Press release:
A Unified Web Evaluation Methodology to evaluate web accessibility across Europe
A Unified Web Evaluation Methodology to evaluate web accessibility across Europe
Brussels, July 5, 2006. Accessibility checks can be carried out in different ways even if the checks are based on the same guidelines. The Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM) is developed to ensure that large scale monitoring and local evaluation are compatible and coherent among themselves and with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from W3C/WAI. The methodology is based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), and will be synchronised with the foreseen migration from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 in the near future. Thus, UWEM will sharpen the support for evaluating, certifying, and benchmarking web content.
The UWEM 1.0 was released today. It is developed from the UWEM 0.5 version that was released for comments in October last year. The main elements are as follows:
- test descriptions to evaluate WCAG 1.0 conformance covering level AA.
- provide a sampling scheme both for automatic and expert evaluation;
- improved aggregations supporting confidence levels and to some extent integration of automatic and expert evaluation;
- updated accessibility Score Cards to communicate in a clearer way.
The methodology is developed by three European research (FP6 IST) projects in the area of e-Inclusion. They have also developed an earlier draft of the UWEM. The projects are grouped under the EU Web Accessibility Benchmarking Cluster (WAB Cluster). They aim to establish UWEM as the basis for web accessibility evaluation and possible certification in Europe.
The UWEM development is financially supported by the European Commission DG Information Society and Media.
Learn more about the methodology and download the full document at http://www.wabcluster.org/uwem10. To participate in this exciting development to measure and shape the information society you are welcome to comment on the document.
The three projects developing UWEM are:
The EIAO project will establish the measurement machinery for a prototype European Internet Accessibility Observatory. Frequently updated measurements will be available online from a data warehouse to enable large scale benchmarking, and provide a basis for policy-making, research and actions to improve the accessibility to Internet content.
http://eiao.net.
Support-EAM aims to propose a strategy for creating a Web Accessibility Quality Mark for Web services, as part of the Action Plan eEurope 2005: An information society for all. It refers to the Council Resolution on "eAccessibility" - improving the access of people with disabilities to the Knowledge Based Society (doc. 5165/03), inviting the Commission and the member states "to consider the
provision of an "eAccessibility mark" for goods and services which comply with relevant standards for eAccessibility". The project will explore the possibility to use the UWEM as a framework for a unified inspection process as part of a European certification scheme for Web accessibility.
http://www.support-eam.org
BenToWeb is a research project aimed to support the European public and private sector by providing new software modules and methodologies for Web Accessibility, which are not analysed by existing tools due to their inherent complexity. Among them, we can highlight issues like colour-contrast, low-vision, colour-deficiency, consistency of navigation elements and language simplicity. BenToWeb will also produce suites of test files for WCAG 2.0, which can be used for benchmarking accessibility evaluation and repair tools.
http://bentoweb.org/
