The Transparency of Automatic Accessibility Evaluation Tools

Several web accessibility evaluation tools have been put forward to reduce the burden of identifying accessibility barriers for disabled people. One common issue in using accessibility evaluation tools in practice is that the results provided by different tools are often variable. Such variability may confuse the users who may not understand the reasons behind it, and thus limits the possible adoption of such tools. Hence, there is a need to shed light on the tools' actual functioning, indicate what criteria they should adopt to be transparent and to help users better interpret their results. In this communication paper, we discuss such issues, analyse how they have been addressed by a representative set of tools, and provide useful indications for obtaining user-centred accessibility evaluations.