Advancements in web accessibility evaluation methods: how far are we?

Achieving web accessibility has become a global aim nowadays, especially with the significant inclusion of the Internet in our daily lives. There exist different accessibility evaluation methods that support web developers and designers during websites' development life cycle, and each has different benefits and drawbacks. However, many studies show that there is a continued lack of equality between disabled and non-disabled people in benefitting from the web, especially with the prolonged growth of web development standards and techniques, which raises a demand for continuous improvement in web accessibility evaluation methods in order to gain reliable results. Given this demand, our paper investigates the advancements in web accessibility evaluation methods for the past five years (2011-2015). The results reveal a lack of significant evolution of these evaluation methods. Based on our findings, more efforts are required for enhancing accessibility evaluation techniques in order to achieve better web accessibility.