Adapting Modularized Web Applications to Web Accessibility Standards

This paper presents a web application designed to evaluate the accessibility of a modular Content Management System called Quilt CMS, widely used as a solution for Croatian higher education institutions. Aimed primarily at web developers, this tool is focused not on evaluating subpages as whole documents, but on modules of a Quilt CMS instance used in their context, providing cleaner analysis and easier code refinement. The modules were evaluated using AATT - Automated Accessibility Testing Tool, composed of Axe, Chrome and HTML Code Sniffer accessibility evaluation libraries. The modules' code is accessible via the newly created, customizable REST API methods, providing a solution easily extendible to other web platforms. The web accessibility of modules is evaluated according to the following accessibility guidelines: Web Content Access Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 and 2.1), Web Accessibility Initiative - Affordable Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) and Section 508. The analysis was done on one of the websites using this CMS, but is applicable in other instances due to module code sharing. The results were used to improve the source code of selected Quilt CMS modules, providing a higher level of accessibility norms' implementation.