europe and Asia Using Automated Accessibility Protocols

“…Generally, there are several techniques or methods to evaluate web accessibility. Four web accessibility evaluation techniques are more popular and effective: automatic evaluation tools [ 24 ], manual evaluation or expert evaluation [ 25 ], user evaluation (those who have disabilities) [ 26 ], and hybrid evaluation (both automatic and manual judgment). The automatic evaluation technique allows the tester to evaluate the website’s accessibility by running the evaluation tools into the browser.…”

Evaluating the effectiveness of automatic image captioning for web accessibility

“…These tools help to assess a minimal accessibility level, which is better than nothing. However, experts’ judgments is always required to capture subtler accessibility issues, as discussed for example in [ 22 ] or in a more recent study [ 3 ] where four commercial accessibility monitoring systems are compared.…”

“…To ensure access to an image for the blind, it is necessary to include an alternative text that can be read aloud by a screen reader or rendered by a braille display. The HTML markup language provides properties and elements to add such text, for example the alt and longdesc 3 properties used in combination with the src element to include images in web pages, or the <figcap-tion> element used within the <figure> element. In this study, we will use the alt property and often adopt the term alt-text to denote image descriptions.…”