Automated Evaluation of Web Site Accessibility Using A Dynamic Accessibility Measurement Crawler
This addresses the challenge for government agencies and businesses in implementing accessibility standards due to limitations of current tools with dynamic content.
The paper tackles the problem of automated accessibility testing for dynamic web applications by introducing the Demodocus framework, which simulates user interactions to compare reachable states for users with and without disabilities, resulting in a method to determine accessibility and access difficulty.
Achieving accessibility compliance is extremely important for many government agencies and businesses who wish to improve services for their consumers. With the growing reliance on dynamic web applications many organizations are finding it difficult to implement accessibility standards, often due to the inability of current automated testing tools to test the stateful environments created by dynamic web applications. In this paper, we present mathematical foundations and theory for the Demodocus framework and prototype, and outline its approach to using web science, web crawling,and accessibility testing to automatically navigate and test interactive content for accessibility. Our approach simulates the page interactions of users with and without disabilities, and compares graphs of reachable states from these simulations to determine both the accessibility and the difficulty of content access for these different users.