OPTIMAL-EM: Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation
Published in Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference, 2023
Recommended citation: Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper. 2023. OPTIMAL-EM: Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation. Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference https://doi.org/10.1145/3587281.3587962
This paper presents a prototypical accessibility tool and associated framework. Our tool supports a framework of six metrics: coverage, representativeness, complexity, popularity, freshness and accessibility, designed to optimise the web accessibility evaluation process through representative pages. We divided our tool into three stages: an initial step focused on crawling and downloading pages to run preliminary clustering. The second step calculates the complexity of the population, and the third stage calculates the sample size and produces a final report. Our approach significantly reduces the number of pages an auditor must review, as they will inspect a page representative of the others in their cluster. Collectively, these clusters are statistically representative of the pages in the target population.