Skip navigation Menu

• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Evaluation procedures and conformance
• Resources lists and Sampling
• Tests for conformance evaluation
• Aggregation model for test results
• Reporting of test results
• Scorecard report
• Appendices

Unified Web Evaluation Methodology, (UWEM 1.0)

This document is the result of a joint effort by 23 European organizations participating in three European projects combined in a cluster to develop a Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM). It describes a methodology for evaluating conformance of Web sites with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

The next version of UWEM will be synchronized with the foreseen migration from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0. We hope that this version and the work inside the WAB Cluster can serve as input to the WCAG 2.0 work that is done by the World Wide Web Consortium as part of its Web Accessibility Initiative.

The projects involved in making this methodology aim to ensure that evaluation tools and methods developed for global monitoring or for local evaluation, are compatible and coherent among themselves and with WAI. Their aim is to increase the value of evaluations by basing them on a shared interpretation of WCAG 1.0. Therefore, UWEM offers a harmonized interpretation of the WCAG 1.0 guidelines agreed among the participants within the three aforementioned projects.

The UWEM provides an evaluation procedure consisting of a system of principles and practices for expert and automatic evaluation of Web accessibility for humans and machine interfaces. The methodology aims to be fully conformant with WCAG 1.0 guidelines. Currently the UWEM is limited to priority 1 and priority 2 guidelines and combines tool and expert evaluation.

The methodology is suitable for detailed evaluations of one Web page, an entire site (irrespective of size), or multiple sites. It covers sampling, clarifications of the checkpoints and information necessary for reporting, interpretation and integration/aggregation of results.

The UWEM will be used by the projects included in the Cluster for an observatory (EIAO project), tools for benchmarking (BenToWeb project) and a certification scheme (SEAM project). More information about the Cluster, the UWEM and the projects involved can be found at: wabcluster.org.

Editors:

• Eric Velleman (Accessibility Foundation),
• Carlos A Velasco (Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT),
• Mikael Snaprud (Agder University College),
• Dominique Burger (BrailleNet)

Contributors:

See Appendix D for contributors list

Please see Appendix A for the document license.