Improving Browsing Environment Compliance Evaluations for Websites

Identifying accessibility issues that can threaten univer sal website usability is critical for web service and content providers who wish to accommodat e the diverse web audience. Detecting page-to-environment incompliance and modifyin g pages to promote universal accessibility is one important step in improving the proces s of exploration and navigation in the web user experience. To address this issue, we have des igned a system that evaluates the accessibility of a web page in a given browsing environme nt based on knowledge of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) tags that comprise the page and knowledge of the tag support provided in respective browsing environm e ts. Given this approach, one of the most important aspects of the system is the compreh ensive nature of tag support knowledge. The more support rules known, the more environme nt-specific bugs the system can accurately identify. In order to optimize knowledge of t ag support criteria, we have also incorporated a learning mechanism that can inductivel y d termine HTML tags that are unsupported in a given environment by observing both pos itive and negative examples of web page appearance and behavior.