Automatous web accessibility evaluator

• Main Author: Chai, Tze Yan
• Other Authors: Alex Qiang Chen
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software::Programming techniques
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62789
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

World Wide Web is full of the information nowadays, but not all individuals access the same information in the same way. Some disabled users may be using screen reader to read out the page for them, while some users will be experiencing slow internet connection when accessing the page which will cause the page content to not be loaded fully. Thus, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 is aimed to be the useful guidelines for developer to use in order to increase the Web accessibility. This project will provide a high level understanding of the Web accessibility of the Web pages. A Web agent will be created to find out the Web accessibility of the Web sites. The Web agent consists of crawler, parser, and evaluator. Crawler is used to crawl into two degree of the Web sites and parser is used to parse the URL from the HTML file that have been saved in the local disk. Evaluator is used to extract the related DOM elements from the HTML file for the Web accessibility analysis. Three areas have been selected for the evaluation process. These are the section heading, text alternative of static image and title text of URL. Three lists have been used in the actual data set, which are the top ten popular Web sites in the world, top five Web sites in The Webby Awards from the category of best navigation/ structure in year 2014, and top five Web sites in The Webby Awards from the category of best user experience in year 2014. The Web accessibility will be evaluated in terms of the error found in the Web site based on the criteria set. The list of the top five Web sites in The Webby Awards from the category of best navigation/ structure in year 2014 is identified to be having the lowest error ratio compared to the other two lists analysed, which are the top ten popular Web sites in the world and the top five websites in The Webby Awards from the category of best user experience in year 2014. The findings show that the awareness of the Web accessibility among the developers are still very low. Even the Web sites are popular or awarded, it does not mean that the Web site is fully conformed to the selected Web accessibility criteria. Although it is impossible for the Web site to achieve a full conformance on WCAG 2.0, it is still a responsibility for the Web site to look at the Web accessibility of the Web site as it will help to decrease the accessibility barriers for both normal users and disabled users.