Scoring the Impact of Web Accessibility Issues

Date & Time

Tuesday, March 19, 2024 - 1:20 PM PDT  

Location

Orange County 1-2  

Description

Determining how the accessibility (or lack thereof) of a web site impacts end users with disabilities is complex and difficult. Can automated tools measure human impact? Or is in-depth and complex manual testing always needed? How does one compare the accessibility of web sites? This session will present a methodology that addresses many of these questions. Aligning automated web page test results to the large dataset from the WebAIM Million (an annual analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages) provides an indication of how that page’s automated test results align with web pages generally. This approach could be used with other testing tools that have an adequately-sized sample to which site results can be compared. Despite the ability of automated tools to detect some accessibility issues, such tools are inherently limited and don’t always give a good indication of how detected issues may impact users with disabilities. To partially address these issues while minimizing the complexity and time requirements of manual testing, this methodology prescribes high-level manual accessibility tests and scoring on 10 aspects of accessibility across a sample of 4 pages. Testing takes a few minutes per page and can be done with minimal expertise. Using both automated and high-level manual testing scores provide a good measure of end user impact, and allows reasonable comparisons of web pages and sites. We will share how this methodology was created and various implementations.  

Audience

• Information & Communications Technology
• Research & Development

Audience Level

Intermediate  

Session Summary (Abstract)

This session will present an accessibility impact scoring methodology developed by WebAIM and Accenture. The methodology uses automated test data and high-level manual testing data to provide a measure of the impacts of website accessibility issues.  

Primary Topic

Web  

Secondary Topics

• Digital Accessibility
• Evaluation & Remediation
• Information & Communications Technology (ICT)

 

Session Type

General Track  

Presenter

• Jared Smith
  WebAIM

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