An investigation of tool support for accessibility assessment throughout the development process of Web sites

This paper investigates the support given by currently available tools for dealing with accessibility at different phases of the development process. At first, we provide a detailed classification of accessibility guidelines according to several levels of automation. Then we analyze which automated inspection techniques are supported by currently available tools for building Web sites. By means of a case study we try to assess the possibility of fixing accessibility problems at early phases of the development process. Our results provide insights for improving current available tools for Web design in order to take accessibility into account at all phases of development process of Web sites.

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