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• OPTIMAL-EM: Complexity-Driven Clustering for Optimised Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper · 2026 · ACM Transactions on the Web, Vol. 20, No. 2

  Hambley, Yesilada, Vigo, and Harper (University of Manchester and METU-NCC) extend their OPTIMAL-EM methodology for large-scale web accessibility conformance evaluation. The problem they address is fundamental to professional auditing: the W3C's Website Accessibility Conformance…

  web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · WCAG-EM · OPTIMAL-EM · representative sampling

• AXECC: Benchmarking the Privacy and Accessibility Impact of Browser Extensions

  James Clarke, Maryam Mehrnezhad, Ehsan Toreini · 2026 · ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

  This paper presents AXECC, a novel automated framework for jointly measuring the web-tracking behaviour and accessibility impact of browser extensions at scale. The authors argue that while browser extensions are widely installed to improve the browsing experience, including by…

  browser extensions · web tracking · privacy · accessibility testing · automated testing

• Towards Testing the Accessibility of Dynamic Visual Changes in Android Mobile GUI with Multi-Modal LLMs

  Mengxi Zhang, Jianlin Yu, Chen Xu, Jiqun Li, Xinglong Yin, Huaxiao Liu · 2026 · ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

  This paper addresses a long-standing gap in mobile accessibility testing: dynamic visual changes in Android GUIs that communicate task status or feedback to sighted users but are invisible to blind users of screen readers such as TalkBack. Examples include an input field…

  Android · mobile accessibility · screen readers · TalkBack · automated testing

• Judge: Effective State Abstraction for Guiding Automated Web GUI Testing

  Chenxu Liu, Junheng Wang, Wei Yang, Ying Zhang, Tao Xie · 2026 · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

  This paper presents Judge, a novel approach to state abstraction for automated web GUI testing (AWGT). AWGTs explore web applications by performing GUI actions and building a state model to guide further exploration, maximising code coverage within a fixed time budget. Effective…

  automated testing · web accessibility · GUI testing · DOM · machine learning

• iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility

  Peya Mowar, Aaron Steinfeld, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper from Mowar, Steinfeld, and Bigham (Carnegie Mellon) presents iTagPDF, an automated system for tagging academic research PDFs so they are accessible to screen reader users. The authors argue that PDF accessibility has remained a persistent problem for over a…

  PDF accessibility · tagged PDF · PDF remediation · automated accessibility · document layout analysis

• Measuring the Semantic Accessibility Gap in LLM-Generated Web UIs

  Tommaso Calo, Alexandra-Elena Gurita, Luigi De Russis · 2026 · Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26)

  Calo, Gurita, and De Russis investigate a blind spot of mainstream automated accessibility tools: while scanners like Axe-core reliably catch missing alt attributes or unlabelled form fields (syntactic violations), they cannot tell whether the values present are actually…

  web accessibility · large language models · LLM code generation · semantic accessibility · WCAG

• Benchmarking PDF Accessibility Evaluation: A Dataset and Framework for Assessing Automated and LLM-Based Approaches for Accessibility Testing

  Anukriti Kumar, Tanushree Padath, Lucy Lu Wang · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper addresses a critical gap in PDF accessibility evaluation by introducing the first expert-validated benchmark dataset and standardized evaluation framework for assessing how well different tools and approaches can evaluate PDF accessibility. Despite PDFs being the…

  PDF accessibility · automated testing · large language models · WCAG · PDF/UA

• AccessGuru: Leveraging LLMs to Detect and Correct Web Accessibility Violations in HTML Code

  Nadeen Fathallah, Daniel Hernández, Steffen Staab · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper introduces AccessGuru, a novel method that combines traditional automated accessibility testing tools with large language models (LLMs) to both detect and correct web accessibility violations in HTML code. The work addresses a persistent gap in accessibility tooling:…

  automated testing · web accessibility · large language models · HTML remediation · prompt engineering

• CodeA11y: Making AI Coding Assistants Useful for Accessible Web Development

  Peya Mowar, Yi-Hao Peng, Jason Wu, Aaron Steinfeld, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2025 · Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25)

  This paper addresses a persistent problem: despite decades of accessibility standards and tools, ~96% of web pages contain accessibility violations. The authors argue that AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot represent an untapped opportunity because developers already use…

  web accessibility · AI coding assistants · developer tools · WCAG · automated testing

• The WebAIM Million: An Annual Accessibility Analysis of the Top 1,000,000 Home Pages

  WebAIM · 2024 · WebAIM

  Annual large-scale automated accessibility evaluation of the top one million website home pages. The study consistently reveals widespread accessibility failures, with the majority of pages containing detectable WCAG conformance errors.

  automated testing · web accessibility · large-scale analysis

• Uncovering the New Accessibility Crisis in Scholarly PDFs: Publishing Model and Platform Changes Contribute to Declining Scholarly Document Accessibility in the Last Decade

  Anukriti Kumar, Lucy Lu Wang · 2024 · ASSETS '24: Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper presents a large-scale analysis of 20,000 scholarly PDFs published between 2014 and 2023 to characterise the scope and trajectory of document accessibility in academic publishing. Most scholarly works are distributed as PDFs, a format that can present severe…

  PDF accessibility · scholarly publishing · document accessibility · screen readers · tagged PDF

