Description of work: W3C/WAI resource, including examples and best practices, for the development of automated and semi-automated web accessibility evaluation tools that support the evaluation methodology for WCAG 2.0 developed through deliverable D4.1.
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This document is targeted to developers of different types of accessibility testing tools. The document is a complement to the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology 1.0 and addresses from the perspective of the testing tool how to implement automatic and semiautomatic evaluation tests and how to present the results. The document covers different aspects of the evaluation process, including the evaluation procedure, the different types of tests, workflows and actors, selection of technologies, etc. A part of the document is dedicated to support developers of testing tools to understand the needs of their target audiences.
This document is targeted to developers of accessibility testing tools:
Secondary audience: users of accessibility testing tools.
Peter is a chief developer of a commercial accessibility testing tool. He is responsible for the update of the tool to the new version of the WCAG 2.0 in his company. He must also design a roadmap that includes the training of his development team and several release and testing cycles for the software.
He has reviewed the recommendation but he feels overwhelmed by the amount of documentation and especially the new structure of the techniques. He is getting confused with the different types of techniques and how they can be tested and combined to arrive to a conformance claim, which is one of the key objectives of his customers.
He reviews this document and sets priorities for the implementations of the techniques, which gives priority to common failures. In that way, his team is first becoming aware of the critical issues that lead to accessibility problems. Then, he addresses sufficient techniques and other implementation issues that need to be tested in web applications.
Lani is a Ph.D. student in the University of Example State. Her professor wants her to develop an environment to simulate the use of mobile phones under poor illumination conditions. During her research, she finds several tools that calculate colour contrast ratios for web accessibility on the basis of formulae given in WCAG 2.0.
However, she finds those tools inadequate for mobile phones because they are used on the go with different lighting conditions. Thus, she decides to create her own simulation environment. For that purpose, she starts by reading WCAG 2.0, to understand how the accessibility tests work.
She finds the document a bit overwhelming for her purpose and decides to read this document to understand the different types of techniques and tests proposed and how she could modify the contrast algorithms to include different light conditions.
What follows is a preliminary table of contents for the document: