BAGEL: An Approach to Automatically Detect Navigation-Based Web Accessibility Barriers for Keyboard Users

The Web has become an essential part of many people’s daily lives, enabling them to complete everyday and essential tasks online and access important information resources. The ability to navigate the Web via the keyboard interface is critical to people with various types of disabilities. However, modern websites often violate web accessibility guidelines for keyboard navigability. In this paper, we present a novel approach for automatically detecting web accessibility barriers that prevent or hinder keyboard users’ ability to navigate web pages. An extensive evaluation of our technique on real-world subjects showed that our technique was able to detect navigation-based keyboard accessibility barriers in web applications with high precision and recall.