A Crawljax Based Approach to Exploit Traditional Accessibility Evaluation Tools for AJAX Applications

Abstract In this paper, we present a Crawljax based approach to automatically evaluate the accessibility of AJAX applications. Crawljax is a tool able to crawl an AJAX application for inferring a corresponding state-flow graph. Thus, combining Crawljax with a traditional tool for accessibility testing we realized a plugin that provides an automatic generation of accessibility evaluation report for AJAX ap-plications. The proposed approach has been experimented carrying out a case study that analyzed the accessibility of Google Search and AskAlexia, as represen-tative of Web applications that use AJAX technology. The case study highlighted the effectiveness of the approach based on the use of a state-based representation to automate the accessibility evaluation of AJAX applications. Nevertheless, it al-so revealed some shortcomings of the current implementation of Crawljax that should be addressed to make its exploitation in this context more reliable. 1