An extensible environment for guideline-based accessibility evaluation of dynamic Web applications

During the last decade, Web site accessibility and usability have become increasingly important. Consequently, many tools have been developed for automatic or semi-automatic evaluation of Web site accessibility. Unfortunately, most of them have not been updated over time to keep up with the evolution of accessibility standards and guidelines, thus soon becoming obsolete. Furthermore, the increasing importance of CSS in the definition of modern Web page layout, and the increasing use of scripting technologies in dynamic and interactive Web sites, has led to new challenges in automatic accessibility evaluation that few of the existing tools are able to face. This paper describes MAUVE, a software environment for Web site accessibility and usability evaluation. The tool is characterized by the possibility to specify and update the guidelines that should be validated without requiring changes in the tool implementation. It is based on an XML-based language for Web Guidelines Definition. It allows checking both HTML and CSS to detect accessibility issues and is able to validate dynamic sites as well, based on the use of a set of plugins for the most popular browsers.