Web site accessibility: identifying and fixing accessibility problems in client page code

Web accessibility is an important issue to address along Web application development. Accessibility aims to allow the access to the content of the Web application even in presence of reduced hardware/software configurations on the client side of the application (such as browser configurations disabling graphical visualization, or scripting execution), or of users with physical disabilities (such as blind people). Some guidelines and rules have been defined by several organizations to grant and assess Web accessibility. This paper presents an approach to verify if the code of client pages of an existing application does not meet some accessibility rules or guidelines, making the application not accessible to some groups of users. A model representing the several features involved in the identification of accessibility problems that client page code may contain has been defined. This model is mainly based on the recent Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Working Draft. A tool supporting the accessibility analysis and the fixing of the identified problems has been developed. Results from a case study carried out by using the proposed approach are presented and discussed.