Web Accessibility Evaluation And Tool Development

Web nowadays meets sorts of challenges, including accessibility. Accessibility barriers occur when the design of the technology fails to allow for the variations in users' abilities, interaction circumstance and devices. Accessible barriers on the web would refuse users and result in "digital divide", so we should enhance web accessibility. There are many laws to guarantee accessible web in other countries and guidelines established by IT companies or IT organization. China is on the early phase of this field .In order to impel local web accessibility we have carried out a sequence of research on web accessibility.During the research, we have perused amounts of literature and grasped the conception of accessibility. We became familiar with web content accessibility guidelines, technology methods and application of evaluation tools. We conducted some web accessibility tests, from simple tests to systemic evaluations. Status of local web accessibility can be measured from the respects of laws, style of web and design level. We designed and developed an assistant tool for web accessibility evaluation-WAET (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) .WAET can test basic accessibility defects and make up image defects. The result shows that WAET is a practical tool.In this paper, the conception of accessibility, the conception about web accessibility, approaches to improve accessible web design are provided. Based on this study, the researches on web accessibility are carried out on two aspects. (1) Analysis, design and application of WAET, (2) Evaluation on web accessibility and methods to improve web accessibility .The conclusion of the research and suggestions of improving web accessibility are listed out in the last part of this paper.