A11Y: A step towards inclusive Web

Need: -

The web is for everyone but too often website is often built with aesthetics in mind and giving less preference to accessibility. There are accessibility tools like lighthouse, axe-core, wave which are proprietary [wave] or difficult to integrate and lack flexibility for contribution making an urgent need for an opensource tool for Indians made by Indians. While demonstrated on generic websites, this FOSS accessibility checker is especially useful for developers in FinTech, MedTech, Autonomous Systems, and other domains where usability and compliance are critical.

My Role: -

In this talk, I will be presenting my FOSS Web Accessibility Checker, an easily portable and expandable application made to help educators, programmers, and students in swiftly identifying and solving accessibility issues in their projects. Based on the WCAG principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust), the checker analyses web pages and reports problems at three different levels: errors, warnings, and information. For documentation and auditing needs, it also supports structured exports, such as HTML and PDF along with text.

Methodology: -

Live presentation of running checks on real sites will happen, viewing outputs, and making reports. Ideally, issues should be found before they reach production; for small sites, that might even just be once per day. I will speak about setting up the tech, introducing new requirements, improving documentation for contributors, and how to add this in a CI/CD pipeline.

Goal of this Talk: -

The aim is to make accessibility easy, relevant, and collaborative. Because the checker runs as a FOSS, the community can contribute not only code but also in rule-set design, testing, and UI enhancement

The project source is currently under review for a research publication under my institution’s R&D Cell. However, its core architecture, accessibility rule engine, and open contribution roadmap will be shared during the talk. The aim is to release it under a permissive open-source license post-review, ensuring long-term community contribution*

1. Understanding importance of accessibility in modern web development

2. Usage of my Web accessibility app to check if a website is compactable with WCAG rules and is accessible by people.

3. Insights into the architecture and how to contribute new rules.

4. Demo of generating structured accessibility reports.

5. Accessibility as part of everyday developer productivity and debugging practices.