Dear Dr. Mukhopadhyay: To try to answer your questions:
1] There is pa11y (pa11y.org); pa11y can be run in a variety of ways and I believe it can be run through an automated, API-like fashion through the command line where you can receive results as JSON. It also has different accessibility standards (WCAG 2.0 or 2.1) and different test runners (https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y#runners). The different test runners provide slightly different results. In my experience, both test runners will find some false positives (something that reported as wrong but is not) and most importantly, automated tools like pa11y and WAVE will not many accessibility issues and I would recommend not solely relying on them to assess or score a website's accessibility. They are a good supplement to manual testing which can find issues (e.g. keyboard accessibility 2.1 in WCAG) that automated tools like pa11y cannot 2] ARIA is just one method of making content accessible on the web. If used in the proper contexts, ARIA can be beneficial for increasing web accessibility, but I recommend minimizing its use. Many times, ARIA is used even though it is not necessary or even more often, it is used incorrectly, making content less accessible and harder to maintain and troubleshoot. Using the proper HTML elements/markup is more effective for web accessibility since proper HTML is by far, better supported by across different technologies and the best first step to ensure the content is accessibility. ARIA support within different assistive technologies (e.g. screen readers) varies. There is no correlation with the amount of ARIA used on a website to indicate a website's accessibility or lack thereof; 3] There is not a truly global agreed-upon standard or benchmark for web accessibility. The WCAG 2.1 is the most popular web accessibility standard in Americentric environments that I'm familiar with; it has three levels of compliance (A, AA, and AAA) and is cumulative (Level AA includes all A criteria; Triple AAA includes A, AA, and AA criteria. Our library's website aims to comply with level AA. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ Web accessibility is subjective. Although this paper is 2 years old and is written about WCAG 2.0, it is still very applicable today with WCAG 2.1; and somewhat in depth; I've found it to be one of the most insightful pieces of defining and implementing web accessibility. The paper is found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L9OYaP052j2uxVu-8IXGxzwQsHdx8G6YKrxpHo7BZ_w/edit# More context at http://www.webaxe.org/accessibility-interpretation-problem Lastly, https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/ is a good place to get started if you're looking for more introductory material. For an auditing template, you can check the https://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/report-tool/#!/#%2F and this one by Yale https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/articles/wcag2-checklist Regards, Will Will Skora (he/him) Web Administrator Cleveland Public Library 325 Superior Ave. E. Cleveland, OH 44114 216-623-2914 (O) [email protected] https://cpl.org/<http://www.cpl.org/> ________________________________ From: Code for Libraries <[email protected]> on behalf of CODE4LIB automatic digest system <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2020 11:00 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: CODE4LIB Digest - 21 Oct 2020 to 22 Oct 2020 (#2020-223) There are 7 messages totaling 628 lines in this issue. Topics of the day: 1. Introduction to Text Encoding (online course) 2. “Living Our Values and Principles” report by Next Generation Library Publishing 3. Web accessibility and ARIA 4. Automatically generating keywords from abstracts (3) 5. teleprompter software ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2020 20:25:20 +0530 From: Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay <[email protected]> Subject: Web accessibility and ARIA 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTICE: This e-mail message and all attachments transmitted with it are intended solely for the use of the addressees and may contain legally privileged, protected or confidential information. If you have received this message in error, and/or you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by e-mail reply and please delete this message from your computer and destroy any copies. Any unauthorized use, reproduction, forwarding, distribution, or other dissemination of this transmission is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful.
