Comparing automatic accessibility testing tools
Lempola, Aki (2023)
2023
Ohjelmistokehityksen maisteriohjelma - Master’s Programme in Software Development
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2023-05-28
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202305095495
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202305095495
Tiivistelmä
Recently, the Web has become increasingly important as information and many essential ser-vices move to the Web. Accessibility aims to make services to users with disabilities. Web accessibility’s goal is to make the Web accessible, which means disabled people can use the Web. It has been estimated that 15% of the world's population lives with some form of disabil-ity, and the aging population makes web accessibility increasingly important. Similarly, recent legislation Increasingly requires the Web to be accessible to all.
Web accessibility evaluation can be done to ensure that the website conforms to the needs of disabled people or legal requirements. There exist different accessibility evaluation meth-ods, each with its benefits and drawbacks, and the methods often complement each other. Automatic testing tools are an important part of accessibility testing. There are many different automatic accessibility evaluation tools to choose from. And previous studies show that tools detect a different number of issues.
In this thesis, we compared three automatic accessibility testing tools in terms of how many success criteria they cover, testing speed, and the number of detected issues. Tools were used to test Finnish e-commerce sites and a test site containing a set of accessibility issues.
We found that the WAVE was the fastest tool to scan pages. IBM Accessibility Checker covered the greatest number of WCAG success criteria. The number of detected issues de-pends on the selected page and the type of accessibility issues present on the page. In five out of six tested pages, IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker found the greatest number of issues, and in one out of six pages WAVE found the greatest number of issues.
Web accessibility evaluation can be done to ensure that the website conforms to the needs of disabled people or legal requirements. There exist different accessibility evaluation meth-ods, each with its benefits and drawbacks, and the methods often complement each other. Automatic testing tools are an important part of accessibility testing. There are many different automatic accessibility evaluation tools to choose from. And previous studies show that tools detect a different number of issues.
In this thesis, we compared three automatic accessibility testing tools in terms of how many success criteria they cover, testing speed, and the number of detected issues. Tools were used to test Finnish e-commerce sites and a test site containing a set of accessibility issues.
We found that the WAVE was the fastest tool to scan pages. IBM Accessibility Checker covered the greatest number of WCAG success criteria. The number of detected issues de-pends on the selected page and the type of accessibility issues present on the page. In five out of six tested pages, IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker found the greatest number of issues, and in one out of six pages WAVE found the greatest number of issues.