Checking and Correcting the Source Code of Web Pages for Accessibility

This paper aims to propose and experiment a framework for checking and correcting websites for accessibility. Existing tools usually check the WCAG-conformance of HTML client pages (that contain the static elements to be displayed through a browser to end users at a moment). Consequently, web developers have to do tedious works of identifying which parts of server source pages (i.e. server-side source codes that generate HTML client pages) cause non-conformant client elements. Unlike these tools, our framework allows directly reporting and suggesting solutions for the elements in the server source pages. The proposed method composes of four steps. First, the HTML client page and the server source page are parsed. Second, the elements of HTML client page that are non-conformant with the WCAG success criteria are identified and reported. Third, a mapping between the HTML client page and the server source page is established. Fourth, fixes to the server source page are suggested; this implies automatic modification of the code of server source page. Therefore, this framework can be applied to create new accessible websites, or to improve the accessibility of existing websites.