WAEX: Web Accessibility Evaluator in a Single XSLT File

Web accessibility rules, i.e., the conditions to be met by Web sites in order to be considered as accessible for all, can be (partially) checked automatically in many different ways. Monolitic applications built on top of procedural programming languages like C, Java, Perl or PHP have been developed during the last years. These applications usually provide their own interpretation of the W3C guidelines, so it is easy to obtain different evaluation results when different evaluation tools are applied to a common sample page. Since most accessibility rules are involved with the markup of Web sites and XSLT can be applied to any selectable-by-condition markup, we have developed WAEX as a Web accessibility evaluator in a single XSLT file. Such XSLT file contains 50+ singular accessibility rules and XHTML-specific conditions that are in the prose of the XHTML specification because they could not be included in the grammar specification (the DTD or the XML Schemas). This approach of using XSLT as a declarative repository of accessibility rules has lead to a portable and reusable style sheet that generates rather complete (if compared with already existing evaluation tools) accessibility reports for any Web page