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Web Accessibility FrameWork (demo)

About Web Accessibility FrameWork (demo version)

Main objectives of this demonstration version

This is a functional demo of a system -still under development- for establishing and overseeing action plans aimed at improving the accessibility of the content available on websites. Web Accessibility FrameWork is a tool that allows you to make a diagnosis, guide of correction, and perform continuous monitoring of large volumes of web content. It is ideal for organizations in charge of several websites, but it is also flexible enough to become useful for those who have a small amount of content available on the web.

For this demonstration, 35 sites were selected -one from each country-, which are representative of the web contents offered nowadays by public administrations. We are talking essentially about government websites, some of which represent the access door for citizens to the online Public Administration. The sample collected is made up of a maximum of 50 pages per site. A total of about 1750 pages was subjected to an automatic evaluation that compares the practices found in the different pages to the practices put forward by the W3C recommendation document, called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and whose 2.0 version was published on December 11th, 2008 (WCAG 2.0).

In the first tab of Web Accessibility FrameWork, there is a list of 35 sites ordered according to the "score" index. The score is assigned by the automatic validation system taking into account the failures and techniques found in the page. For example, in this demo, the websites that appear first in the list are the ones in which the validator found practices most congruous to those established in WCAG 2.0, giving them higher ratings. The index score uses a scale from 1 to 10, in which 10 corresponds to an excellent practice, and 1, to a very deficient practice, which impedes access to the content of a large group of people with disabilities, and requires immediate correction. The score assigned to a website is an average of the scores assigned to each of the 50 pages separately. The score assigned to each page, in turn, is calculated taking into account the failures and techniques used on the page, and can be found in the detailed report. Going from the general to the particular, it is possible to go from the website list to the page list and, from there, to the respective detailed reports.

Thus, Web Accessibility FrameWork, apart from describing in high detail the practices and failures encountered by providing a wide range of information on context-sensitive help -perfect for the most demanding content editors-, it also enables website administrators to have a quick and updated overview of the global situation of the contents in one or several sites.

With Web Accessibility FrameWork, it is algo possible display the information of the websites according to different categories. For example, in this demo, the user can see the situation of European countries, and even compare the situation of North American to the situation of South American countries. The construction of categories is completely adaptable to the world the user wants to analyze. For example, it is possible to organize the information by department, by university, by sector of activity, by region, etc.

Web Accessibility FrameWork can be used as a self-certification of accessibility, providing a common methodology of production practices of web content -guiding the professionals involved-, whose result will withstand the scrutiny of the general public, given the perfect transparency of information produced.

Web Accessibility FrameWork can be used as a WCAG 2.0 observatory, monitoring a great number of websites and studying their evolution over time. With this system, it is not only possible to "measure" the level of overall compliance with the WCAG 2.0, but also to analyze in detail which are the elements -particularly, HTML elements- that constitute the main barriers, enabling the drafting of specific recommendations applicable to the universe under review.

It has to be remembered that the data resulting from automatic validation tools do not cover all the success criteria and failures described in WCAG 2.0, and it is possible that automatic testing produces false positives or negatives. Particularly, Web Accessibility FrameWork can facilitate the work of an expert in web accessibility, always recommended.

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