Requirements for "Techniques for Automated and Semi-Automated
Evaluation Tools"
This document provides a set of
initial requirements that need to be incorporated in the document
"Techniques for Automated and Semi-Automated Evaluation Tools". Further
refinements of this document will occur under the scope of the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group
(ERT WG) discussions.
- This version:
- Not Applicable
- Latest internal version:
- Not Applicable
- Previous published version:
- Not Applicable
- Previous internal version:
- Not Applicable
- Editor:
- Carlos A Velasco, Fraunhofer
Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT
Copyright
© 2013 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability,
trademark
and document
use rules apply.
Audience of the document
The document
"Techniques for Automated and Semi-Automated Evaluation Tools", in the
following called simply document, is targeted mainly to development
managers and developers of accessibility testing tools. Under this
scope, we will not distinguish between commercial and open source
developers, although there are use cases and issues that can be more
relevant to one group than to the other.
Secondary
audience: users of accessibility testing tools like accessibility
experts or web developers.
Issues not covered in this
document
The following issues are not covered in this
document:
- Procurement and acquisition issues for this type of tools are
outside of the scope of this document and are covered elsewhere
- Interpretation of WCAG 2.0 success criteria and
techniques
- How to interpret standards and recommendations related to web
technologies
Types of tools included
Examples of tools that are
included are:
- Industrial/commercial an open source tools, which test complete
websites or web applications.
- Focused tools, which test a concrete aspect of accessibility, for
instance, testing contrast of images, accessibility of forms, ARIA
implementation, etc.
- Tools that support research with users or developers of specific
aspects of accessibility.
Profile of an evaluation tool
The document will contain
descriptions of different functionalities that are included in different
evaluation tools, which help to classify them and to identify their
limitations. Typical examples include:
- ability to crawl big websites or portals
- types of web technologies handled by the tool, for instance HTML
markup, stylesheets, PDF documents, Flash applications, multimedia, etc.
- ability to integrate dynamic content generated via scripting
(dynamic modification of the Document Object Model according to the user
interaction with the application, etc.)
- support for testing APIs like the WebDriver API, for instance
- support for standard reporting languages like EARL
- support for different accessibility compliance environments in
different countries
- integration in the web development workflow as a plug-in add-on in
different Integrated Development Environments (open source or
commercial)
- multilinguality and internationalisation
Objectives/purpose of the document
- Present how to distinguish different types of web accessibility
tests: automatic, semiautomatic and manual
- Present different workflows for accessibility evaluation and actors
that participate in them
- Support developers of accessibility testing tools to understand the
different types of techniques in WCAG 2.0
- Support developers of accessibility testing tools in presenting
results to different audiences
- Support developers of accessibility testing tools to identify target
user groups for their tools
Scenarios
The document will present two or more scenarios
which can put in context the recommendations of the
document.References
- Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
- Website Accessibility
Conformance Evaluation Methodology 1.0
- Developer Guide for
Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0
- UWEM, Unified Web
Evaluation Methodology version 1.2
- Requirements for
web developers and web commissioners in ubiquitous Web 2.0 design and
development (January 2012)
- ACCESSIBLE project
Table of contents
What follows is a preliminary table of
contents for the document:
- Abstract
- Status of this document
- Introduction
- Audience of this document
- Document conventions
- Complementary resources
- Scenarios
- How to implement tests for WCAG 2.0 and its
techniques
- Integrating the testing procedure into the development workflows
- Accessibility testing actors
- Evaluation procedures
- Types and scope of tests
- Testing web technologies and document types
- Morphology of a test
- Reporting for different audiences
- Profile of an evaluation tool
- References