Web Accessibility Testing for Deaf: Requirements and Approaches for Automation

The aim of this work is twofold. First, we identify web accessibility requirements for deaf people who communicate using Sign Language. Second, we define automation approaches for accessibility testing according to the requirements identified. The requirements were identified through a literature review that considered laws, standards, guides, and scientific articles. This review showed the lack of tools that automate the accessibility test for the Deaf. Thus, we propose two approaches to automating accessibility testing: one that requires the programmer to encode metadata for accessibility testing, and another that relies only on descriptive analysis of data from other web pages accessible to the deaf. Our work was based on the analysis of 150 sites, 100 of them with metadata analysis, and 50 with descriptive analysis. We discuss the tradeoff for each approach.