Large-Scale Web Accessibility Evaluation

The systematic automated or semi-automated assessment of web accessibility across hundreds or thousands of websites to understand broad trends, compliance rates, and the overall state of accessibility on the web. These evaluations typically use automated testing tools like axe-core or WAVE to scan pages against WCAG criteria, producing aggregate data about common violations, severity levels, and compliance patterns. While valuable for identifying systemic issues and tracking progress over time, large-scale evaluations face challenges including inconsistent page sampling methodologies, high resource costs, and the inherent limitation that automated tools can only detect a subset of accessibility barriers.