Literature Reviews

Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.

• OPTIMAL-EM: Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper (2023) — Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This extended abstract presents OPTIMAL-EM, a prototypical tool and framework designed to optimise the web accessibility evaluation process by systematically selecting representative pages from a website for auditing. Currently, accessibility evaluat…

  • automated accessibility testing
  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • web crawling
  • machine learning
  • WCAG compliance
  • accessibility standards
  • large-scale analysis

• Accessibility Metatesting: Comparing Nine Testing Tools

  Jonathan Robert Pool (2023) — Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This short paper presents a systematic empirical comparison of nine automated web accessibility testing tools that are amenable to integration into multi-tool testing regimes (free or nearly free, controllable via APIs or NPM packages, and comprehens…

  • automated accessibility testing
  • web accessibility
  • accessibility testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG compliance
  • developer tools
  • accessibility violations
  • tools

• QualState: Finding Website States for Accessibility Evaluation

  Filipe Rosa Martins, Letícia Seixas Pereira, Carlos Duarte (2024) — Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper introduces QualState, a web crawling tool designed to solve a fundamental limitation of automated accessibility evaluation: the inability to test dynamic content in Single Page Applications (SPAs). SPAs like Facebook, Google Maps, and Gmai…

  • automated testing
  • web accessibility
  • single page applications
  • web crawling
  • accessibility evaluation
  • dynamic content
  • DOM

• A11yPDF: Bridging the Gap to Inclusive PDFs

  Wajdi Aljedaani, Sandeep Kumar Rudhravaram, Akhila Chintham, Abdulrahman Habib, Marcelo M. Eler (2024) — Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This technical note introduces A11yPDF, a free web-based tool for evaluating the accessibility of PDF documents against WCAG 2.2 guidelines. The tool addresses key limitations of existing PDF accessibility checkers such as PDFA Inspector, PAVE, ABBYY…

  • PDF accessibility
  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • document accessibility
  • WCAG
  • tools

• Benchmarking PDF Accessibility Evaluation: A Dataset and Framework for Assessing Automated and LLM-Based Approaches for Accessibility Testing

  Anukriti Kumar, Tanushree Padath, Lucy Lu Wang (2025) — ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper addresses a critical gap in PDF accessibility evaluation by introducing the first expert-validated benchmark dataset and standardized evaluation framework for assessing how well different tools and approaches can evaluate PDF accessibility…

  • PDF accessibility
  • automated testing
  • large language models
  • WCAG
  • PDF/UA
  • benchmark dataset
  • document accessibility
  • alternative text
  • reading order
  • semantic tagging
  • accessibility evaluation