Dear Dr. Mukhopadhyay:

To try to answer your questions:

1] There is pa11y (pa11y.org); pa11y can be run in a variety of ways and I believe it can be run through an automated, API-like fashion through the command line where you can receive results as JSON. It also has different accessibility standards (WCAG 2.0 or 2.1) and different test runners (https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y#runners). The different test runners provide slightly different results. In my experience, both test runners will find some false positives (something that reported as wrong but is not) and most importantly, automated tools like pa11y and WAVE will not many accessibility issues and I would recommend not solely relying on them to assess or score a website's accessibility. They are a good supplement to manual testing which can find issues (e.g. keyboard accessibility 2.1 in WCAG) that automated tools like pa11y cannot


2] ARIA is just one method of making content accessible on the web. If used in the proper contexts, ARIA can be beneficial for increasing web accessibility, but I recommend minimizing its use. Many times, ARIA
is used even though it is not necessary or even more often, it is used incorrectly, making content less accessible and harder to maintain and troubleshoot.

Using the proper HTML elements/markup is more effective for web accessibility since proper HTML is by far, better supported by across different technologies and the best first step to ensure the content is accessibility. ARIA support within different assistive technologies (e.g. screen readers) varies.
There is no correlation with the amount of ARIA used on a website to indicate a website's accessibility or lack thereof;

3] There is not a truly global agreed-upon standard or benchmark for web accessibility.
The WCAG 2.1 is the most popular web accessibility standard in Americentric environments that I'm familiar with; it has three levels of compliance (A, AA, and AAA) and is cumulative (Level AA includes all A criteria; Triple AAA includes A, AA, and AA criteria. Our library's website aims to comply with level AA. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

Web accessibility is subjective. Although this paper is 2 years old and is written about WCAG 2.0, it is still very applicable today with WCAG 2.1; and somewhat in depth; I've found it to be one of the most insightful pieces of defining and implementing web accessibility.

The paper is found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L9OYaP052j2uxVu-8IXGxzwQsHdx8G6YKrxpHo7BZ_w/edit#
More context at http://www.webaxe.org/accessibility-interpretation-problem

Lastly, https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/ is a good place to get started if you're looking for more introductory material.

For an auditing template, you can check the https://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/report-tool/#!/#%2F
and this one by Yale https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/articles/wcag2-checklist

Regards,
Will


Will Skora (he/him)

Web Administrator

Cleveland Public Library

325 Superior Ave. E.

Cleveland, OH 44114

216-623-2914 (O)

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https://cpl.org/<http://www.cpl.org/>


________________________________
From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of CODE4LIB automatic digest system <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2020 11:00 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: CODE4LIB Digest - 21 Oct 2020 to 22 Oct 2020 (#2020-223)

There are 7 messages totaling 628 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

  1. Introduction to Text Encoding (online course)
  2. “Living Our Values and Principles” report by Next Generation Library
     Publishing
  3. Web accessibility and ARIA
  4. Automatically generating keywords from abstracts (3)
  5. teleprompter software

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 22 Oct 2020 20:25:20 +0530
From:    Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Web accessibility and ARIA

Hello all

We are trying to measure web accessibility of some Indian
institutes/universities/libraries in the form of a score and then rank
those institutes/universities/libraries against the score (still at the
idea plane). The plan is to fetch data through API in a data wrangling
software for further analysis. My questions are as follows:

1) Are there other services (apart from WAVE) that provide results in JSON
format through API?
2) What is the significance of *ARIA* in determining such a score for web
accessibility? Does a higher number of ARIA indicate a better
accessibility? Or is converse true?
3) Is there any globally agreed-upon indicator for web accessibility?

Best

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Dr. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay
Professor, Department of Library and Information Science,
University of Kalyani, Kalyani - 741 235 (WB), India
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