Imergo Helps Compliance and Accessibility Evaluation of Web Sites

The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) in Germany developed a tool to validate complex websites on accessibility and standard compliances.

The FIT institute explains the tool as following: “Due to the complexity of today’s Web applications and services, the creation of standards-compliant and accessible websites can only be achieved by employing powerful automated evaluation tools that complement expert assessments. Frequent updates of such services also demand continuous supervision and re-checks. For an efficient monitoring of large websites in particular, we have developed a software tool that supports quality assurance methods by validating entire sites against international standards (HTML, XHTML, XML) and configurable accessibility rule-sets.”

The software is platform independent and includes a multilingual user interface of German, English and Spanish. It provides a large scale validation of XML and (X)HTML documents for big Internet portals. The tool validates also CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Current evaluation rule sets include BITV priorities 1 and 2 (German law), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 1.0 levels A, AA and AAA, and Section 508 (USA). A powerful database backend: rules, evaluated documents and project configuration files are stored in an XML database that is compatible with the major commercial and Open Source databases.

Imergo has been used successfully in many of our industrial and public sector consultancy projects and is one of many accessibility project the FIT is supporting.

Source: FIT