A Methodology for Automating Guideline Review of Web Sites

This work consists in proposing a methodology to improve automated evaluation of the ergonomic quality of web sites (with special focus on usability and accessibility) by static analysis of HTML code of their pages using the evaluation technique called guideline review. This methodology will be articulated around: - A framework that defines a systematic and consistent way for structuring guidelines in order to enable their automatic evaluation; - A guideline definition language (GDL) able to express guideline information in a sufficiently rich manner to enable an evaluation engine to perform automated evaluation of any GDL-compliant guideline; - Tools to support the proposed methodology. The tools are (1) a structuring tool (editor) to enable the specification and manipulation of guidelines structures (structured following the framework and expressed in a GDL-compliant form) and (2) an evaluation tool which uses the guidelines to conduct the evaluation of Web sites.