A novel approach is presented for automatically evaluating of the usability and accessibility (U&A) of web sites by performing a static analysis of their HTML code against U&A guidelines. The approach relies on separating guidelines evaluation logic from the evaluation engine. Due to this separation, the whole evaluation process can be divided into two main phases: specifying formal guidelines and web page evaluation. In the first phase, the formal structure of a guideline is expressed in terms of Guideline Definition Language (GDL). In the second phase, the web page is parsed to identify its contents and structure and link them to relevant guidelines to be evaluated on the page parsed. This approach enables the simultaneous evaluation of multiple guidelines selected on demand from different sources. It also optimises evaluation by automatically identifying common sub-structures among structured guidelines. It also supports the expression, by evaluators with different usability practises, of alternative evaluation strategies.
Also the approach reported in REF is based on the separation between the guideline specification and the evaluation engine.
Automated Evaluation of Web Usability and Accessibility by Guideline Review
ICWE
Computer Science