Improving Accessibility of Public Administrations Web Sites through Large-Scale Automatic Validations

Digital accessibility is considered an important aspect to allow all people, including those with permanent or temporary disabilities, to access the continuously increasing number of digital services. This raises the need for tools able to provide support for monitoring the accessibility of many websites, to understand their level of accessibility, and identify the areas that need more interventions for their improvement. The primary objectives of this work are to describe the challenges that have been faced in extending the MAUVE++ tool to carry out web accessibility validation in the context of large-scale assessments and provide an up-to-date view of the accessibility landscape of public administration websites. We discuss how the tool was adapted to analyse more than four million web pages and associated PDF documents from Italian public administration websites, assessing their compliance with WCAG guidelines. The results of this large-scale analysis have been utilised to provide insights on the state of accessibility at the national level, through a dedicated public dashboard updated quarterly, and stimulate its improvement. This research identifies the most violated success criteria, thus highlighting areas that should require attention from web developers and designers. Finally, we highlight some broader as well as practical implications of this research, and to what extent it can stimulate a more responsible approach and attention to accessibility aspects.