• 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

• Does ChatGPT Generate Accessible Code? Investigating Accessibility Challenges in LLM-Generated Source Code

  Wajdi Aljedaani, Abdulrahman Habib, Ahmed Aljohani, Marcelo Eler, Yunhe Feng · 2024 · Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents the first empirical evaluation of the accessibility of web code generated by ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), examining both how accessible the generated code is and how well the model can fix accessibility violations. The study involved 88 web developers who prompted…

  web accessibility · large language models · ChatGPT · automated testing · WCAG

• A11yPDF: Bridging the Gap to Inclusive PDFs

  Wajdi Aljedaani, Sandeep Kumar Rudhravaram, Akhila Chintham, Abdulrahman Habib, Marcelo M. Eler · 2024 · Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This technical note introduces A11yPDF, a free web-based tool for evaluating the accessibility of PDF documents against WCAG 2.2 guidelines. The tool addresses key limitations of existing PDF accessibility checkers such as PDFA Inspector, PAVE, ABBYY FineReader, Common Look, and…

  PDF accessibility · automated testing · accessibility evaluation · document accessibility · WCAG

• QualState: Finding Website States for Accessibility Evaluation

  Filipe Rosa Martins, Letícia Seixas Pereira, Carlos Duarte · 2024 · Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper introduces QualState, a web crawling tool designed to solve a fundamental limitation of automated accessibility evaluation: the inability to test dynamic content in Single Page Applications (SPAs). SPAs like Facebook, Google Maps, and Gmail change their content in…

  automated testing · web accessibility · single page applications · web crawling · accessibility evaluation

• Towards Automated Accessibility Report Generation for Mobile Apps

  Amanda Swearngin, Jason Wu, Xiaoyi Zhang, Esteban Gomez, Jen Coughenour, Rachel Stukenborg, Bhavya Garg, Greg Hughes, Adriana Hilliard, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jeffrey Nichols · 2024 · ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

  This paper presents a system for automatically generating whole-app accessibility reports for mobile apps, addressing key limitations of existing accessibility scanning tools. The work begins with formative interviews with eight accessibility QA professionals at a large…

  automated testing · accessibility testing · mobile accessibility · app crawling · machine learning

• A platform to check website compliance with web accessibility standards

  Reinaldo Ferraz, Ana Duarte, João Bárbara, Adriano C.M. Pereira, Wagner Meira · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This short paper presents the TIC Web Acessibilidade platform, a comprehensive system for evaluating and monitoring the accessibility of Brazilian government websites at scale. Developed by NIC.br (the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee's executive arm) in collaboration with…

  automated testing · web accessibility · government accessibility · accessibility monitoring · web crawler

• Notably Inaccessible — Data Driven Understanding of Data Science Notebook (In)Accessibility

  Venkatesh Potluri, Sudheesh Singanamalla, Nussara Tieanklin, Jennifer Mankoff · 2023 · Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '23)

  This paper presents the first large-scale analysis of the accessibility of computational notebooks — interactive documents combining code, text, and data visualizations that have become the standard tool for data science work. The researchers analyzed 100,000 Jupyter notebooks…

  computational notebooks · data science · screen readers · blind and visually impaired · data visualization

• Towards Real-Time Measurements of Internet Health: Optimizing Large-Scale Web Accessibility Evaluations

  Luís P. Carvalho, Tiago Guerreiro, Shaun Lawson, Kyle Montague · 2023 · Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2023)

  This paper investigates how to optimize page sampling strategies for large-scale web accessibility evaluations, aiming to make near real-time measurements of Internet Health feasible. Current large-scale accessibility studies are financially and time exhaustive, typically…

  web accessibility · large-scale evaluation · automated testing · internet health · WCAG

• 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

• Optimising the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper critically examines the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM), the W3C's standard five-step process for evaluating website conformance to WCAG. The authors identify several methodological weaknesses in WCAG-EM and propose a parallel…

  accessibility evaluation · WCAG-EM · sampling methodology · automated testing · web crawling

• On the Identification of Accessibility Bug Reports in Open Source Systems

  Wajdi Aljedaani, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Stephanie Ludi, Ali Ouni, Ilyes Jenhani · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses a significant gap in software engineering research: the automated identification of accessibility-related bug reports in open-source projects. While bug tracking systems like Bugzilla and Monorail accumulate vast numbers of reports, manually sifting through…

  accessibility bug reports · machine learning · open source · bug classification · automated testing

• Creating an Open Source, Customizable Accessibility Checker for Content Authors

  Adam Chaboryk · 2022 · Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This extended abstract introduces Sa11y, an open-source, in-page accessibility checker specifically designed for content authors rather than developers. Created at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) to manage accessibility across several hundred website…

  automated testing · accessibility tools · content management · open source · quality assurance

• 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

• The Transparency of Automatic Accessibility Evaluation Tools

  Parvaneh Parvin, Vanessa Palumbo, Marco Manca, Fabio Paternò · 2021 · Proceedings of the 18th International Web for All Conference (W4A '21)

  This paper examines a critical but often overlooked problem in automated accessibility testing: the lack of transparency in how evaluation tools operate and present their results. The authors observe that different accessibility evaluation tools frequently produce variable…

  automated testing · accessibility evaluation · WCAG · transparency · web accessibility