Exploring automatic CSS accessibility evaluation

Abstract

Automatic evaluation tools are crucial for helping designers to develop accessible web content. However, most of the existing automatic tools are focused on evaluating the accessibility of (X)HTML code and do not consider style sheets. CSS provides mechanisms for separating content from display which is a requirement for accessible web documents. Although the use of CSS has become essential, sometimes its powerful mechanisms and functionalities may lead to a misuse. This paper presents an accessibility evaluation framework for verifying the correct application of CSS techniques. For this purpose, a flexible accessibility evaluation framework was selected and adapted to incorporate CSS test cases defined in WCAG 2.0. As a result of a detailed analysis, 6 different types of test cases were identified and a total number of 92 test cases were accommodated into the framework. This process has lead to obtain a flexible framework which performs more comprehensive automatic evaluations. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.