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• Ability Heuristics for Conducting Accessibility Inspections

  Claire L. Mitchell, Junhan Kong, Jesse J. Martinez, Shaun K. Kane, Amy J. Ko, Alexis Hiniker, Jacob O. Wobbrock · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Mitchell and colleagues develop and evaluate a set of nine 'ability heuristics' intended to let designers and developers — not just accessibility specialists — inspect interactive technology for accessibility problems. The authors argue that existing approaches have significant…

  heuristic evaluation · ability-based design · accessibility inspection · accessibility evaluation · design methods

• OPTIMAL-EM: Complexity-Driven Clustering for Optimised Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper · 2026 · ACM Transactions on the Web, Vol. 20, No. 2

  Hambley, Yesilada, Vigo, and Harper (University of Manchester and METU-NCC) extend their OPTIMAL-EM methodology for large-scale web accessibility conformance evaluation. The problem they address is fundamental to professional auditing: the W3C's Website Accessibility Conformance…

  web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · WCAG-EM · OPTIMAL-EM · representative sampling

• Judge: Effective State Abstraction for Guiding Automated Web GUI Testing

  Chenxu Liu, Junheng Wang, Wei Yang, Ying Zhang, Tao Xie · 2026 · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

  This paper presents Judge, a novel approach to state abstraction for automated web GUI testing (AWGT). AWGTs explore web applications by performing GUI actions and building a state model to guide further exploration, maximising code coverage within a fixed time budget. Effective…

  automated testing · web accessibility · GUI testing · DOM · machine learning

• Benchmarking PDF Accessibility Evaluation: A Dataset and Framework for Assessing Automated and LLM-Based Approaches for Accessibility Testing

  Anukriti Kumar, Tanushree Padath, Lucy Lu Wang · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper addresses a critical gap in PDF accessibility evaluation by introducing the first expert-validated benchmark dataset and standardized evaluation framework for assessing how well different tools and approaches can evaluate PDF accessibility. Despite PDFs being the…

  PDF accessibility · automated testing · large language models · WCAG · PDF/UA

• Accessible Web Design for Older Adults: Challenges and Solutions

  Washington Chiriboga-Casanova, Nuria Medina-Medina, Patricia Paderewski-Rodríguez · 2025 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This systematic literature review analyzes 4,052 articles published between 2014 and 2023 to comprehensively map the challenges older adults face online and the solutions proposed to address them. Using the PRISMA methodology and PICO framework, the authors selected 35 studies…

  systematic review · older adults · web accessibility · aging · design guidelines

• A11yPDF: Bridging the Gap to Inclusive PDFs

  Wajdi Aljedaani, Sandeep Kumar Rudhravaram, Akhila Chintham, Abdulrahman Habib, Marcelo M. Eler · 2024 · Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This technical note introduces A11yPDF, a free web-based tool for evaluating the accessibility of PDF documents against WCAG 2.2 guidelines. The tool addresses key limitations of existing PDF accessibility checkers such as PDFA Inspector, PAVE, ABBYY FineReader, Common Look, and…

  PDF accessibility · automated testing · accessibility evaluation · document accessibility · WCAG

• QualState: Finding Website States for Accessibility Evaluation

  Filipe Rosa Martins, Letícia Seixas Pereira, Carlos Duarte · 2024 · Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper introduces QualState, a web crawling tool designed to solve a fundamental limitation of automated accessibility evaluation: the inability to test dynamic content in Single Page Applications (SPAs). SPAs like Facebook, Google Maps, and Gmail change their content in…

  automated testing · web accessibility · single page applications · web crawling · accessibility evaluation

• Accessibility Metatesting: Comparing Nine Testing Tools

  Jonathan Robert Pool · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This short paper presents a systematic empirical comparison of nine automated web accessibility testing tools that are amenable to integration into multi-tool testing regimes (free or nearly free, controllable via APIs or NPM packages, and comprehensive in scope). The nine tools…

  automated accessibility testing · web accessibility · accessibility testing · accessibility evaluation · WCAG compliance

• OPTIMAL-EM: Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This extended abstract presents OPTIMAL-EM, a prototypical tool and framework designed to optimise the web accessibility evaluation process by systematically selecting representative pages from a website for auditing. Currently, accessibility evaluations supported by…

  automated accessibility testing · web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · web crawling · machine learning

• Towards Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This doctoral consortium extended abstract presents a PhD project proposing a novel framework and prototypical tool for optimising web accessibility evaluation through statistically representative page sampling. The work is the single-author companion to the multi-author…

  automated accessibility testing · web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · web crawling · machine learning

• Optimising the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper critically examines the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM), the W3C's standard five-step process for evaluating website conformance to WCAG. The authors identify several methodological weaknesses in WCAG-EM and propose a parallel…

  accessibility evaluation · WCAG-EM · sampling methodology · automated testing · web crawling

• The Transparency of Automatic Accessibility Evaluation Tools

  Parvaneh Parvin, Vanessa Palumbo, Marco Manca, Fabio Paternò · 2021 · Proceedings of the 18th International Web for All Conference (W4A '21)

  This paper examines a critical but often overlooked problem in automated accessibility testing: the lack of transparency in how evaluation tools operate and present their results. The authors observe that different accessibility evaluation tools frequently produce variable…

  automated testing · accessibility evaluation · WCAG · transparency · web accessibility

• Evaluation of Assistive Technologies from the perspective of Usability, User Experience and Accessibility: a Systematic Mapping Study

  Tatiany Xavier de Godoi, Guilherme Corredato Guerino, Natasha Malveira C. Valentim · 2021 · Proceedings of the XX Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC)

