AI-Powered Web Accessibility Tool

Web Accessibility: A Generative AI-Based Tool for Monitoring, Navigating, and Identifying Errors

The Importance of Web Accessibility

While it may seem almost obvious to many, not everyone is able to enjoy the same level of access to content and applications on the web. Users with visual impairments or other disabilities may find it very difficult or even impossible to use certain online features, often including important and/or essential ones such as accessing their bank account or booking a hospital visit.

Web accessibility is the attempt to break down these digital barriers. It refers to the ability of computer systems to provide services and information that is usable, without discrimination, even by those who need assistive technologies or special configurations due to disabilities.

Regulation


The European Union has issued various guidelines and directives over time aimed at making more important websites accessible to as many people as possible. Directive 2016/2102/EU requires EU member states to ensure that their websites and mobile applications meet the requirements set out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Furthermore, with Legislative Decree 76/2020, private companies with a turnover of over 500 million euros in the last 3 years have also been obliged to comply with these accessibility requirements.

Making a Website Accessible

Making a website accessible therefore means making it compliant with the various requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Since it is obviously not possible in most cases to rewrite a website from scratch with web accessibility by design, it is often necessary to analyze the existing platform and identify the problems to be checked and resolved within it. This is a long and tedious task, which can currently only be replaced or at least assisted by automatic tools to a small extent. Most of these tools are in fact limited to checking only violations of some of the WCAG requirements. These tools also often stop at simply highlighting what has been analyzed, without proposing possible solutions to resolve the problems.


A Web Accessibility tool based on Generative AI

A generative AI-based tool can effectively address these issues and provide more efficient assistance to developers, analysts, and anyone working on a web accessibility project. This tool was created within Technology Reply Financial Services during a challenge on generative artificial intelligence, where it won first place. It is currently in the optimization phase, with some prototypes already shown to major companies in the financial sector.

Thanks to the support of OpenAI and Azure APIs, the tool can not only assess the accessibility of a website but also propose solutions and remediations directly at the code level or in any case ready to be used. To make the results even more reliable, the tool also uses AXE, one of the leading web accessibility testing tools currently on the market. The results of AXE are enriched and improved thanks to the support of generative artificial intelligence.


The potential of the tool

By using this tool, it is therefore possible to greatly reduce the effort required both in the analysis phase and in the resolution of accessibility problems. Thanks to the use of generative AI, the tool can identify problems and relative solutions even for WCAG requirements for which human intervention was previously necessary, such as analyzing the context of various images.

In addition to the assessment phase, the tool can also be integrated into test suites, thus establishing an initial accessibility check for future implementations.

Here are some of the accessibility problems that the tool can identify, analyze, and correct: