Flexible Reporting for Automated Usability Evaluation of Web Sites

A system for automatically evaluating the usability and accessibility of web sites by checking their HTML code against guidelines has been developed. All usability and accessibility guidelines are formally expressed in a XML-compliant specification language called Guideline Definition Language (GDL) so as to separate the evaluation engine from the evaluation logics (the guidelines). This separation enables managing guidelines (i.e., create, retrieve, update, and delete) without affecting the code of the evaluation engine. The evaluation engine is coupled to a reporting system that automatically generates one or many evaluation reports in a flexible way: adaptation for screen reading or for a printed report, sorting by page, by object, by guideline, by priority, or by severity of the detected problems. This paper focuses on the reporting system.