Web Accessibility Directive Decision Support Environment

Project Information

WADcher

Grant agreement ID: 780206

DOI

10.3030/780206

Project closed

EC signature date 13 November 2017

Start date 1 January 2018

End date 30 June 2021

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 2 129 005,00

EU contribution

€ 1 957 011,25

Coordinated by

FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG EV
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - WADcher (Web Accessibility Directive Decision Support Environment)

Reporting period: 2019-07-01 to 2021-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Web technologies and mobile apps have become an essential means to delivering and accessing information and services. With 1 in 4 people in the EU aged 16 or over suffering from a long-term disability and an ageing population, web accessibility has become crucial. Web accessibility means that everyone, including persons with disabilities, will be able to better perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Internet. Web accessibility thus enables the participation of millions of Europeans that may otherwise be at risk of exclusion from the digital society. The EU has, and is, doing much to raise awareness of digital inclusion and accessibility among the design, development, usability, and related communities who build, shape, fund and influence technology and its use, to ensure that European Digital Economy and Society legislation is there for everyone, regardless of their ability.

A major initiative to address this is the EU Directive on the “Accessibility of the Websites and Mobile Applications of Public Sector Bodies ” that came into force on 26/10/2016, also known as the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD), which establishes accessibility requirements for the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies. The WAD defines accessibility as “principles and techniques to be observed when designing, constructing, maintaining, and updating websites and mobile applications in order to make them more accessible to users, in particular persons with disabilities”. The content of websites and mobile applications includes textual as well as non-textual information, downloadable documents and forms, and two-way interaction such as the processing of digital forms and the completion of authentication, identification, and payment processes.

The main objectives of WADcher are (1) a large scale web accessibility assessment infrastructure to interact with external web accessibility assessment tools, (2) a decision support environment to present the results of these tools to the accessibility expert and/or developer to complete the assessment work or to correct the accessibility issues, (3) an observatory to allow web commissioners to manage the web accessibility and the monitoring of the aggregated results and to create customized reports and web accessibility statements.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

WADcher outcomes enable public sector bodies, as well as large organisations, SMEs or individuals (developers, designers, accessibility experts, monitoring bodies, policy makers, etc.) to produce websites and mobile applications of superior accessibility and quality, accompanied with appropriate measures, technologies and tools to detect and formally report accessibility hurdles and assisting developers in repairing them.

WADcher provides a holistic and hybrid approach to Web accessibility assessment. The WADcher project has gone beyond state of the art to provide developers, designers, experts and policy makers with an integrated web accessibility and WAD-compliance support environment. This has been done with a dynamic and personalised environment that enables them, on one hand, to design accessible web applications and, on the other hand, to understand their problems, and analyse and test their accessibility. Within WADcher, the challenge has been to find the way in which technology can be best used to increase accessibility, usability and quality of web applications and services. WADcher integrates both new ICT-driven concepts and user-oriented approaches with methodologies and tools regarding web accessibility assessment. Within this context, and by using lessons learnt from relevant standards, research and best practices (WCAG, EARL, etc.).
WADcher is a large-scale infrastructure integrating extended and enhanced existing web accessibility tools making them customizable to the needs of different actors and stakeholders in European Member States, transferable to different sectors in web environments, aiming at minimizing costs and development time while increasing scalability and improving their accessibility and usability to meet the requirements of the WAD. To maximise the effectiveness of a system that is conceived to support, among others, developers and software designers, the environment design has been carefully matched with their workflows and tasks. A User-Centred Design (UCD) has been one of the most important requirements in the WADcher system definition and development.

WADcher comprises the following WADcher services:
• Observatory – mainly for Web Commissioners and Managers
• Decision Support Environment (DSE) – mainly for Accessibility Experts and Developers
• Monitor Service – mainly for WAD Monitoring Bodies
• WADcher APIs – for providers of Accessibility Evaluation Tools

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

WADcher primarily provides WAD compliance to the following 4 groups of users that WADcher is directly targeting:
• Web Applications Providers and Commissioners that mainly include the public sector bodies whose websites that need to comply with the WAD monitoring, reporting and enforcement procedures. But also, private enterprises and organisations responsible for commissioning the content and graphical layout and multimedia content of these websites.
• Web Developers and Tools Developers/Providers. The former use WADcher to support them in their development and testing of WAD-compliant accessible web applications. While the latter use the WADcher Open API to integrate their tools into WADcher and its WAD compliance processes.
• Expert Accessibility Reviewers, who use the WADcher tools and services, interpret their results, and provide guidance and/or certification of WAD compliance.
• WAD Monitoring Bodies and Policy Groups involved in WAD policy implementation, and eAccessibility generally. These include EU and national WAD Monitoring and Policy bodies. Their endorsement and encouragement of WADcher use are critical to the wide-spread take-up of the service.

As with all innovative software solutions, a structured evaluation and testing process was implemented to fully understand the workings and potential issues that might arise through the implementation of new accessibility evaluation and improvement methods. The WADcher system was pilot trialed in 2 phases at 20 pilot sites in Austria, Greece, Italy and Ireland during the project, with the following overall objectives:
• WADcher tools evaluation and validation
• Periodic WAD simplified monitoring and in-depth testing
• WAD Evaluation Reports
• Generating WAD Accessibility Statements
• Periodic National WAD Reports
The Pilot Testing during the project used a two phased approach where the first phase consisted of general quality checks through the partner organisations themselves and on the websites of these organisations. This was conducted mainly to ensure, that the pilot application was running smoothly and could deliver evaluation results and recommendations, according to the best knowledge available and in line with the WAD procedures. The success of the pilot actions as well as the whole setup of the first pilot phase set the baseline for starting the second pilot phase and evaluating whether the revised monitoring environment more closely matches the requirements put forward by the web commissioners, expert reviewers, web developers and monitoring bodies.

WADcher Monitor Service providing to the Monitoring Body a graphical comparison of accessibility aud

WADcher logo

WADcher Observatory displaying an overview of the audit results.