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• Access Over Deception: Fighting Deceptive Patterns through Accessibility

  Tobias Pellkvist, Katie Seaborn, Miu Kojima · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This exploratory paper asks whether the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and related European legislation — the European Accessibility Act (EAA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the upcoming Digital Fairness Act (DFA) — can be repurposed as a tool against…

  dark patterns · deceptive design · manipulative interfaces · heuristic evaluation · web accessibility

• When LLM-Generated Code Perpetuates User Interface Accessibility Barriers, How Can We Break the Cycle?

  Alexandra-Elena Gurita, Radu-Daniel Vatavu · 2025 · Proceedings of the 22nd International Web for All Conference (W4A 2025)

  This paper evaluates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate accessible web user interfaces, comparing ChatGPT (GPT-4-turbo) and Claude (3.5 Haiku) across two prompting strategies: accessibility-agnostic prompts ("Design the homepage of a banking app") and…

  large language models · WCAG compliance · automated accessibility · prompt engineering · code generation

• Accessibility in AI-Assisted Web Development

  Peya Mowar · 2024 · Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This extended abstract from a CMU doctoral student examines whether AI code generation tools—specifically GitHub Copilot—help or hinder web accessibility when used by developers. The research is motivated by a persistent problem: despite decades of accessibility research, 96.3%…

  AI code generation · web accessibility · developer practices · GitHub Copilot · automated testing

• Accessibility Metatesting: Comparing Nine Testing Tools

  Jonathan Robert Pool · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This short paper presents a systematic empirical comparison of nine automated web accessibility testing tools that are amenable to integration into multi-tool testing regimes (free or nearly free, controllable via APIs or NPM packages, and comprehensive in scope). The nine tools…

  automated accessibility testing · web accessibility · accessibility testing · accessibility evaluation · WCAG compliance

• OPTIMAL-EM: Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This extended abstract presents OPTIMAL-EM, a prototypical tool and framework designed to optimise the web accessibility evaluation process by systematically selecting representative pages from a website for auditing. Currently, accessibility evaluations supported by…

  automated accessibility testing · web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · web crawling · machine learning

• Towards Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This doctoral consortium extended abstract presents a PhD project proposing a novel framework and prototypical tool for optimising web accessibility evaluation through statistically representative page sampling. The work is the single-author companion to the multi-author…

  automated accessibility testing · web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · web crawling · machine learning

• The Transparency of Automatic Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools: Design Criteria, State of the Art, and User Perception

  Marco Manca, Vanessa Palumbo, Fabio Paternò, Carmen Santoro · 2023 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper investigates a critical but often overlooked problem in web accessibility practice: the lack of transparency in automated accessibility evaluation tools. While these tools are widely used to identify WCAG violations, users frequently struggle to understand why…

  automated testing · accessibility evaluation tools · WAVE · axe · Lighthouse

• The Use of ADKAR to Instil Change in the Accessibility of University Websites

  Silvia Rodríguez Vázquez · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This short paper applies the ADKAR change management model — Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement — to understand what interventions are needed to improve web accessibility at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) in Switzerland. The author argues that…

  organizational accessibility · change management · higher education · web accessibility · accessibility policy

• Accessibility Assessment of Violations on the Stack Overflow Platform

  Ingrid M. Miranda da Silva, Luciano Arruda Teran, Marcelle Pereira Mota · 2022 · Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC)

  This study investigates whether code snippets shared on Stack Overflow — one of the world's most popular developer Q&A platforms with over 120 million monthly visitors — follow web accessibility guidelines. The researchers built a tool called A11y RepoMining that extends the…

  web accessibility · repository mining · software development · code quality · WCAG compliance

• Intelligent Approaches in the Software Development Process: A Systematic Literature Mapping

  Luciano Arruda Teran, Alan Trindade de Almeida Silva, Giselle Lorrane Nobre Melo, Marcelle Pereira Mota · 2021 · Proceedings of the X Latin American Conference on Human Computer Interaction (CLIHC)

  This short paper from the Federal University of Pará in Brazil presents a systematic literature mapping (SLM) investigating how intelligent approaches — methods and tools using artificial intelligence concepts — are used to assess and validate accessibility requirements during…

  software engineering · accessibility testing · artificial intelligence · automated testing · systematic review

• Analysis of automated contrast checking tools

  Rafael Almeida, Carlos Duarte · 2020 · Proceedings of the 17th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper evaluates the reliability and limitations of three free automated color contrast checking tools: the Color Contrast Accessibility Validator (from the Bureau of Internet Accessibility), WAVE (from WebAIM), and the WCAG Color Contrast Checker (a browser extension for…

  color contrast · automated testing · accessibility tools · WCAG compliance · visual accessibility

• Tables on the web accessible? unfortunately not!

