Hello Dr. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay, I can provide some partial thoughts, and there are other members who have strong, knowledgeable perspectives that may want to chime in also.
Re: 2. - For ARIA, there's consensus that a high number of ARIA found on a page is not necessarily an indicator of accessibility and, to the contrary, a high score is a red flag that may indicate abuse of ARIA tags. They are easily mishandled. There are others in this community, namely Katherine Deibel, who are prolific on this topic that I hope can chime in or link to part presentations/resources. - For your study, as it relates to ARIA specifically, I recommend AXE browser extension (https://www.deque.com/axe/). I don't think an API is available for it, but it is good for validation, and I believe is suited to a quantitative study. There is a learning curve on understanding it. Deque Systems, according to their training, split off from the team behind WAVE, and built out the tool's capacity for testing ARIA tags. Re: 3 - In terms of a globally recognized quantitative indicator, I'm not aware of one. A combination of different tools is recommended, and they do have their weak spots. I prefer mixed methods to test for web accessibility. - For a large number of websites at a time, I understand the need for a framework. For auditing our e-resources for accessibility, Towson University adapted a framework from Princeton University, who in turn adapted it from another library. My colleagues and I recently presented on how to do this approach (Description: https://wp.towson.edu/tcal/one-step-at-a-time-assessing-e-resources-for-accessibility-compliance/ Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQZjTeW-69E&feature=youtu.be - 40 mins) - I hope that's helpful and if so, I'd be interested to hear about it. All the best, Julia Caffrey-Hill Web Services Librarian Towson University -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2020 7:55 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [CODE4LIB] Web accessibility and ARIA [EXTERNAL EMAIL - USE CAUTION] Hello all We are trying to measure web accessibility of some Indian institutes/universities/libraries in the form of a score and then rank those institutes/universities/libraries against the score (still at the idea plane). The plan is to fetch data through API in a data wrangling software for further analysis. My questions are as follows: 1) Are there other services (apart from WAVE) that provide results in JSON format through API? 2) What is the significance of *ARIA* in determining such a score for web accessibility? Does a higher number of ARIA indicate a better accessibility? Or is converse true? 3) Is there any globally agreed-upon indicator for web accessibility? Best ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kalyani, Kalyani - 741 235 (WB), India -----------------------------------------------------------------------
