Comparing Six Free Accessibility Evaluation Tools

Abstract

The web is continuously growing in content and functionality having an important impact on society. An objective of the Digital Agenda for Europe is to make the web technologies available for all. Recently, a European directive has been issued that requires the accessibility of public websites by September 2020. Given the low accessibility of public websites, systematic evaluation and monitoring strategies are needed. Covering the huge number of public websites with reasonable effort is only possible in a tool-based approach which makes the selection of a suitable tool a critical issue. The goal of this paper is to compare six accessibility evaluation tools as regards the coverage of accessibility-related issues, identification, reporting, and document-ing of accessibility errors. The comparison is illustrated with six case studies of Romanian municipal websites. The results show large differences as regards the way of reporting and the number of errors which suggest that only one tool is not enough.

Keywords

• accessibility checking tools
• web accessibility
• wcag 2.0
• municipal websites