  Waqar Haider, Yeliz Yesilada · 2020 · Proceedings of the 17th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents the first large-scale systematic study specifically focused on the accessibility of HTML tables on the web. The authors crawled approximately 30,000 web pages sourced from Google, Google Tables, and the Alexa top 10,000 sites, ultimately analyzing over 16,000…

  web accessibility · HTML tables · automated testing · WCAG compliance · screen readers

• A declarative model for accessibility requirements

  Jens Pelzetter · 2020 · Proceedings of the 17th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses a fundamental problem in automated accessibility testing: different tools produce inconsistent results because they each implement their own interpretation of WCAG guidelines in code, and the guidelines themselves contain ambiguity. The author proposes a…

  automated testing · WCAG compliance · ACT Rules · ontology · accessibility evaluation

• Still Not Readable? An Interactive Tool for Recommending Color Pairs with Sufficient Contrast based on Existing Visual Designs

  Fredrik Hansen, Josef Jan Krivan, Frode Eika Sandnes · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This demonstration paper presents a web-based color contrast tool that goes beyond the pass/fail validation of existing contrast checkers by actively recommending how to fix insufficient color contrast while preserving the designer's original visual intent. The authors observe…

  color contrast · low vision · web design · design tools · readability

• Semantic Content Analysis Supporting Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Carlos Duarte, Inês Matos, Luís Carriço · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses a fundamental limitation of automated web accessibility evaluation tools: their inability to assess whether text alternatives actually describe the content they refer to. While tools can detect the presence of an alt attribute on an image, they cannot judge…

  automated testing · alternative text · semantic analysis · machine learning · image recognition

• Reliability Aware Web Accessibility Experience Metric

  Shuyi Song, Jiajun Bu, Chengchao Shen, Andreas Artmeier, Zhi Yu, Qin Zhou · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper introduces RA-WAEM (Reliability Aware Web Accessibility Experience Metric), a novel approach to measuring website accessibility that incorporates actual user experience from people with disabilities while accounting for the varying reliability of different evaluators.…

  accessibility metrics · user experience · accessibility evaluation · machine learning · web accessibility

• Active Learning for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Mengni Zhang, Can Wang, Zhi Yu, Chao Shen, Jiajun Bu · 2017 · Proceedings of the 14th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper introduces "active-prediction," a semi-supervised machine learning method that addresses a fundamental bottleneck in web accessibility evaluation: the prohibitive cost of evaluating all pages in a large website. Current practice relies on sampling methods (ad hoc,…

  accessibility evaluation · machine learning · active learning · web accessibility · automated testing

• Creating Accessible Local Government: The Process

  Vivienne Conway, Keith Fitzpatrick · 2017 · Proceedings of the 14th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This short paper documents the end-to-end process the City of Cockburn, a local government authority in Western Australia, followed to develop an accessible replacement website. The paper provides a practical 9-step roadmap: (1) embed accessibility in official planning…

  government accessibility · WCAG compliance · procurement · organizational accessibility · case study

• WAEM: A Web Accessibility Evaluation Metric Based on Partial User Experience Order

  Shuyi Song, Can Wang, Liangcheng Li, Zhi Yu, Xiao Lin, Jiajun Bu · 2017 · Proceedings of the 14th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper introduces WAEM (Web Accessibility Experience Metric), a novel accessibility metric that derives checkpoint weights from actual user experience data rather than from WCAG priority levels. The authors demonstrate that existing metrics like WAB and WAQM, which weight…

  accessibility metrics · user experience · accessibility evaluation · machine learning · SVM

• The Crowd Work Accessibility Problem

  Saiganesh Swaminathan, Kotaro Hara, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2017 · Proceedings of the 14th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper examines a largely overlooked accessibility problem: the inaccessibility of crowdsourcing tasks themselves. While crowd work platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) offer potential employment benefits for people with disabilities — flexible scheduling, remote…

  web accessibility evaluation · crowdsourcing · employment · disability employment · WCAG compliance

• Editor for accessible images in e-Learning platforms

  Sandra Sanchez-Gordon, Juan Estevez, Sergio Luján-Mora · 2016 · Proceedings of the 13th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This extended abstract defines a set of twenty features that an HTML visual text editor should provide to support content authors in creating accessible images within e-learning platforms. The features were derived from reviewing published research on accessible images and…

  image accessibility · alternative text · e-learning accessibility · authoring tools · WCAG compliance

• Development technologies impact in web accessibility

  Carlos Duarte, Inês Matos, João Vicente, Ana Salvado, Carlos M. Duarte, Luís Carriço · 2016 · Proceedings of the 13th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This study investigates whether the choice of web development technologies—programming languages, web frameworks, JavaScript frameworks, and content management systems—has a measurable impact on the accessibility of resulting web pages. The researchers crawled 1,669 pages from…

  web accessibility · automated testing · web development · content management systems · JavaScript frameworks

• Complementing standards by demonstrating commitment and progress

  Sarah Horton, David Sloan, Henny Swan · 2015 · Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  Written by consultants at The Paciello Group, this position paper argues that treating digital accessibility solely as a standards compliance activity is insufficient for organizations with large, complex digital estates. The authors draw a parallel between physical…

  accessibility standards · organizational accessibility · WCAG compliance · accessibility policy · barrier removal

• DOM block clustering for enhanced sampling and evaluation

  Simon Harper, Anwar Ahmad Moon, Markel Vigo, Giorgio Brajnik, Yeliz Yesilada · 2015 · Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses a fundamental challenge in web accessibility evaluation: large websites with thousands or tens of thousands of pages are practically impossible to fully evaluate, yet current sampling methods (random, best-guess, or convenience samples) cannot be trusted…

  accessibility evaluation · automated testing · web crawling · sampling methodology · DOM analysis

• Empathic communication of accessibility barriers in web 2.0 editing

  Afra Pascual, Mireia Ribera, Toni Granollers · 2015 · Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents EmpathicEditor4Accessibility (EE4A), a prototype web editor that helps non-technical content writers understand and fix accessibility errors by communicating barriers through the perspective of disabled personas rather than technical jargon. The authors…

  authoring tools · user-generated content · accessibility education · empathic design · WCAG compliance