Executive summary
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.
The document is organised in the following way:
Introduction outlines the requirements, the target audience and the techniques for the document and serves as a description of the basic properties of UWEM.
Evaluation procedures and conformance describes the UWEM evaluation procedures and conformance.
Resources lists and Sampling describes the approaches for scoping and sampling to provide resources lists for confromance of a web site. The procedures are designed to ensure that the identified samples are representative so that the evaluation results are reliable.
Tests for conformance evaluationon conformance testing describes how to carry out tool and expert tests for conformance evaluation of WCAG 1.0 checkpoints for priority 1 and 2
Aggregation model for test results describes a model for aggregating test results from the procedures described in test for conformance evaluation. The model also supports estimation of accessibility barriers within a Web site as well as across groups of Web sites. Section
Reporting of test results describes the reporting of test results with EARL and also proposes a template for reporting expert evaluation results.
Scorecard report describes a reporting method specially tailored for policy makers using a scorecard approach.
Glossary and References a glossary with the terms and, a list of the references used in the document.
Appendix A provides the document license for UWEM 1.0. Appendix B provides a template to report evalution results tailored to the expert evaluation using UWEM. Appendix C provides RDF schema's, Appendix D contains a list of contributors to this document , and appendix E provides the W3C document license for the referenced W3C work in this UWEM document.