AccessMonitor

AccessMonitor produces a report of accessibility practices found on a page, scoring them in a school-type rating, from 1 to 10 (good practice). From 1 to 10, how much are your accessibility practices worth? The immediate reading of the score, instantly leaving an order of value in the user's mind associated with a language that is beyond the technicality of those who have read a lot about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), makes the accessibility reports produced by AccessMonitor appealing to beginners in the subject but also to experts who use it to identify the line of code where the problem is located.

The Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Community Group is an open forum set up to document and harmonise the interpretation of W3C accessibility standards, such as WCAG and the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA), for testing purposes.

One of the main outputs of the H2020 WAI-Tools project was the writing, reviewing, implementing, and validating of ACT Rules”. But this work will only be useful if the validation tools and methodologies implement these rules consistently and, additionally, the work of writing and revising new rules continues.

In Portugal, QualWeb (an automated web accessibility evaluation service developed by Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon) integrated the AccessMonitor accessibility validator, a case study of Research and Development dating back to 2005 and whose development is currently maintained by the Administrative Modernization Agency (AMA), the national authority responsible for monitoring web accessibility issues.

AccessMonitor is also the basis for the creation of the Portuguese Web Accessibility Observatory (PWA-O). The latter was a demonstrator of the WAI-Tools project and is, today, the platform that shows us the status and evolution of the accessibility of Web contents of the Portuguese Public Administration. The Observatory is an awareness-raising tool, mainly for all entities that are part of the target group of the legislation on accessibility. By providing a joint perspective of the situation of the various entities, it provokes in those who are part of it, the feeling of improvement and in all those who are not part the curiosity to elaborate their own diagnosis. The data provided by the Observatory does not reveal details of the pages that compose the sample, just indicate errors or good practices found in the sample as a whole.

The 3 above-mentioned applications – PWA-O, AccessMonitor and QualWeb – form part of an ecosystem of Free Open-Source Software as a Service to Monitor and Evaluate the Web Accessibility.

To obtain detailed information on the websites, their owners will have to identify themselves and request this information from the national entity responsible for monitoring. By doing this, they are provided with the MyMonitor application, about to be launched, which allows the entity to observe all the details of the sample and even to start its own monitoring process.