As the Web is evolving, so are our expectations. The accessibility of Web interfaces has been a focal point of standardization efforts by professional and governmental forums. Most of the existing national guidelines are based on the first version of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web accessibility initiative document called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published in 1999. This document has some loose ends, left to interpretation by Web developers, and has also been criticized for lack of attention to specific user demographics such as the elderly and mobile device users.

Multiple tools have been developed in an attempt to control the time, effort, and resources needed to check for compliance to these guidelines in the life cycle of a Web application. With the publication of the WCAG 2.0 in 2008, these tools face the challenge of aligning with the new, clearer, better-specified guidelines in the document. Aizpurua et al. look into the challenges that the accessibility evaluation tools may face in this transition.

The tool EvalAccess--developed by the authors’ research team--is used to investigate to what degree WCAG 1.0 can be used for the new guidelines. The tool features an evaluation engine separate from the logic of the guidelines. It is depicted as a flexible tool that might not solve all the transitional problems, but makes the automated and semi-automated checking of the guidelines fairly efficient. The study shows that 55 percent of the automatic and 16 percent of the semi-automatic checks of WCAG 2.0 can be performed using this framework, initially developed for WCAG 1.0.