Updating accessibility monitoring tools with sampling capabilities

Tese de Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 2022Since its creation, the internet has grown in popularity going from military use to being commonly used by the general population to do everything - from reading news to paying their bills. Some but not all content is open to all of them, leaving a lot of disabled users not able to enjoy those contents, as for example blind people, deaf people and those with other disabilities that inhibit their lives. To resolve these issues, the European Union created a directive in 2016 where all countries in the EU must monitor the accessibility of their public sector body websites by creating a national comity. AMA (the Portuguese commission) does their monitoring in two phases (as per law): simplified monitoring and in depth monitoring. In order to help them do it in a better way, some changes were made to their tools to better translate information for more effective monitoring. Those included: the addition of an element and type count, which counts the number of elements and type of lements of a page, cards for showing all the roles and tags in a website; also some cards for certain roles and tags like tables, Iframes, images and some others. Finally, a sampling card was also added, where experts could sample a specified number of pages based on certain tags and/or elements present in the website chosen by them. Sampling testing was also done to help the experts have even better information to compare to while they are monitoring. Simple Random Sampling, Url Sampling and Stratified sampling were tested and compared. In the majority of the testing done it was found that in performance Simple Random Sampling was faster but in accuracy it was found Url Sampling was the best in every category. Therefore, Url Sampling was the chosen algorithm, since the performance gains did not justify the lack of accuracy of Simple Random Sampling