With advances in technology, information has become accessible via various resources. Papers have now been replaced with electronic documents that can be accessed using websites on the Internet or the World Wide Web. However, websites need to serve users regardless of their physical and psychological backgrounds. People who are disabled or differently-abled should be able to access information on the Internet without any difficulties. Web accessibility is the practice of developing websites that are easily accessible by people of different abilities or by people having disabilities.
People with disabilities include people having blindness, deaf or hard of hearing users, low-vision users, color blind users, users with motor disability impairing use of a keyboard or mouse, and users with cognitive disabilities. Challenges faced by disabled people include, inability of visually challenged users to read images, inability of hearing impaired users to access audio, inability of monochrome device users to differentiate between colors, and inability of old people to read small font text. Further, since a lot of Internet use nowadays relate to access and utilization of entertainment content, websites are generally designed using audio, video and colorful content including the use of images. For visually challenged users, screen reader softwares which read and interpret text on a screen cannot read images and this causes lot of inconveniences to users of screen reader softwares. Users having cognitive disabilities include users having problems related to memory, problem-solving, attention, visual comprehension etc. Challenges faced by people having cognitive disabilities include, getting distracted by scrolling text, blinking icons or multiple pop-ups on a webpage, inability of people having visual comprehension difficulties in correlating photograph of a person with representation of the person, inability of a person with problem solving difficulties in navigating webpages with bad links etc. The accessibility challenges get intensified for web applications with interactive information sharing such as Web 2.0 applications because for such applications, users tend to be content producers and may not be able to produce accessible content.
To deal with the various challenges faced by users with disabilities, several standards and best practices have been developed to enable a web designer to make accessible web pages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international standards organization that regularly publishes web accessibility guidelines for web designers to design web accessible content. However, for the considerable volume of web pages already existing on the Internet, the task of manually accessing the web pages and making changes to them according to the web accessibility guidelines is a cumbersome process. Further, the cost of employing skilled web designers to access web pages and point out non-adherence to standards as per W3C is very high.
Based on the above mentioned limitations, there is a need for an automated system and method for assessing websites and for suggesting remedies for issues related with website accessibility.