Metrics for accessibility on the Vamolà project

Abstract

How far are the Web sites from accessibility? Such a question implies a measure and, before, metrics or a set of metrics to quantitatively describe distances or closeness to one or more aspects of inclusion. Quantitative evaluations can effectively guide the improvement of sites quality and of skills which are necessary along the content authoring process. This paper details the hypothesized metrics and measures on the Vamolà project, which has been issued to integrate a monitor and a validator of the Web accessibility, according to the Italian Law. On Vamolà, the validation tool output can be effectively used in defining metrics inside the monitor application.

Automatic web accessibility metrics: Where we are and where we can go

“…While some of these policies are based on their own set of guidelines such as JIS (Japanese Industry Standards) or Stanca Act (Italian Accessibility Legislation), 2 many others are based on WAI-WCAG guidelines. Because governments have to enforce the law and ensure that web pages meet their regulations, national and international accessibility observatories are being developed, like the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO 3 ) or the Vamola project in Italy (Mirri et al, 2009). These projects aim at keeping track of the accessibility level of pages and to do so they need accurate measurement methods and tools.…”

Accessibility of the Italian institutional web pages: a survey on the compliance of the Italian public administration web pages to the Stanca Act and its 22 technical requirements for web accessibility

“…However, for a preliminary analysis and when a large number of pages must be analyzed, automatic analysis is feasible [8]. In [9][10][11], a metrics according to the Italian law is given thanks to the Vamolà project, along with an evaluation tool. The reader is referred to all the papers presented in the Online Symposium Website Accessibility Metrics, which are available freely in [12].…”

Avoiding to dispense with accuracy

“…On the one hand, the law imposes the markup being HTML 4.01 strict, XHTML 1.0 strict or superior, and thus it provides distinct dominions which are comparable in a difficult way. On the other hand, as the authors of this paper have experienced on the VaMoLà monitor [7], just about 43% of Italian Public institutions homepages are declared DTD strict, while the others refer to a transitional or frameset Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.…”

“…Such a monitor utilizes messages and errors coming from the validator, in order to compute some sort of measures, on the strength of metrics. The goal of the whole project is aiding public institutions to effectively survey their Web contents and services and to point out a global, synthetic portrait of accessibility and its dynamics in time [7]. Since the VaMoLà monitor is expected to gather data on 8-10000 Web sites and other 20 requirements have to be verified, effectiveness in evaluating DTD conformance is necessary.…”