Evaluating the accessibility of rich internet applications

Abstract

The Web has been growing in size and complexity and is used for the most diverse activities in our every day life, becoming almost indispensable. Besides, Web applications are becoming more popular, and consequently used by a wide range of people. Thus, it is important to evaluate the accessibility of the new Rich Internet Applications (RIA) to guarantee that everyone can access the information. Currently, there are some tools to evaluate the accessibility of classical Web pages, which use WCAG guidelines. However, Web applications impose different challenges, so it is mandatory to find a way to automatically obtain the dynamically introduced HTML code, in order to evaluate what users really experience. This paper details a new process of accessibility evaluation of Web applications, which evaluates the content by triggering possible events that partially change the Web page. It also presents an experimental study with several Web applications, demonstrating the potential of this framework in evaluating Web applications. © 2012 ACM.