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This content will become publicly available on June 19, 2026

Title: Enhancing Web Accessibility: Automated Detection of Issues with Generative AI
Websites are integral to people’s daily lives, with billions in use today. However, due to limited awareness of accessibility and its guidelines, developers often release web apps that are inaccessible to people with disabilities, who make up around 16% of the global population. To ensure a baseline of accessibility, software engineers rely on automated checkers that assess a webpage’s compliance based on predefined rules. Unfortunately, these tools typically cover only a small subset of accessibility guidelines and often overlook violations that require a semantic understanding of the webpage. The advent of generative AI, known for its ability to comprehend textual and visual content, has created new possibilities for detecting accessibility violations. We began by studying the most widely used guideline, WCAG, to determine the testable success criteria that generative AI could address. This led to the development of an automated tool called GenA11y, which extracts elements from a page related to each success criterion and inputs them into an LLM prompted to detect accessibility issues on the web. Evaluations of GenA11y showed its effectiveness, with a precision of 94.5% and a recall of 87.61%. Additionally, when tested on real websites, GenA11y identified an average of eight more types of accessibility violations than the combination of existing tools.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2211790 2106306
PAR ID:
10618081
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2025)
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering
Volume:
2
Issue:
FSE
ISSN:
2994-970X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
2264 to 2287
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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