Everyone agrees the best approach to accessibility issues is to avoid them in the first place. What if we could predict problems before they happen?

Informed buying decisions—such as researching a product’s accessibility before buying the product or adopting a technology—is the true path to saving money and time on auditing and remediating issues after the system has been deployed. Using a variety of data sources, it is possible to weigh how accessible a site is while also identifying which technologies it uses. The aggregated data can be used to determine the error rates, error densities, and categories of errors. This information can allow organizations to make informed decisions when they choose which technologies to use on their sites. There are many ways that the implementation of technologies can affect the accessibility of the resulting interface. The use of large-scale data gathering will provide the opportunity for the impact of implementation differences from being a barrier to effective analysis. The data that we gathered in this process confirms how pervasive accessibility problems are on the web. It can also show risk patterns that can help organizations learn about potential accessibility problems related to specific technologies before they adopt those technologies. This presentation will discuss this ongoing research effort, including our current findings and our future research plans.