M.F. Costabile and F. Paternò (Eds.): INTERACT 2005, LNCS 3585, pp. 281 – 294, 2005. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005 Flexible Reporting for Automated Usability and Accessibility Evaluation of Web Sites Abdo Beirekdar 1 , Marc Keita 1 , Monique Noirhomme 1 , Frédéric Randolet 1 , Jean Vanderdonckt 2 , and Céline Mariage 2 1 Fac. Univ. Notre-Dame de la Paix, Institut d’Informatique, Rue Grandgagnage, 21 B-5000 Namur (Belgium) {abe, mno, mke, fra}@info.fundp.ac.be http://www.info.fundp.ac.be 2 Université catholique de Louvain, Information Systems Unit, Place des Doyens, 1 B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) {vanderdonckt, mariage}@isys.ucl.ac.be http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/bchi Abstract. A system for automatically evaluating the usability and accessibility of web sites by checking their HTML code against guidelines has been devel- oped. 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. 1 Introduction Since the communication and the information transfer are nowadays predominantly achieved through the World Wide Web, the Web probably represents one of the most largely used channels for information exchange [8]. This observation does not neces- sarily lead to the conclusion that this channel is appropriately tailored for the wide diversity of users, computing platforms, and environments in which users are work- ing, thus provoking a digital divide [13]. In order to reduce this digital divide, the e- Europe action plan (http://europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/action_ plan/ eaccess/index_en.htm), accepted by European Countries in June 2000, foresees that any public site should be made compatible with Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) recommendations recommended by the W3C. The resolution e-Europe 2002-Public Web Site accessibility and their contents (P5-TAPROV-2002-0325) are very precise on this subject: companies in charge of developing web sites for any public admini- stration will be forced to develop sites adhering to these recommendations. Among others, Usability and Accessibility (U&A) guidelines have been set up to help designers in the process of creating usable and accessible sites. For instance,