imergo - Development of automated tools that support standards compliance and quality assurance methods for the production and maintenance of Web portals Carlos A Velasco Yehya Mohamad
Abstract The design, management and maintenance of Web portals is becoming a challenge for the industry, that is confronted with an increasing amount of devices and user agents, due to the growing number of mobile platforms to be compatible with. On top of this, accessibility for people with special needs (enforced by legal frameworks in many European countries, the USA and Canada, among others) is generating additional complexity to the aforementioned processes, in times of critical budget constraints. This paper will describe how the combination of quality assurance methods with automated tools that support the implementation of standards and accessibility recommendations, can help companies to monitor and manage their compliance efforts in complex Web applications. We will also describe the limitations of existing tools, and present a new software suite developed by the Fraunhofer Institute FIT, successfully used and tested in several consultancy projects led by the authors.
Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 2. Business benefits of standards compliance ....................................................................................... 3. Integrating Web accessibility and standards ..................................................................................... 4. imergo: a new generation of software tools ...................................................................................... 5. Conclusions ............................................................................................................................... Bibliography .................................................................................................................................
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1. Introduction The ubiquity of mobile devices -- with a wide variety of user agents, operating systems and display sizes 0- has awaken the Web industry from the nightmare of "tag-soup", "code forkings" and "best-viewed with" labels. When optimizing costs and re-purposing content, it became clear that standards were the only way out. Media companies with a page traffic in the order of tens of millions per day, like Wired News (http://www.wired.com/) and ESPN (http://www.espn.com/) have moved to standards compliance designs that can reduce page sizes to the half or less, and bring bandwidth daily savings in the order of Terabytes (see e.g., http://devedge.netscape.com/central/strategy/2003/case-studies/ for further information). But companies need to be able to monitor the quality of big Internet portals -with sizes in the order of thousands of pages- to ensure that the created and updated content complies with standards. To that end, many actors already implement quality assurance methods, that due to the limitations of existing tools place a great burden on the responsible teams. In addition to the aforementioned requirements, ICT accessibility for people with special needs has become:
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imergo - Development of automated tools that support standards compliance and quality assurance methods for the production and maintenance of Web portals •
a legal requirement in many European countries, as well as in the USA and Canada, for example;
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a market opportunity when considering the progressive aging of the population in Western countries; and
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a chance to improve corporate image by demonstrating social responsibility towards people with special needs.
We will present in the rest of the paper a global overview of the business benefits of implementing Web Standards, their relation to accessibility, and the limitations of existing tools to support companies in their implementation efforts. Then, we will introduce imergo, a software suite developed by Fraunhofer FIT to implement quality assurance methods that include standards compliance and accessibility.
2. Business benefits of standards compliance The commercial benefits of applying Web standards in the development and maintenance of business sites, either for the Internet, the Intranet of the company, or in B2B sites are well-known (see e.g., [Hazael-Massieux], [Nonnenmacher] or [Zeldman]; and references therein). Summarizing, the main benefits are: •
Lower costs. It becomes much easier to manage a site-wide look and feel due to the separation of content and presentation. Re-purposing of content becomes simpler, the development and deployment processes are streamlined, and rendering differences become minimal across browsers. Furthermore, page sizes are reduced, and they render faster in browsers. The speed is increased by browser caching mechanisms of CSS, combined with faster rendering speeds of browser engines in standards mode.
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Future-proof. Standardized code is more portable across devices, and allows its reuse, without giving room to less compelling designs. It also allows extensibility to other XML-based languages like SVG, SMIL or MathML, that can be easily rendered in new browsers. It also avoids being locked to a particular tool, browser or even developer, that created code-forkings compatible with different browsers.
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More customers. You obtain a better search engine ranking because separating presentation from content augments the information/markup ratio. Browse diversity is also increasing -no more browsers' war with two user agents dominating the market-, making totally impossible to code for all of them. Coding with standards allows you to cover all browsers and platforms, and therefore reaching wider audiences.
