Auto-WCAG introduction

Hello dear WCAG automators,

First of all, welcome! Thank you for joining the automated WCAG monitoring community group. Just a friendly warning: This is a long e-mail, but don't worry, I won't make a habit out of that.

As I'm sure you've read in the group's description, Auto-WCAG was created to design tests that can be automated for large scale accessibility monitoring. There is a growing need for accurate and reliable information about web accessibility. This information is difficult to come by without the use of manual accessibility evaluations, which are time consuming and expensive. This group has been set up in an attempt to reduce this problem, by describing reliable test for WCAG that can be automated, or that can be performed by people without web accessibility expertise. 

This is quite different from what most existing automated WCAG checkers have done so far. Most of these tools are specifically designed to assist web developers. Because of this, the emphasis in such checkers is on finding as many potential issues as possible. These tools often start with the assumption that the website was build by people with a thorough understanding of web standards (why else would they be using a tool to double check for potential accessibility problems). Unfortunately, when you compare the results of such tools, there is often very little (if any) correlation between their findings. That does not mean that they don't provide useful results,  meaningful information to developers. However relying on this kind of information to drive policy is more then a little problematic.

The Auto-WCAG group was created out of a EU project called the European Internet Inclusion Initiative (EIII). An important objective behind this project is to provide the EU with ongoing, reliable information about the accessibility of European government websites. The EIII intends to implement the tests described by this group in the monitoring tool they are developing. This will generate information about the reliability of the test descriptions, so they can be fine tuned and improved upon over time.

As this is a new group, we have yet to figure out all the details of how the collaboration will work. To get us started, I intend to have weekly Skype calls. The first of which will be next week, on Wednesday the 21st of May, at 14:00 CET. If you want to join the call, please go to our IRC channel (irc://irc.w3.org:6665/#auto-wcag). Everyone on IRC around the time of the meeting will be added to the Skype call.

Kind regards,


Wilco Fiers
Accessibility Foundation
The Netherlands

Received on Thursday, 15 May 2014 12:33:46 UTC