Managing and Monitoring Web Site Accessibility

Abstract

Evaluating Web sites for accessibility is a quality assurance process that becomes increasingly difficult to manage as the size and complexity of a Web site increases. There is a growing need to effectively manage and monitor the accessibility of Web sites throughout the development process. The Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) is a semantic Web vocabulary, and is a W3C royalty-free format for expressing test results. While EARL can be used to support generic Web quality assurance processes, it has been specifically developed to assist Web accessibility evaluation reviews. EARL facilitates the exchange of test results between development and quality assurance tools. While a lot of development has already gone into EARL and tools that support the EARL format, a lot more work and research remains to be addressed.