Not surprisingly, many of these benefits are directly related to accessibility, because most of the needs of people with disabilities are related to alternate presentation modes and views, similarly on how a PDA cannot use the same layout and style as a full functional desktop screen. As Steven Pemberton said: "... Google is just like a blind user, because Google can only see text and not images, and if their site is not accessible to Google they will get a lower Google rating, and fewer people will find them." [Pemberton]
3. Integrating Web accessibility and standards While many businesses are waking-up to the benefits that standards compliance will bring to them, accessibility is still seen as a burden they need to bear because of legal reasons. This view is also associated with the early years of the Web, where accessibility was linked to boring text-only versions of Web sites. However, as it has been demonstrated earlier, accessibility is bringing similar benefits as those of standards compliance and its implementation does not demand unattractive designs. In the view of the authors, the biggest existing barrier to its wider adoption is the dicotomy between quality-assurance tools and accessibility tools. Bearing that in mind, and to satisfy many demands from our customers, we carried out a study to evaluate different accessibility verification tools and compare its characteristics. Our findings showed clearly a lack of maturity in all of them to cope with market needs. Among the main issues identified, we can highlight: •
Lack of validation against published grammars (particularly complex for SGML parsers) and CSS. This deficiency is combined with the absence of large scale validation capabilities (for sites in the order of thousands of pages), where monitoring of legacy areas is necessary. Although tools like W3C's HTML (http://validator.w3.org/) and CSS Validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/) exist, it is unrealistic to use them in a Web portal. Large scale validation can only be achieved through the integration of powerful, flexible and configurable crawlers.
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Poor support for project management. Most of them do not have any database back-end, which difficults partial monitoring tasks, very important for the integration with quality-assurance and certification processes.
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Undocumented error handling and interpretation of existing accessibility guidelines and checkpoints. Lack of information on repair techniques.
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Minimum or unexisting support for customer-oriented tests, such as e.g., presence of corporate image elements.
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Low quality components to analyze and repair DOM (Document Object Models) trees. A surprisingly high number of applications do not implement DOM parsers to verify the accessibility rules that can be automatically tested. They use text parsers that are however not adequate for this task, thus leaving to manual verification tests that could be easily automated.
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Fragmentation: different tools perform different tasks (e.g., color-contrast tests, color blindness, media accessibility, spell checking, etc.), and their results cannot be easily integrated.
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Legal Frameworks. The tools cannot cope with the different policy environments of every country, mostly based upon the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 from the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (http://www.w3.org/WAI/).
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Localization. Most of the analyzed tools cannot produce information in the local language, an especially important issue in countries where English knowledge is not widespread.
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Reporting capabilities. The tools studied could not produce information to be consumed by different audiences: IT managers and developers, marketing people and top-management level. They do not digest the available results and generate adequate summaries.
But the most important deficiency is the lack of integration with Content Managements Systems. Only very small Web sites are produced and maintained nowadays with any of the well-known WYSIWYG Web design tools. Web portals are produced by different teams, and content is aggregated via CMS. CMS are in most cases based upon XML templates derived from some proprietary DTD or Schema, which also demands from the tools the possibility to realize on the fly XSLT transformation and aggregations to be able to evaluate accessibility issues. None of the tested tools could be integrated in different production environments. Although no standard CMS API exists, several Web Services-based integration models could be designed if the tools would support on-the-fly XML transformations.
4. imergo: a new generation of software tools Bearing in mind the limitations of existing tools described in the previous section, we saw a gap where a new type of application could be developed to adequately support accessibility and standards compliance. It was also a key issue that the underlying architecture could adapt itself to different development environments. The application was designed to provide to the customer three interfaces: a command-line interface, a Web Services interface, and a multiplatform GUI interface. It is obvious that for the type of application we mainly targeted, batch processing was the more important issue, combined with powerful post-processing of results. The architecture of the suite includes: •
An XML-database back-end compatible with any XML:DB-compliant (http://www.xmldb.org/) commercial or Open Source database.
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A localizable interface, not only for the GUI, but also for the reports and the application environment.
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Flexible reporting and project management capabilities, targeting different audiences.
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A powerful multi-threaded Crawler able to process many different document types.
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Authentication and proxy support.
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Batch processing.
