Abstract
The Web Accessibility Guidelines are designed to help developers ensure that web content is accessible to all users. These guidelines provide the foundation for evaluation tools that automate inspection processes. However, due to the heterogeneity of these guidelines and the subjectivity involved in their evaluation, humans are still necessary for the process. As a result, evaluating accessibility becomes a collaborative endeavor wherein different human experts and tools interact. Despite quickly being noticed by the W3C, it has largely been overlooked in the existing literature. Tool vendors often focus on providing a thorough evaluation rather than importing, integrating, and combining results from diverse sources. This paper examines an EARL-based document-centric workflow. It introduces a dedicated editor for EARL documents that accounts for the life-cycle of EARL documents where evaluation episodes feedback on each other. Expert evaluations were conducted (n = 5 experts), not so much about the tool itself but its ability to facilitate a collaborative approach.
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Notes
- 1.
European Union main web page: https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en; Brussels City Hall main web page: https://www.brussels.be/; World Health Organization main web page: https://www.who.int/home; United Nations main web page: https://www.un.org/en/; UNESCO main web page: https://www.unesco.org/en; MIT main web page: https://www.mit.edu/.
- 2.
It’s worth noting that if even a single error is detected, the corresponding success criterion is labeled as Failed.
- 3.
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Acknowledgement
This work is co-supported by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the “European Union NextGeneration EU/PRTR” under contract PID2021-125438OB-I00.
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López-Gil, JM., Díaz, O., Iturria, M. (2023). Collaborative Web Accessibility Evaluation: An EARL-Based Workflow Approach. In: Garrigós, I., Murillo Rodríguez, J.M., Wimmer, M. (eds) Web Engineering. ICWE 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13893. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34444-2_15
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