Feasibility of automatically assigning severity scores to web accessibility problems

Abstract

We discuss the potential for automatically prioritizing accessibility issues found by automated test tools in an application, based on 'accessibility impact' to the end user. We examine three influential factors in assessing the severity of an issue: criticality of the affected component, impact of the type of issue, and mitigating effect of the application context. We describe how these factors could be quantified and combined to yield severity measures consistent with those of a human expert, illustrating with a set of accessibility issues found in a real online web task.