Assessing the effort of repairing the accessibility of web sites

Abstract

The paper presents a new metric and a framework to assess the effort of repairing the accessibility of a Web site. For that all the HTML elements of all the pages of a site are considered, excluding those that are duplicated. The rationale is that those elements are originated in a reusable construct, such as a template and, therefore, need to be corrected only once. The evaluation then ap-plies the accessibility evaluation techniques on those elements instead of on all the instances that are presented to the user. The reported fails and warnings are then computed in a simple sum metric. The paper also describes the validation experiment of both metric and framework, providing very important results. These may well contribute to a different perspective from managers and development team leaders about the effort to revamp the accessibility of a site. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.