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imergo - Development of automated tools that support standards compliance and quality assurance methods for the production and maintenance of Web portals imergo offers as well a flexible and customizable definition of validation rules, both for accessibility and document validation (standards compliance). To our knowledge, imergo is the only tool in the market supporting pure SGML/HTML, as well as XML, validation of complete Internet portals. From the accessibility standpoint, it offers off-the-shelf support for: •
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (see http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/)
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Section 508 (see http://www.section508.gov/)
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German Accessibility decree (Verordnung zur Schaffung barrierefreier Informationstechnik nach dem Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz - Barrierefreie Informationstechnik-Verordnung - BITV, see http://www.behindertenbeauftragter.de/gesetzgebung/behindertengleichstellungsgesetz/rechtsverordnung/rvo11bgg)
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imergo - Development of automated tools that support standards compliance and quality assurance methods for the production and maintenance of Web portals
Figure 1. In particular, imergo supports plug-ins with a predefined Java Interface, by which the customer can design their own tests and quality assurance methods. imergo is a unique tool in the market, supporting validation (SGML/XML/CSS) of entire Web sites with any markup preference, and supports XHTML, XML, XSLT, XLink, other XML-derived languages, allowing an easy integration with Content Management Systems.
5. Conclusions The industry needs support in their efforts to implement standards that benefit them and their users with a new generation of tools able to cope with sizes of huge portals that must satisfy the browsing needs of a variety of devices inconceivable a few years ago. No company can afford wasting resources in creating sites for browsers that might not longer dominate the market in the near future. On the same token, accessibility tools must grow of age and be able to react to the industry needs. This implies that accessibility can no longer be a post-process, and must be integrated in all phases of a project, from its conception to its monitoring and quality assurance tasks. Accessibility must be understood as a continuum, where constant monitoring, together with experts' assessment, will facilitate its implementation in the long run. Accessibility is not a black or white fact. From our work, it shall never be understood that automated tools can replace experts' assessment. There are aspects of usability and accessibility that cannot be tested automatically, but for Internet portals, it is necessary to count on powerful tools that can complement and support expert validation. imergo is the result of several years of collaboration with the public and private sector, and it is continuously updated with requirements from our customers. FIT is starting to offering it openly to interested actors, and the authors expect that it can bring up new concepts to the industry.
Bibliography [Hazael-Massieux] Hazael-Massieux D (ed) (2002). Buy standards compliant Web sites. World Wide Web Consortium. Available at: http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/07/WebAgency-Requirements [Nonnenmacher] Nonnenmacher F (2003). Web Standards for Business (Translated from the original French version "Les standards web pour l'entreprise"). The Web Standards Project. Available at: http://www.webstandards.org/learn/reference/web_standards_for_business.html [Pemberton] Pemberton S (2003). Accessibility is For Everyone. Interactions, November-December 2003, pp. 4. [Zeldman] Zeldman J (2003). Designing With Web Standards. Indianapolis, USA: New Riders.
Biography Carlos A Velasco Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT Schloss Birlinghoven Germany
[email protected] Dr. Carlos A. Velasco has a Masters Degree in Aerospace Engineering (Polytechnic University of Madrid, 1990) and a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 1999). He is currently a senior researcher in the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT), and leads the BIKA Competence Center. Since 1990, Dr. Velasco has held several positions in Research Centers and private companies in the United States, The Netherlands and Spain. Before joining FIT, he was an independent consultant in the field of software development and Web technologies. He manages several national and international R&D projects.
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imergo - Development of automated tools that support standards compliance and quality assurance methods for the production and maintenance of Web portals Yehya Mohamad Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT Schloss Birlinghoven Germany
[email protected] Mr. Yehya Mohamad has a Diploma Degree in Computer Science (Technical University of Berlin 1986). He is currently a senior researcher in the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT). Since 1987, Mr. Mohamad has held several positions in Industry and Research Centers. Before joining FIT, he was employed in the following companies and institutes: Free University of Berlin, Institute of Logistics and Economics in Bremen, Port and Transport Consulting Bremen, BLG Data Services Bremen and Medical Faculty at the University of Bonn. Key working areas include: Systems Analysis, software development and Web technologies. He has been a team member in many German and European R&D projects.
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