  This systematic mapping study (SMS) investigates how assistive technologies (ATs) are evaluated from the perspectives of usability, user experience (UX), and accessibility — three interrelated but distinct software quality factors. The authors searched Scopus, ACM Digital…

  assistive technology · usability · user experience · accessibility evaluation · systematic review

• Web Accessibility Testing for Singapore Government e-Services

  Zui Young Lim, Jia Min Chua, Kaiting Yang, Wei Shin Tan, Yinn Chai · 2020 · Proceedings of the 17th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from Singapore's Government Technology Agency presents a customized automated accessibility testing tool designed specifically for government e-service developers. The authors identified two core problems: Singapore's low accessibility maturity despite being a…

  automated testing · web accessibility · government services · accessibility evaluation · CI/CD

• A declarative model for accessibility requirements

  Jens Pelzetter · 2020 · Proceedings of the 17th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses a fundamental problem in automated accessibility testing: different tools produce inconsistent results because they each implement their own interpretation of WCAG guidelines in code, and the guidelines themselves contain ambiguity. The author proposes a…

  automated testing · WCAG compliance · ACT Rules · ontology · accessibility evaluation

• An Easy to Use Data Logger for Local User Studies

  Vagner Figueredo de Santana, Felipe Eduardo Ferreira Silva · 2019 · Proceedings of the 16th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This demonstration paper introduces User Test Logger, an open-source Firefox browser add-on designed to capture detailed user interaction data during local usability and accessibility studies. The authors identify a gap in available tooling: existing interaction logging tools…

  usability testing · accessibility evaluation · interaction logging · data collection · open source tools

• Automatic Identification of Widgets and their Subcomponents Based on a Classification Pipeline for DOM Mutation Records

  Eduardo Henrique Rizo, Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Humberto Lidio Antonelli, Willian Massami Watanabe · 2019 · Proceedings of the 16th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents a machine learning pipeline for automatically classifying web widgets (specifically dropdown menus) and their subcomponents by analyzing DOM mutation records — the dynamic changes that occur in a web page's HTML structure when users interact with it or visual…

  WAI-ARIA · machine learning · web accessibility · automated testing · widgets

• Combining Semantic Tools for Automatic Evaluation of Alternative Texts

  Carlos Duarte, Carlos M. Duarte, Luís Carriço · 2019 · Proceedings of the 16th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents SCREW v2, an updated algorithm for automatically assessing the quality of alternative texts for images on web pages from an accessibility perspective. The work is motivated by the EU Directive 2016/2102, which requires monitoring the accessibility of public…

  alternative text · automated accessibility testing · image accessibility · semantic analysis · computer vision

• A Proposal to Adapt the Semiotic Inspection Method to Analyze Screen Reader Mediated Interaction

  Lucas Pedroso Carvalho, Raquel Oliveira Prates, André Pimenta Freire · 2019 · Proceedings of the 18th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC 2019)

  This paper proposes SIM-SR (Semiotic Inspection Method for Screen Reader mediated interaction), an adaptation of the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) from Semiotic Engineering theory to evaluate how screen readers mediate the communication between designers and visually impaired…

  semiotic engineering · screen readers · communicability · blind users · low vision

• The Current Status of Accessibility in Mobile Apps

  Shunguo Yan, P. G. Ramachandran · 2019 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This large-scale empirical study evaluated the accessibility of 479 Android apps from Google Play across 23 business categories using IBM Mobile Accessibility Checker (MAC), an automated tool that maps accessibility rules to GUI widget categories. The study examined over 610,000…

  mobile accessibility · Android · automated testing · accessibility evaluation · GUI accessibility

• On Accessibility Policies for Higher Education Institutions

  Giorgio Brajnik, Sanela Graca · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This short paper analyses the web accessibility policies of twenty universities across Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australia to identify what constitutes an effective accessibility policy and provide guidance for institutions creating or revising their own. The authors argue…

  web accessibility · higher education · accessibility policy · WCAG · organizational accessibility

• Web Accessibility Evaluation in a Crowdsourcing-Based System with Expertise-Based Decision Strategy

  Shuyi Song, Jiajun Bu, Ye Wang, Zhi Yu, Andreas Artmeier, Lianjun Dai, Can Wang · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This short paper presents a crowdsourcing-based web accessibility evaluation system that addresses the scalability bottleneck in manual accessibility evaluation: expert evaluators are scarce (training takes years) and expensive, yet many WCAG checkpoints cannot be evaluated…

  web accessibility · crowdsourcing · accessibility evaluation · WCAG · automated testing

• Automatic Role Detection of Visual Elements of Web Pages for Automatic Accessibility Evaluation

  Carlos Duarte, Ana Salvado, M. Elgin Akpinar, Yeliz Yeşilada, Luís Carriço · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This short paper presents an approach to automatically detect the visual roles of web page elements — specifically menus and lists — to enable automated accessibility evaluation tools to assess WCAG techniques that require understanding an element’s semantic role, not just its…

  automated testing · web accessibility · WCAG · web page segmentation · navigation

• Using Ontologies as a Foundation for Web Accessibility Tools

  Jens Pelzetter · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This extended abstract proposes using formal ontologies — machine-readable knowledge representations using languages like OWL (Web Ontology Language) — as the foundation for web accessibility tools, addressing two major problems: supporting developers in creating accessible…

  web accessibility · ontologies · WCAG · knowledge representation · automated testing

• Semantic Content Analysis Supporting Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Carlos Duarte, Inês Matos, Luís Carriço · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses a fundamental limitation of automated web accessibility evaluation tools: their inability to assess whether text alternatives actually describe the content they refer to. While tools can detect the presence of an alt attribute on an image, they cannot judge…

  automated testing · alternative text · semantic analysis · machine learning · image recognition